Immigrant groups are also increasingly dissimilar to the host society, contributing to feelings of distrust and the rise of authoritarianism within these host countries, said , a professor of psychology in Georgetown University œÛŚÓÊÓÆ” & Sciences. 

, published in January 2026 by Cambridge University Press, focuses on questions raised by the current immigration landscape. Moghaddam wrote the book with co-authors (MPP’19, G’22), who received her Ph.D. in psychology from Georgetown in 2022, and (MPP’22, G’25), a Ph.D. graduate from the Department of Psychology and Jesuit priest who received the .

From a purely fiscal perspective, that immigration boosts economic growth. “But people are not rational,” said Moghaddam. “People are driven by irrationality, emotions. Often, they are driven by fears, hatred, anger.”

Studying and researching the issue of immigration from the perspective of psychology opens the door to examine the emotional and behavioral aspects to modern immigration. 

“Why are we seeing immigration as a threat? This is a perception. It’s a psychological experience,” Moghaddam said. “On the immigration side, what are the perceptions and aspirations and hopes of immigrants as they arrive in America? That’s a psychological feeling as well. So on both sides, both the immigrants and the hosts, the key to their relationship is psychological.”

Advocating for Omniculturalism

“Immigration is inevitable, so the question is, how do we manage it?” Moghaddam said. The new book aims to answer this question.

Approaching the issue from a global perspective, The New Immigration Challenge explores challenges of managing this inevitable migration while immigrants are increasingly dissimilar from the host society. 

“It’s this dissimilarity that creates threats or feelings of threats in the host population and creates this backlash against immigrants,” Moghaddam said. “In the United States and in Europe, this backlash is the foundation for the rise of authoritarian political movements and leaders.”

The book is based on Moghaddam’s research into immigration, which he has been examining since the 1980s, and on the Ph.D. theses completed by co-authors Hendricks and Salas-Schweikart. Hendricks’ research focuses on American identity and immigration, and Salas-Schweikart’s focuses on diversity and trust.

“We often hear about immigration in the news and how much people are against it — and of course others speaking out against those who are against it,” Hendricks said. “I think the book’s focus on the psychological perspective is important because it helps to explain why this is and also maybe more importantly, highlights that it’s not just the U.S. and it’s not just ‘western’ countries. These feelings or attitudes are global.”

In The New Immigration Challenge, the authors advocate for omniculturalism.

“Omniculturalism is the celebration of similarities,” Moghaddam said. “Based on scientific evidence, human beings are much more similar than they are different, and our focus should be on how we are similar so that we can meet challenges of nuclear proliferation, human-induced global warming and more.” 

The authors argue for the idea of omniculturalism so that societies can celebrate commonalities and focus on common challenges.

“That’s how psychology can help us: by acknowledging the challenges that we face when relating with immigrants, and how we can navigate these challenges by highlighting the commonalities,” Salas-Schweikart said.

Impacts of Inequality on the Human Mind

The book was published as part of the , edited by Moghaddam for Cambridge University Press. The series highlights research on the impacts of inequality on the human mind, a blindspot in the field of psychology.

Poverty and food insecurity shape psychological processes such as intelligence and decision making. However, mainstream psychology “completely neglects” these impacts, Moghaddam said.

“If we look at any introductory psychology text, there’s a lot of discussion about the impact of different group memberships, including gender and ethnicity and even religion, but there’s almost nothing about poverty and social class,” he said.

Moghaddam started the series to draw attention to the impacts of poverty and class inequality on psychology and how these forces shape the brains of almost who live in poverty. There are in the series and one more is set to be published this February. Moghaddam is the author of three other books in the series: , and .

As the latest book of the series, The New Immigration Challenge contributes to the collection through its analysis of immigrants and poor populations of the host nation, Moghaddam said.  

“The common plight of working-class whites and working-class immigrants, that’s something that needs to be taken up,” he said. “The common theme has to be poverty and dealing with poverty, not the color of your skin.”

Graduate linguistics student Helen Dominic is examining the power that listening can have on healing that will improve health care for immigrants by utilizing narrative medical practices. Dominic, a fourth-year Ph.D. student, is performing intersectional research through the that will improve health care for immigrants by utilizing narrative medical practices.  

Listening, Learning, Linguistics

Originally from Singapore, Dominic’s interest in linguistics began at a young age. 

“A lot of my research has been shaped by my own experiences of being an immigrant,” Dominic says. “I was born in India, but my family moved to Singapore when I was two, which made me very aware of how language shapes society and how it has shaped me.”

Dominic says that being a racial minority in Singapore played a major role in her ultimate pursuit of earning a Ph.D. in linguistics and moving to a culturally diverse city like Washington, DC. 

Since she started her program, Dominic’s primary research focus has been within immigrant discourse. When she came to Georgetown, Dominic was able to find a community in the , specifically, in a branch that examines the intersection of health care and language. 

“The more I learned, the more I realized that there is so much work that needs to be done within immigrant discourse and medical care,” Dominic explains. “Currently, I’m on the pathway to writing my dissertation that will focus on interpretation  in medical settings, specifically the immigrant interpreter’s experiences.”  

When an immigrant with limited proficiency in English needs medical care, they tend to bring a family member or friend along with them who can communicate with medical staff and offer moral support. In these interactions, there are many possibilities for miscommunication. 

