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When Dr. Lainey Sevillano introduces herself to students on the first day of class, she begins not with her degrees or publications, but with her story.

Dr. Sevillano identifies as a Pilipinx woman who immigrated to the United States at age three and grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Los Angeles. She is the child of a formerly incarcerated parent and the first in her family to attend college. Those early experiences—navigating systems not built for families like hers—continue to shape her teaching and research today.

While an undergraduate at UCLA, Dr. Sevillano first noticed the deep disparities that structured who thrived and who was left behind. “At first, I felt shame,” she says. “Then I began to turn that shame into curiosity—'Why do these disparities exist?' And the more I learned, the more determined I became to help eliminate them.”

As a social work scholar-educator-advocate, Dr. Sevillano investigates the psychosocial, historical, and systemic mechanisms—including colonialism, migration, and racism—that influence health and education outcomes for minoritized populations. Drawing on Indigenist and decolonial frameworks, she explores how the legacies of historical and structural oppression shape health and how cultural values and practices can serve as protective buffers against those harms.

Dr. Sevillano recently led a critical collaborative autoethnography project exploring communal care as a form of decolonial mental health praxis, published in American Psychologist: “Atangs to Kuwentos: The Power of Communal Care as Decolonial Mental Health Praxis among Pilipinx Americans”.

She is currently launching a new NIH-funded study focused on understanding 'colonial mentality'—a unique form of internalized racism—among Pilipinx American adolescents and young adults. The project aims to adapt and validate culturally grounded measures while identifying ways to disrupt trauma and restore health, healing, and community.