Notre Dame faculty are conducting research around the globe year-round. Their research spans continents, connects them with remote parts of the world, and even brings them into war and conflict-torn areas.
For some, that’s exactly where they need to be.
Notre Dame psychology professors Laura Miller-Graff and Mark Cummings have been visiting Gaza and the West Bank to complete transformational research for more than a decade. The collaboration began when Miller-Graff started her appointment at Notre Dame in 2013, and found a shared interest with Cummings regarding the impact of political violence on children.
The resulting joint project, Promoting Positive Family Futures, is a family-based intervention program for Palestinian parents and their adolescent children to support family wellbeing, communication, and mental health in the context of the ongoing violence that Palestinians experience in their day-to-day lives.
“It is designed to strengthen family functioning in the face of stress,” said Cummings, the William J. Shaw Family Professor of Psychology.
their graduate students during a trip to Palestine.
The research has spanned 10 years because of the thorough process involved. Before fully launching, Miller-Graff, a professor of psychology and peace studies, and Cummings spent years conducting a pilot program partially supported by a Notre Dame Global grant. They were then able to collect data and use their findings to apply for additional funding for the next implementation phase.
“We're doing something that I confidently say is world-class work," Cummings said. "It's world-class intervention research, cutting edge,"
The psychologists partnered with Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and the Palestinian Counseling Center for their research, and eventually, were able to secure essential funding from the National Institute of Mental Health.
“It's been really a great privilege to be able to work with our partners on it and continue to fine-tune it for the families,” Miller-Graff said.
This “fine-tuning” is a vital part of their process.
“We really wanted to contextualize our program for the needs of Palestine,” Cummings said.
One lesson the researchers learned was the need to reformat their working groups to better reach local families.
“The idea was to have mothers, fathers, and children do the program in groups, and then we got our first pilot data back from 25 families,” Cummings said. “This first pilot study was conducted in the West Bank in 2017 in collaboration with the Palestinian Counseling Center. We had great participation by mothers and adolescents, but not a single father participated.”
Rather than write off fathers as uninterested, they dug deeper and made changes for the second study conducted in Gaza with 62 families supported by CRS.
“We had separate sessions for dads and then one for mothers and adolescents. We tried that because, based on our study in the West Bank, we concluded that it doesn't work in Palestinian culture to have unrelated men and women together,” Cummings said.
This resulted in a drastic increase in fathers' participation, from zero to nearly 100%, including participation in the eight treatment sessions and the pretest, post-test, and six-month follow-up assessments.
The goal for their most recent visit this past year was to meet with therapists they’d been working with to learn about their experience implementing the program. They also met with some of the families who participated in the program.
“It was really, really beautiful to meet with the families,” Miller-Graff said. “It's been interesting because there's this element of what families agree that they've gotten out of the program as a family, but also each individual member taking away different things according to what their needs were at the time. We've been really happy because it speaks to the program's ability to flexibly meet a diverse set of needs that families might bring, which was really our hope heading into it.”
Cummings said some of the challenges they faced were securing funding and partners. They thought they had ironed out everything and made plans to return to the West Bank and Gaza to finally implement their project. They were able to visit colleagues at the Palestinian Counseling Center in the West Bank in the summer of 2023, but did not visit the CRS site in Gaza. To follow up in Gaza, they booked their flights for mid-October of 2023, but the October 7th attack would ignite the Israel-Hamas war.
“We had to cancel our plane tickets and close down the Gaza site because of the war,” Cummings said.
Remarkably, they were back up and running a month later, jumping on conference calls with colleagues at CRS and the Palestinian Counseling Center every week, often multiple times. Their original goal was to work with 150 families in the West Bank and 150 in Gaza.
“After the war started, it was not tenable to continue in Gaza; our partners needed to redirect their resources to lifesaving humanitarian aid,” Miller-Graff said.
By December of 2023, they had resumed work in the West Bank, sticking to their goal of serving 300 families.
“It really is a real testament to our partners," Miller-Graf said. "It has taken an enormous amount on all sides of careful rethinking about what providers need, how we need to do training differently, how we need to deliver the intervention to families, where we would deliver the intervention to families, to make sure that we're doing this work in a way that is physically safe for families."
One aspect that’s made the continuation of their project possible, despite the challenges, is Notre Dame’s global location in Jerusalem at Tantur.
“Tantur’s been central to all this since the beginning,” Cummings said.
During their decade-long research, Miller-Graff and Cummings have used Notre Dame Jerusalem’s physical location as a home base. The location is ideal, allowing them to travel as needed between sites. Additionally, the researchers said the local Notre Dame Jerusalem team has been an invaluable resource.
“It's really meaningful for Notre Dame to have these global centers as an integrative space to allow for conversation, feedback loops, interdisciplinary research, and educational spaces,” Miller-Graf said. "We've definitely felt the importance of being a part of that community.”
For faculty traveling far and wide to carry out work for the greater good, global locations like Notre Dame Jerusalem remind them of the support the University offers, even miles and miles from home.
While Miller-Graff and Cummings may be wrapping up their research in the next year, that doesn’t mean the work shuts down.
“We're in the process of what's called sustainability,” Cummings said. “We're systematically working with our local partners to sustain the program in the West Bank after we leave so they have the knowledge they need to run the program after we leave to set it up for future groups.”
Currently, Cummings is working to extend the Promoting Positive Family Futures program and adopt it in Ukraine, in collaboration with the Ukrainian Catholic University to implement it.
Ultimately, for Miller-Graff and Cummings, the success of their work lies in its longevity.
“We're really dedicated to long-term engagement with community partners,” Miller-Graff said. “Funding comes and goes, but the work is always there and needs to be done.”
Originally published by at jerusalem.nd.edu on June 17, 2026.
