Notre Dame faculty are carrying out research all 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 of them, that’s exactly where they need to be.
For over a decade, Notre Dame psychology professors Laura Miller-Graff and Mark Cummings have been visiting Gaza and the West Bank to do transformational research. The collaboration began when Miller-Graff first began her appointment at Notre Dame in 2013 (though their connection goes back even further—Miller-Graff was an undergraduate in Cummings’ lab). They made an excellent match as collaborators due to their shared interest in the impact of political violence on children.
The resulting joint project from their partnership is Promoting Positive Family Futures—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. Essentially, as Cummings puts it, the program is “designed to strengthen family functioning in the face of stress.”
their graduate students during a trip to Palestine.
The research has stretched over 10 years because of the thorough process behind it. Before fully launching their project, Miller-Graff and Cummings spent years carrying out a pilot program, in part supported by a Notre Dame Global grant. They then collected data from the pilot and used their findings to apply for funding to begin the next implementation phase. “We're doing something that I confidently say is world-class work. It's world-class intervention research, cutting edge,” Cummings says. They’ve found outstanding partners in Catholic Relief Services and the Palestinian Counseling Center, and eventually, secured 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 says. This “fine-tuning” is a vital part of their process. As Cummings shares, “We really wanted to contextualize our program for the needs of Palestine.”
One lesson they learned from paying attention to the local audience was the need to reformat their working groups. “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 says. “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 (in this first pilot study) but not a single father participated.” Rather than write off fathers as uninterested, they dug deeper and made changes for the second pilot study conducted in Gaza with 62 families (mothers, fathers and adolescent children) supported by Catholic Relief Services (CRS). “We had separate sessions for dads and then one for mothers and adolescents. We tried that because we concluded that it doesn't work in Palestinian culture (based on our West Bank pilot study) to have unrelated men and women together,” Cummings remarks. The outcome for the second pilot study in Gaza in 2019? Participation from fathers jumped drastically—from zero to nearly 100%, including participation in the 8 treatment sessions and pretest, post-test and 6-month follow-up assessments.
The main purpose of their most recent visit, this past year, was to meet the 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 says. “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 speaks of the challenges they faced throughout, particularly in the beginning, as they worked to secure 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 visited colleagues at the Palestinian Counseling Center in the West Bank in the summer of 2023 but did not visit the Catholic Relief Services site in Gaza. To accomplish a follow-up visit to Gaza, they booked their flights for mid-October of 2023, days after the October 7th attack that would ignite the Israel-Hamas war.
“We had to cancel our plane tickets and close down the Gaza site because of the war,” Cummings shares. 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 a week. 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 says. 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. 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,” Miller-Graff says.
One aspect that’s made the continuation of their project achievable, despite the challenges, is Notre Dame’s global location in Jerusalem, Tantur. “Tantur’s been central to all this since the beginning,” Cummings says. Over the years that they’ve carried out their research in the West Bank and Gaza, 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 local Notre Dame Jerusalem team has been an invaluable resource. Miller-Graff shares, “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.”
Notre Dame Jerusalem, and Notre Dame’s other eleven locations around the world, aim to provide just that to faculty, students, staff, and members of the Notre Dame community. For Miller-Graff and Cummings, the Notre Dame Jerusalem team and location at Tantur has not only served as a practical resource but also as a connection to the Notre Dame family while away from campus. “We've definitely felt the importance of being a part of that community,” Miller-Graff says. “Daniel [Schwake] and Gabi [Mitchell] are really instrumental in facilitating that and have been an incredible support.”
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 shares. “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.” Cummings is also actively working on extending the Promoting Positive Family Futures program and adopting it for use in Ukraine, working with 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 says. “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.