Melanie Sonsteng-Person completed her Ph.D. in Social Welfare at UCLA and is currently a Postdoctoral Associate in the College of Education at the University of Florida. Her work centers a liberatory praxis that connects her research, teaching, and activism as she works with various collectives to dismantle institutional trauma. Melanie bridges participatory action research with mixed methods to inform policies and practices that address institutional conditions that produce and maintain racism, violence, and trauma throughout education and social work institutions. Her work is informed by her experience as a middle school teacher at a zero-tolerance charter school in Brooklyn and as a certified trauma practitioner for children exposed to violence-related trauma in Detroit.