Meeting Announcement

Details: Please join us on Monday, May 18th, 2026, from 3-4 pm, EST, for a Q&A Discussion during which we hear and learn from speakers with a range of experience and expertise relevant to the Workgroup's mission and goals. 

Ayorkor Gaba, Psy.D.

Ayorkor Gaba, Psy.D., is an Assistant Professor of Counseling and Clinical Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University, and a licensed clinical psychologist whose research and practice have always been in conversation with each other. She is the Director of the Behavioral Health Equity Advancement Lab (B-HEAL) and the Equity Division at the Massachusetts Center of Excellence for Specialty Courts. Her work is centered at the place where behavioral health and the criminal legal system meet, a place defined by enormous need, persistent inequity, and a significant gap between what the evidence says is possible and what people actually receive. 

Dr. Gaba’s research focuses on people with co-occurring substance use and mental health disorders involved in the criminal legal system, with particular attention to the racial and ethnic inequities that shape who gets access to  and benefits from recovery courts, the gendered barriers that make women's pathways to recovery distinctly different and distinctly underserved, and approaches to support young people in and impacted by the system. As a health equity advocate, Dr. Gaba served as an American Psychological Association representative to the United Nations, where she advocated for global mental health policies, practices, and programs and currently serves as a column editor for the Research, Community, & Services Partnerships column in the Psychiatric Services journal. 

What drives her work is a conviction that research is only as meaningful as its accountability to the people it studies and that changing systems requires centering the people those systems most affect. She is interested in questions about what implementation science can and cannot do, what genuine community partnership looks like in practice, what gets lost when we prioritize rigor over relevance, and what it feels like to do this work at a moment when the ground keeps shifting beneath it.