Faculty Directory

Marina Rakhilin

Part-Time Faculty

Photo of Marina Rakhilin

Marina Rakhilin

Contact

Email: rakhilim@bc.edu

ORCID

Education

  • B.S., Tufts University
  • M.S.W., 涩里番下载

Research Interests

Design Thinking, Trauma-Informed Design, Health Equity, Community Participatory Action Research, Implementation Science, Training Lay Health Workers, Task-Sharing/Task-Shifting, Leveraging AI for Deliberative Practices, Futures Thinking, and Post-Anthropocentric Social Work

Expertise

  • Innovations in Research Methods
  • LGBTQ Communities
  • Macro
  • Mental Health
  • Systemic Inequities

Biography

Marina Rakhilin is a social worker, researcher, and designer as well as a part-time professor teaching courses in the 涩里番下载SSW Design Thinking for Social Change certificate program.

They bring a history of designing psychosocial interventions in a variety of research settings, whether with industry, community partners, academic institutions, or hospital systems. These include a community co-designed mHealth training for mental health care providers on best practices for working with transgender and gender diverse youth, an online behavioral activation intervention combined with the use of Fitbits for adults struggling with clinical depression, as well as a version of a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) manual tailored for use by paraprofessionals with previously incarcerated young men.

As a Program Manager at the , Marina works within the Translational Research Team to bring ideas into the real world via pilot studies. This work includes democratizing access to qualitative research methods, injecting technology into the Citizens鈥� Assembly model, and training both students and staff in group facilitation best practices.

Marina strongly believes in inviting more social workers and community members into research spaces and the possibility of leveraging technology to provide non-academics the training and support to do so confidently. After all, everyone can and should have a voice in the decision-making processes that affect them. Design thinking skills lend themselves well to shifting power back to community members and can make the research process both fun and healing. At its best, design thinking is about deconstructing outdated assumptions about what has to be true and then working collectively to design the world we truly want and deserve.

Selected Publications

Price, M.A., Rakhilin, M., Johansen, K., Collins, E., Pachankis, J.E., Lyon, A.R., Allen, M. (in press). Gender Affirming Psychotherapy (GAP): An intervention to reduce the mental healthcare "gap" for transgender youth. Psychiatric Services.

Price, M. A., Hollinsaid, N. L., McKetta, S., Mellen, E. J., & Rakhilin, M. (2023). Structural transphobia is associated with psychological distress and suicidality in a large national sample of transgender adults. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 1-10.

Sylvia, L., Rakhilin, M., Amado, A., Faulkner Modrow, M., Gold, A.K., Albury, E., George, N., Peters, A., Selvaggie, C., Horicke, N.; Rabideau, D.J., Dohse, H., Tovey, R., Turner, J.A., Schopfer, D.W., Pletcher, M.J., Katz, D., Deckersbach, T. & Nierenberg, A.A. (2023) Healthy Hearts Healthy Minds: A Randomized Trial of Online Interventions to Improve Physical Activity for those with Depression and Cardiovascular Risk. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 164, 111110.

Sylvia, L., Faulkner, M., Rakhilin, M., Amado, S., Gold, A., Albury, E., Dinerman, J.G., Dohse, H., Tovey, R., Turner, J., Schopfer, D.W., Pletcher, M., Nierenberg, A. (2021). An online intervention for increasing physical activity in individuals with mood disorders at risk for cardiovascular disease: Design considerations. Journal of Affective Disorders.

Reid, A. G., Rakhilin, M., Patel, A. D., Urry, H. L., & Thomas, A. K. (2017). New technology for studying the impact of regular singing and song learning on cognitive function in older adults: A feasibility study. Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain, 27(2), 132.

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