About

Sylvia Nassar is a professor of counseling and counselor education at North Carolina State University, where she also serves as the Coordinator of Research Methods Courses. Over the past few decades, she has held roles as a scholar, leader, advocate, counselor, educator, supervisor, and mentor. Her projects and initiatives have focused on capacity building and sustainability, influencing best practices both in the United States and globally. She has earned master's and doctoral degrees in counseling and human development and has worked across various sectors including educational, mental health, non-profit, governmental, and corporate settings. Nassar has served on regulatory and advisory bodies, developed and evaluated curriculum and programs, managed projects and budgets, and conducted research with dissemination of findings. She is passionate about fitness in mind, body, and spirit, and enjoys outdoor activities such as running, cycling, hiking, and yoga, as well as spending quality time with family and friends.

Selected publications

• Socioecological Advocacy and Activism Through Collective Action

  2025-05-28

  book-chapter

  Chapter 10 presents clinical supervision activities and interventions focused on socioecological advocacy and activism through collective action. This chapter contains five anti-oppressive clinical supervision interventions. This chapter provides readers with a compilation of anti-oppressive interventions authored by interdisciplinary experts with significant experience in anti-oppressive supervision. The interventions address a range of supervision formats, structures, and developmental stages. Each intervention can be purposefully adapted to align with the identified needs and intended outcomes within the supervisor and supervisee’s professional contexts. Supervisors are invited to incorporate these interventions into their guiding developmental, process, and psychotherapy-based supervision models while centering anti-oppressive supervision practices. This chapter presents five distinct interventions designed to enhance supervisory practice: Cultivating a Professional Identity and Practice of Advocacy and Activism, Utilizing Relational Cultural Theory (RCT) and Socioecological Theory (SET) to Develop a Holistic Conceptualization of Advocacy in Action, Integrating Arts-Based Supervision for Intersectional Cultural Insight and Socioecological Advocacy, Supervision for Mental Health Practitioner Activist Self-Efficacy and Praxis, and Cultivating a Professional Identity and Practice of Advocacy.

  PublisherDOI

• Ethnic identity, negative media portrayal, and psychological well‐being in Arab‐American youth: Mediation analysis

  Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development · 2024-08-22 · 1 citations

  article

  Abstract Researchers have increasingly identified a growing concern in the lack of attention given to factors intertwined with the mental health and well‐being of Arab‐American youth. To circumvent this problem, we applied a community‐based participatory research (CBPR) design to a sample of Arab‐American youth with the mean age of 13.72 years. We discuss the implications for professional counseling and other mental health interventions with Arab‐American youth, as well as provide directions for future research.

  PublisherDOI

• Contexts of Immigration and Diversity: Biopsychosocial Implications for Arab Americans

  Springer eBooks · 2023 · 1 citations

  Senior author
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Gender studies
  PublisherDOI

• Optimizing Biopsychosocial Health Among Arabs in the United States and Globally

  2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Multicultural and social justice competencies for school stakeholders: a Delphi study

  Journal of Counselor Leadership and Advocacy · 2023-11-22 · 1 citations

  article

  Multicultural and social justice competence is an expectation for school counselors. School counselors need to be proficient in providing multiculturally competent practices and social justice advocacy action. The same can be said for their school stakeholder counterparts, yet no empirical investigations explore how the Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies (MSJCC), specifically its institutional interventions, can serve as a framework for all school stakeholders to provide multiculturally competent practices and social justice advocacy action in schools. We conducted a Delphi study with expert school stakeholders as participants, including school counselors, that resulted in a consensus list of opinions regarding initial perceptions, usefulness, willingness, supports, barriers and reflections of the MSJCC, specifically the institutional interventions. We provide emergent implications for school counselors and other educational stakeholders.

  PublisherDOI

• Biopsychosocial Perspectives on Arab Americans

  2023-01-01 · 4 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This book provides an overview of Americans of Arab descent to better understand the nuances of their developmental and health concerns.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Embodying the Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competency Movement: Voices From the Field

  Journal of Counseling & Development · 2020-06-08 · 23 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article illustrates counselors’ embodiment, over time, of the multicultural and social justice counseling competency movement leading to the Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies (Ratts, Singh, Nassar‐McMillan, Butler, & McCullough, 2015). The authors discuss the multicultural and social justice counseling competency movement in the context of relationships as appropriate to the counseling field. Aligned with contemporary research perspectives, the authors focus on the lived experiences of 2 pioneering social justice and multicultural competency advocates, Drs. Patricia Arredondo and Derald Wing Sue. The authors integrate scholarship with these historical and personal perspectives, as well as their own, to demonstrate the ways in which people and movements drive counseling leadership and advocacy.

  PublisherDOI

• Program Evaluation of Career Development Services in Five Turkish Schools: A Preliminary Study

  Journal for Perspectives of Economic Political and Social Integration · 2020-01-20 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  School counselors in Turkey, like in many other countries, are tasked with providing career development services within the broader school curriculum. Yet, both globally as well as in Turkey, the unemployment rate among youth continues to rise. In addition, Turkey is home to thousands of Syrian refugees largely concentrated in four cities, creating another layer of challenge for school counselors as career development providers. Effective programs are essential more than ever before, yet very few rigorous efforts at evaluating such programs are in place. In Turkey there are some recent policies governing both career practices and their evaluation, which represents a promising beginning for evaluating these programs locally and nationally. This preliminary qualitative study aims to provide such an example of program evaluation by measuring six key components as identified by the Career Builders Toolkit, an empirically based tool designed to develop and evaluate career and workforce development programs. Five school counseling programs in the city of Gaziantep, Turkey (which is among the cities with a very high Syrian refugee populations), were purposefully selected. Their program materials were content analyzed and, encoded around the Career Builders Toolkit six key components, were rated as being Sufficient, Existing, or Absent, thus providing information about the growth areas still needed in these school-based career development curricula. Among the largest growth areas identified were trainer curriculum and evaluation. Implications for policy, research, and practice are provided based on a Tripartite Model of Program Evaluation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Multicultural and social justice counseling competencies: institutional interventions for professional school counselors

  Journal of Counselor Leadership and Advocacy · 2020-01-02 · 18 citations

  articleSenior author

  Embedded within the new Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies (MSJCC) are counseling and advocacy interventions at various socioecological levels. School counselors are uniquely positioned to provide such interventions at the institutional level. We integrate the MSJCC with other models relevant to school counselors and provide examples and recommendations for how school counselors can initiate and carry out these seven institutional counseling and advocacy interventions.

  PublisherDOI

• The Past Guides the Future: Implementing the Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies

  Journal of Counseling & Development · 2020-06-08 · 72 citations

  article

  The authors describe the ways in which the Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies (MSJCC; Ratts, Singh, Nassar‐McMillan, Butler, & McCullough, 2015) can be viewed from a human rights framework and as the latest iteration in the long history of the multicultural and social justice counseling competency movement. MSJCC implementation and integration are explored, and recommendations for innovating the MSJCC are described.

  PublisherDOI

Education

• Doctor of Philosophy, Counseling and Counselor Education, Counseling and Educational Development

  University of North Carolina at Greensboro

  1994

• Master of Arts, Guidance and Counseling, Leadership and Counseling

  Eastern Michigan University

  1986

• Bachelor of Arts, Psychology

  Oakland University

  1984

Awards & honors

• Numerous awards and distinctions