The TRACE Lab examines how relationships shape experiences of trauma, resilience, and healing. Our research centers families and communities within their cultural, relational, and social contexts, with particular attention to populations whose experiences have historically been overlooked in trauma and family research.

Our Mission

Our mission is to advance relational and systemic approaches to understanding trauma and resilience. We conduct research that connects family relationships, cultural and community contexts, clinical practice, and lived experience to better understand how people adapt to adversity and how relationships can function as contexts of both harm and healing.

What We Do

Study relational trauma and resilience
We examine how trauma, adversity, resilience, and healing unfold within relationships, families, communities, and broader social contexts.

Center culture and context
We investigate how culture, migration, spirituality, identity, and structural conditions shape experiences of adversity, resilience, and healing.

Translate research into practice
We connect research with clinical practice, community knowledge, training, education, and public scholarship.

Why TRACE?

Relationships leave traces on our lives. Some are shaped by adversity and trauma, while others reflect connection, resilience, and healing. These traces vary in depth and significance, influencing how we understand ourselves, relate to others, and navigate the world. They can extend across individuals, families, communities, and generations.

TRACE Lab explores these relational experiences and the social, cultural, and historical contexts that shape them.

Core Values

Relational and Systemic Thinking

We understand trauma, resilience, and healing within relationships, families, communities, and broader social systems rather than locating them solely within individuals.

Cultural and Spiritual Responsiveness

We center culturally grounded and spiritually informed perspectives and recognize that understandings of adversity, resilience, and healing are shaped by culture, belief systems, traditions, and community contexts.

Equity and Context

We examine how structural and sociopolitical conditions shape experiences of adversity, access to resources, and opportunities for healing and wellbeing.

Community-centered Knowledge

We value the lived experience, expertise, and knowledge of communities and seek to conduct research that is meaningful, accessible, and responsive to community priorities.

Research with Real-World Relevance

We seek to translate research into clinical practice, community action, education, training, and policy while collaborating across disciplines when doing so strengthens the work.

Research Areas

Relational Trauma

How trauma and adversity are experienced, communicated, and responded to within relationships, families, and communities.

Relational Resilience

How relationships and social systems support adaptation, health, and healing following adversity.

Cultural and Community Contexts

How culture, spirituality, migration, community, and structural conditions shape experiences of trauma, resilience, and healing.

Clinical and Community Translation

How relational and culturally grounded research can inform clinical practice, community interventions, training, and policy.

Research Programs

Relational Trauma Program

This program examines trauma as a relational and contextual process, with attention to how adversity is experienced, communicated, and responded to within families, relationships, communities, and cultural systems. Research considers both how relationships can contribute to trauma and how relational processes may support safety, repair, and healing.

Current projects

Muslim Trauma Meaning-Making
Intra-Family Trauma Interactions (IFTI)
Relational Trauma and Healing

Relational Resilience Program

This program examines resilience as a relational and contextual process rather than solely an individual characteristic. Research considers how relationships across family, community, cultural, and broader social systems may support adaptation and health following adversity.

Current areas of development

Resilience Reconsidered: Integrating individual, family, community, and ecological theories of resilience
Relational Resilience Theory: Developing a multilevel theory of resilience following structural and relational adversity

Planned research

Relational Resilience Across Historically Marginalized Communities

Join the Lab

The TRACE Lab welcomes students and collaborators interested in trauma, family systems, and culturally responsive research. Opportunities include research assistantships, collaborative projects, and mentorship in culturally responsive and community-engaged research. Email us at info@tracelabresearch.org.

Publications

The TRACE Lab produces interdisciplinary scholarship on relational trauma, relational resilience, family systems, and culturally responsive approaches to healing across diverse communities.

Selected Publications

Dini, Z., & Mussa, S. K. (2026). Intergenerational trauma in refugee families: A scoping review of contextual and systemic perspectives. Journal of Family Theory & Review. https://doi.org/10.1111/jftr.70013

Dini, Z. (2025). Communication is socialization: Understanding family socialization patterns across three generations of Somali-American refugee families. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2025.2596975

Dini, Z., & Solheim, C.A. (2025). Making Sense of Complexity in Refugee Family Systems: Second-Generation Somali and Hmong Refugee Adults’ Reflections on Their Relationships with Their First-Generation Refugee Parents. International Journal of Systemic Therapy, 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/2692398X.2024.2403851

Selected Manuscripts Under Review

Dini, Z., Mussa, S. K., Sharma, S., & Muse, Z. “Tired of Being Tired”: Intergenerational Trauma and Relational Bridging Among 1.5-Generation East African Refugees.

Dini, Z. “Waxaa nahay labo qabiil oo is la dagan” [“We are two different tribes living together”]: Racial and ethnic socialization in multigenerational Somali refugee families.

Dini, Z. “From Transmission to Interaction: The Intra-Family Trauma Interactions (IFTI) Model.”

Contact

Zamzam Dini, PhD, LMFT
Founding Director

zamzam@tracelabresearch.org

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