Faculty Spotlight: Professor Cristina Biasetto

Professor Cristina Biasetto, a part-time member of the Wright Institute’s Counseling Psychology program’s core faculty, was born and raised in Italy. After high school, Professor Biasetto attended the University of Milan in Italy where she studied Arabic and earned her bachelor’s degree. She was the first person in her family and the only one of her siblings to attend college. “I was drawn to studying Arabic because I was surrounded by immigrant communities where I lived, many of whom were from Arabic speaking countries,” she explained. Professor Biasetto had been very interested in languages from a young age. She learned English in high school, then was eager to expand her knowledge base at the University of Milan.

During her undergraduate studies, Professor Biasetto began volunteering and later working as a Psychosocial Program Coordinator at a non-profit in Milan that served asylum seekers, refugees, and survivors of torture. “At that time, there was a really big Sudanese community in the area that was seeking support from the non-profit,” she recalled. “They were from Darfur, where a significant refugee crisis was unfolding at that time, so I became really interested in the connections between large-scale conflict and psychological suffering at the individual and community level.” Professor Biasetto was initially drawn to this organization because she spoke some English and Arabic and could assist with translation and mediation between Italian-speaking volunteers and staff and the populations they were serving. “Then I became really passionate about supporting these folks who were living in my community and struggling in so many ways, both with meeting their basic needs and in terms of their emotional and psychological health,” she reflected. “This was my first exposure to really significant psychic suffering that came from both experiencing large-scale conflict and the painful experiences that happened in the context of their families.”

Working at this non-profit was a turning point in Professor Biasetto’s path and really changed the course of her life. After graduating from the University of Milan, she attended the University of Damascus in Syria, where she earned a certificate in advanced Arabic. It was her goal to learn more Arabic so she could be of better service to the Arabic-speaking members of her community.

Professor Biasetto then attended the University of London in the UK, where she earned her MSc in international development with a focus on violence, conflict, and development. She attended school part-time so that she could also work to support herself financially and formed a close group of friends who were also international students. “The experience of being at the University of London was extremely formative for me in that it kind of taught me critical thinking in a way that I had not experienced before in my prior education,” she explained. “I really learned how to read and digest content and work through my own ideas about it in a way that was completely novel to me.” It was also her first time studying in English, which presented an additional challenge. Looking back on her time studying at the University of London, Professor Biasetto shared that it radically changed her for the better.

In London, Professor Biasetto worked as a Learning and Personal Development Project Manager for a community-based refugee organization, providing aid to asylum seekers and refugees. In this role, she trained and managed a team of over fifty volunteers. “I was supporting this team of volunteers who were teaching English to our clients and supporting them in their professional development as folks who had either recently arrived in the UK or were still still in the process of figuring out what their lives in this new country would look like,” Professor Biasetto recalled. “It was interesting because I was going through that same process myself in some ways, albeit in a very different position as someone who was privileged in the sense that I had documents and I had chosen to be in London for my studies.” She loved working there and stayed on for a year after graduating from her master’s program.

Professor Biasetto then worked as a Program Manager and Country Representative for an international NGO in Somalia and Kenya. She lived in Kenya and traveled to Somalia regularly, which was very challenging in a variety of ways. Professor Biasetto also discovered through this experience that humanitarian assistance at the international level is fraught with many ethical questions and concerns. “After going through a graduate program where I was thinking about the impact of large-scale conflict on a community and country level, I realized that what I was really interested in was the impact on a psychological level for individuals, families, communities,” she shared. “I realized that I wanted to pursue that interest and turn it into a career.”

In 2012, Professor Biasetto moved to the United States and enrolled in UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare, where she earned her masters in social work. “Pursuing a masters in social work seemed like a really natural link between my previous life and the life I wanted to build as a clinician,” she reflected. “I liked its focus on systemic issues and the connections between systems and individuals.”

