Millan AbiNader, PhD, MSW is an Assistant Professor in Social Work & Social Policy at the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a mixed-methods researcher who seeks to understand the social ecology of gender-based violence, with particular attention to intimate partner violence-related fatalities. Dr. AbiNader also seeks to understand how one’s social and geographic position, like race or rurality, affects one’s experience of gender-based violence and investigates how organizational environment, like vicarious traumatization prevention policies, affects survivor-client experiences. Before entering academia, Dr. AbiNader worked as a community victim services advocate in the fields of sexual violence, intimate partner violence, family violence, and commercial sexual exploitation/trafficking. She delivered primary prevention interventions from kindergarten through college, facilitated support groups in the community and in carceral settings, and delivered advocacy services to incarcerated women.
Dr. AbiNader’s current research projects investigate intimate partner violence-related fatalities, vicarious trauma, gender-based violence across contexts, and intimate partner violence among multi-racial/multi-ethnic individuals among other topics. She is the primary investigator of an NSF grant to study COVID-19 policies’ effects on homicide rates. Dr. AbiNader integrates her practice experience as a victim advocate and macro social worker with her research, aiming to lead studies that support survivor healing and perpetrator change.
Dr. AbiNader earned her MSW from the University of Texas at Austin and her PhD in Social Work from Boston University where she completed an award-winning dissertation examining rural intimate partner homicide. Dr. AbiNader was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Arizona State University’s School of Social Work’s Office of Gender Based Violence under the mentorship of Dr. Jill Messing where she studied intimate partner homicide and risk assessment.
