Faculty Affiliate, Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity; Founding Dean of the New Institute for Racial Justice of Loyola University Chicago
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Dr. Malik S. Henfield is a Full Professor and Founding Dean of the Institute for Racial Justice at Loyola University Chicago (scheduled to launch Fall 2021). He received a BA in Biology from Francis Marion University, a MEd and EdS in School Counseling from The University of South Carolina, and a PhD in Counselor Education from The Ohio State University.
Dr. Henfield has published multiple scholarly manuscripts and books, and delivered numerous national, regional, state, and local keynote addresses and professional presentations. His scholarship situates Black students’ lived experiences in a broader ecological milieu to critically explore how their personal, social, academic, and career success is impeded and enhanced by school, family, and community contexts. His work to date has focused heavily on the experiences of Black students formally identified as gifted/high-achieving while his latest projects focus more exclusively on developing, implementing, and evaluating in- and out-of-school interventions associated with developing Black students ready to succeed in college and careers.
As a counselor educator, Professor Henfield also has a fundamental belief in mental health as a key component in meeting students’ needs and is, therefore, committed to diversifying the counseling profession as a means to help the profession better reflect current demographics. To that end, he also researches underrepresented students’ (Black and international students) experiences in counselor training programs as a means to uncover the connection between programmatic factors and positive student outcomes and experiences, which has direct implications for increased diversity in the counseling profession. He has consulted on these topics at Atlanta Public School District, Baltimore City Public School District, Oakland Unified School District, and San Francisco Unified School District, and many other school districts and community stakeholders across the country on topics related to his scholarly interests.
Over the years, Dr. Henfield has been widely recognized for his scholarship and service including winning the American Education Research Association (AERA) Division E Research Paper of the Year Award, the Chi Sigma Iota International Honor Society’s Outstanding Article Award, and the Outstanding Research Award from the North Central Association for Counselor Education and Supervision (NCACES). In terms of leadership recognition, he was named an Emerging Leader by the Phi Delta Kappa (PDK) International Education Association, a Young Academic Fellow by the Institute for Higher Education and the Lumina Foundation, and was elected Chair of one of AERA’s largest Special Interest Groups (SIG), the Critical Examination of Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Gender in Education (2018-2021).
His research has resulted in millions of dollars of external funding including, most recently a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant focused on increasing the number of students of color entering computer science professions and an Institute of Education Sciences (IES) grant aimed at determining the extent to which school districts provide equity and excellence in their gifted education programming.
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