During her second year at UC Berkeley, Professor Biasetto began an internship at the UCSF Trauma Recovery Center (TRC), then worked as a clinical social worker there. “The Trauma Recovery Center works with survivors of interpersonal violence,” she explained. “It became a really important place for me because it gave me the opportunity to combine my academic interest in the impact of conflict and large-scale violence on communities and countries on a political level with my interest in how violence affects individuals, families, and communities on a psychological level.” When Professor Biasetto began her work at TRC, they had just acquired the non-profit Survivors International. She became the program coordinator for Survivors International and kept that role until 2020. “It was kind of a perfect landing place for me,” she reflected. “It gave me a chance to continue working with asylum seekers, refugees and just broadly speaking people who had experienced violence while also giving me a chance to develop really meaningful clinical skills that were focused on the treatment of trauma in particular.” Since 2020, Professor Biasetto has been the Trauma Recovery Center manager at UCSF, providing clinical supervision and consultation to a team of about fifteen mental health providers and trainees.

While working at the Trauma Recovery Center, Professor Biasetto also held the role of Clinical Advisor at the International Rescue Committee office in Oakland. “They were working with recently resettled refugees and human trafficking survivors and doing really great work,” she recalled. “They were hoping they could find someone who could provide more of a trauma-informed lens and support the team from a clinical standpoint.” Professor Biasetto worked in that capacity from 2018-2021, providing training and developing protocols for trauma-informed care.

In 2019, Professor Biasetto co-founded the UCSF Health and Human Rights Initiative with a group of medical providers and psychologists. They started the initiative in response to their desire to help in whatever way they could with the surge in family separations and detention of immigrants at the U.S. southern border. “We wanted to find a way to use our skills to support impacted communities and one way that we could do that was to train medical providers and mental health providers in the community to do forensic evaluations,” she explained. “Our goal was to lend our expertise to support their stories so that they could potentially have their asylum cases be approved.” Professor Biasetto served as the initiative's mental health director until earlier this year when she stepped down to make more time for her other endeavors.

Professor Biasetto became an adjunct faculty member in the Wright Institute’s Counseling Psychology program in 2019 as well. “I started with teaching Community Mental Health, which was an obvious match given that I’ve been working in community mental health since the start of my clinical career,” she shared. “I love introducing students to this really rich, complex field of clinical care.” Professor Biasetto went on to teach Family Violence and Protection and Crisis Disaster and Trauma Counseling as well over the next several years.

In the spring of 2025, Professor Biasetto moved to a part-time role at the Trauma Recovery Center and stepped into the role of part-time core faculty member in the Wright Institute's Counseling Psychology program. “I’ve worked in community mental health for over a decade and I’ve grown so much because of my colleagues and the mentors I’ve had,” she reflected. “I like the idea of expanding that at the Wright Institute as well.” She also loves being able to mentor aspiring clinicians as part of the core faculty and being a faculty advisor. “I really enjoy just feeling like I’m more part of the community,” she explained. “I have a greater understanding of the Institute, its culture, and the students’ needs in a way that was hard to have as an adjunct, as someone who was coming in exclusively to teach a course and then leaving.” Her biggest piece of advice for students is to use their time at the Wright Institute to build as many relationships as they can, both with their peers and the faculty and staff, because those will be the foundations of their professional networks as they enter the field.

Professor Biasetto also recently started her own private practice where she meets in person and virtually with individuals and couples. “In my practice, I work with people whose lives have been touched either by trauma or loss, folks who have experienced immigration or cultural adjustments, and people going through changes and transitions in their lives,” she shared. “I've also been working with people who are in the process of family-building or working through pregnancy losses.” So far, Professor Biasetto is really enjoying her work in private practice while she also remains committed to her work in community mental health as she finds great meaning in the work she does in both spheres.

As a new parent, Professor Biasetto admitted that she has had very little time for hobbies in recent months. “I'm sure that there are new parents out there with really busy hobbies schedules,” she laughed, “but most of my hobbies went out the door!” Between her private practice, teaching at the Wright, part-time work at the Trauma Recovery Center, and her family commitments, there is very little free time in her schedule. “Overall, I have two big loves in my life: I love poetry and reading in general, and I love music,” she shared. She particularly loves live music and has even made it to a few live shows since her baby arrived.

Looking to the future, Professor Biasetto hopes to always continue learning and developing her skills as a clinician. “Being an educator and joining the core faculty is in line with my purpose of wanting to continue to grow and learn,” she explained. “The relationship with students is one that I have found to be really enriching, so that’s something I hope to continue to develop.”