4:00 PM / / Shawnee Tribe Community Building, 108 S. Eight Tribes Trail, Miami, OK  74354

Request graduation ceremony regalia and RSVP for the Achievement Banquet here. The deadline for regalia requests is April 15. RSVPs for the Banquet must be submitted by May 6.

Achievement Banquet Keynote Speaker: Dr. Evan White, Principal Investigator, Laureate Institute for Brain Research

Evan is a Native Tulsan with deep roots in Northeastern Oklahoma. He attended local public schools Lanier Elementary, Edison Middle, and Edison High. Evan and his wife Natalie have two children, Benjamin (age 3) and Lois (age 1). He is an enrolled member of the Absentee Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma. He belongs to the Shawnee Chapter of the Native American Church of Oklahoma and the White Oak Shawnee Ceremonial Grounds.

He received his bachelor’s degree in psychology from Oklahoma State University. He also completed his master’s and doctoral education in clinical psychology at Oklahoma State University under the mentorship of DeMond M. Grant, Ph.D. His graduate research focused on employing psychophysiological techniques to test predictions from cognitive models of mood and anxiety disorders. His clinical training was generalist clinical science broadly with an emphasis in adult outpatient treatment of anxiety, mood, and trauma-related disorders using evidence-based psychotherapy approaches. He completed his predoctoral clinical internship at the Charleston Consortium (Medical University of South Carolina/ Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center) in Charleston, South Carolina, working closely with his research preceptor Lisa McTeague, Ph.D.

He is currently a Principal Investigator, Director of Native American Research and Director of the Electroencephalography Core at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research. His work focuses on employing clinical cultural neuroscience to improve mental health outcomes among American Indians by implementing multi-modal neuroscience and psychophysiology. A particularly novel component of this work is integrating community-engaged research methods in working with American Indian communities and Tribal partners to help drive the research programs forward. Dr. White’s research aims to integrate clinical and cultural neuroscience to identify modifiable factors as candidate treatment targets for mental health intervention and prevention. Dr. White’s program of research was recently awarded the prestigious NIH Director’s Pioneer Award for the collaborative project “Kipiyecipakiciipe – Coming Home: Establishing Clinical cultural neuroscience as a tool for understanding the role of traditional cultural engagement in mitigating substance misuse and disorder” with the Shawnee Tribe.