Miriam Steele

Steele is reflecting on the ways research emerges from classrooms, studios, and labs and finds its way into the field. There research gains dimension, humanity, and relevance. Often it expands, evolving into new learning opportunities for New School students as well as programs and systems aimed at creating a better future for all.

Since joining NSSR in 2004 as an endowed faculty member, Steele has co-directed the Center for Attachment Research, a lab producing groundbreaking applied research involving  psychological attachment theory and child, parent, and family development. She spearheads integrative projects that challenge the frameworks of psychology education and research, with the goal of fostering healthier individuals and family systems.

Her approach is to integrate students into every aspect of the center’s work. As a result, emerging scholars receive valuable clinical experience that sets them apart from peers lacking the same opportunities to apply the theoretical knowledge they’re gaining in courses to settings outside the university.

A recent collaborative initiative is the Group-Based Attachment Intervention for vulnerable families with infants and toddlers, conducted in partnership with Montefiore Hospital, in the Bronx, a project that received $1 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health.

Steele and her team of undergraduate and graduate students focused on improving relationships between young children and parents who lacked positive parenting models. The program’s approach to therapy resulted in reduced child maltreatment, improved parent and child emotional well-being, and advanced children’s development. The program has since expanded throughout New York City.

Students were able to work directly with families, honing their observational clinical skills and seeing the intervention promote positive change.

“We developed the clinical work in the community,” says Steele. “Rather than thinking in our ivory tower about what could work, we brought the research to where it applied. Our model is a very different one—it enables us to introduce students to issues involving health disparities and historical racism on the ground.”

In addition to incorporating social justice and equity into students’ fieldwork, Steele draws on The New School’s expertise in interdisciplinary methods. Her lab is working on projects with students and faculty from Lang and Parsons and from NSSR departments beyond Psychology, bringing new thinking to a range of areas—from social media to the parent–child transmission of body image to the employment of transdisciplinary design in addressing the needs of people with disabilities.

Steele sees her research as “very powerful in bringing the clinical work to the research and the research to the clinical work.” It prepares students to step onto the front lines of the battle for mental health, social justice, and equity with the support of New School faculty mentors.