As Assistant Director of Curricular Initiatives, Maya supports students and faculty engaging in experiential learning that allows them to connect with the larger Providence community and take action. Mx. Malik does this through teaching the introduction course to the theory and practice of engaged scholarship, directing the Community-Based Learning and Research Fellowship (which includes undergraduate students and faculty), managing a Graduate Assistant that supports the CBLR Fellowship, overseeing the Engaged Scholarship Certificate for undergraduate students, and working with faculty advisors in all of the above programs. 

Maya Malik, MSSW, is currently a doctoral student at McGill School of Social Work who utilizes arts-based research to co-create programs with queer Black youth from areas impacted by community violence. They are a 2023-2024 Participatory Action Fellow with the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC). They are one of two Fellows who will support evaluation research with UUSC partners doing social justice work worldwide.  They were also a 2022-2023 Sadler Scholar at the Hastings Center for their work on the intersection of health and reparations interventions. 

Before coming to Brown, Mx. Malik served as the community-engaged Training Coordinator for the Women’s Health Center at Boston University Medical School, where they contributed to a national training plan for multiple sites of a large federal Randomized Controlled Trial by both creating and implementing all community-focused training that other sites followed. In addition, they were also a researcher with the McGill Global Child Research Group in the Participatory Methods Axis and worked for years as a researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, in their Youth and Media core at Harvard University Law School, where they contributed to the design and execution of arts-based, participatory action research projects with youth around technology and their future.

Throughout their academic career, Maya has taught low-income youth of color in different communities around the world to combat the negative effects of poverty, trauma, and structural oppression on students from marginalized communities. They also continuously work as a consultant on training development, arts-based research design, qualitative data collection,  participatory analysis, and facilitation for all ages.