Professor and chair of clinical mental health counseling honored for her work on gender-based violence prevention
Dr. Jennifer E. Beebe, professor and chair of clinical mental health counseling at Niagara University and a research fellow with the university’s Office of Violence Prevention & Education (OVPE), has received the Social Justice Award from the North Atlantic Region Association for Counselor Education and Supervision (NARACES).
The award was presented at the NARACES 2026 conference, “Advancing the Profession: Innovation, Advocacy, and Excellence in Mental Health Counseling,” held Sept. 24-27 in Manchester, New Hampshire.
Colleagues describe Dr. Beebe as embodying the “scientist-practitioner-advocate” model. For more than 15 years, she has paired rigorous research on gender-based violence with a simple belief: campuses should be places where people feel safe, seen, and supported.
That belief has shaped her work at Niagara from the start. In 2016, her first year at the university, she co-created Niagara’s Take Back the Night event. Now in its ninth year, the event draws about 400 attendees, roughly 10% of the student body.
She also co-created an annual Domestic Violence Awareness event at the Castellani Art Museum, where survivors’ artwork is displayed beside student work.
In 2022, Dr. Beebe and Dr. Dana Radatz launched the OVPE, the university’s first office dedicated to prevention rather than incident response. Dr. Beebe serves as co-principal investigator of the $250,000 Vincent Commission, which studies gender-based violence on campuses nationwide.
She has also directed a $150,000 Patrick P. Lee Foundation grant for counseling scholarships and led federal Office on Violence Against Women grants. In all, she has helped bring in more than $1.1 million in external funding.
Her greatest impact may be in the classroom, where she trains each cohort to see themselves as counselor-advocates. Students say she makes them feel “understood, seen, and most importantly profoundly more educated and ready for the field.”