“At any point when three people are involved in a conversation, there are many chances for miscommunication — this is the case even when all parties speak English and the miscommunication is compounded further when there is a person who can’t speak a specific language that the other two know,” Dominic explains. “The problem with the specific triad that I’m looking at is that the patient is often the one who’s left out. As much as it is their body, their pain and their desire to be better that needs to be considered, it’s oftentimes really tough for them to communicate in the way that will make them feel comfortable.”

This problem is further complicated by potential biases held by the family member or friend who is interpreting. Since they know the individual they are representing so well, they can overlook or over-emphasize certain aspects of the individual’s problem to medical professionals. However, to the patient, their family member or friend is still valued and necessary in the interaction. This creates a complex problem with attempting to understand how to best provide care for immigrant patients with limited proficiency in English. 

Dominic’s research thus focuses on the family member involved in the interaction and how that intersects with their immigrant identity.

“I think any immigrant would say that translating for their parents is such an important part of their life growing up,” Dominic says. “Being a part of Georgetown has been a good space for me to explore this topic.”

A graduate fellow with the new Medical Humanities Initiative, which examines the intersection of medicine and the humanities, Dominic hopes that this research will continue to allow her to work with doctors to improve doctor education. 

“Intercultural communication can definitely be more strongly taught in medical education, including doctors, nurses, techs and so on,” Dominic explains. “ I would like to ultimately translate my research into materials for medical staff education, which I know will be well received here in Georgetown. The university’s medical school already has programs in place to ensure that they are not only educating their doctors, but trying to reduce burnout among students.  

“They also emphasize that doctors should not only read within their fields of science and medicine, but keep up-to-date on best quality care practices that will guarantee they are caring for the whole person,” Dominic continues.

One of the ways to provide this holistic care is referred to as narrative medicine, where doctors and medical professionals listen to the individual stories of the patients to comprehensively provide aid. This concept is even more crucial for immigrant families who are not only dealing with varying life issues but differing cultural expectations of health care.  

During her year-long fellowship, Dominic will have the chance to observe these triadic interactions, and talk to patients, doctors, and family members one-on-one. 

“What the doctors perceive of the interaction might be so different than what the patients experience and perceive, so I will be spending a lot of time listening to people’s stories and narratives and seeing how to come to a middle ground when creating and promoting these educational materials.” 

Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, Ph.D. and director of the Medical Humanities Initiative, says that “Helen’s project aligns beautifully with the mission and vision of MHI.”

“Leveraging linguistics methodologies with a keen awareness of structural and cultural competencies and motivated by her personal experiences, Helen’s work turns a much-needed critical lens upon health professional education and will impact practitioner-patient communication as well as improve immigrant health care,” Krishnan continues. “We are thrilled to support it through a Graduate Research Fellowship.” 

Life After a Linguistics Program 

After earning her Ph.D., Dominic plans to enter the healthcare research field. More specifically, she hopes to study intercultural communication and linguistics in the telehealth world. 

Dominic says that her mentors at Georgetown have been instrumental to her success. Her main advisor, Natalie Schilling, Ph.D., and professor in the linguistics department, helped Dominic think more deeply about how language can reflect and construct the institution, and how this affects policy and culture. 

Schilling, who works closely with Dominic, says that she “is a dedicated, thoughtful and uniquely collegial student and researcher.”

“Her original research promises to make invaluable contributions to the study of communicative practices in healthcare encounters and their impact on health outcomes and the overall well-being of patients and other concerned parties,” Schilling continues. “In addition, she is contributing to our sociolinguistic understandings of how people shape identities and role relations through language in both everyday and institutional interactions.”

Heidi Hamilton, professor emerita, is a pioneer in studying the intersection of language and medicine, which greatly shaped the work done by Dominic. Finally, Alexandra Johnston, assistant teaching professor and director of the , helped to guide Dominic’s thoughts on how to make her research applicable and useful to the communities she is studying. 

“I am very lucky to have three incredible women as mentors and on my committee,” says Dominic. “What I have ultimately learned from them is that it is so important to have conversations across disciplines and to share ideas. We can all be viewing the same painting at the same time, but what a scientist notices is going to be extremely different from what someone who studies literature notices. I think the better that we get at noticing things that are outside of our fields, the more effective solutions we will find that are going to solve a lot of these extremely complex and dynamic problems.”

Related News

Medical Humanities Minor Launched by University

First-Year Student Presented Paper at Prestigious Computational Linguistics Conference

“The goal of the Curiosity Rover, and specifically of the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument (SAM) that we have been working on, is to find organic molecules that could potentially be indicators of life to help us understand the past and/or present Martian habitability,” explains Millan. “This experiment was a milestone because this is the first time that the derivatization  technique has been employed on another planet and even in space.”

What is Derivatization?

While earning her Ph.D. at the laboratory LATMOS in France where she worked closely with NASA Goddard, Millan met with Johnson to see if she would be interested in joining the Johnson Biosignatures Astrobiology Lab at Georgetown as its first postdoctoral fellow in planetary sciences. Millan agreed and began working on simultaneous research projects at Goddard and Georgetown. 

“I was really excited about these projects and about being the “bridge” between Goddard and Georgetown, so I immediately accepted the offer,” says Millan. “I crossed the Atlantic, relocated to the US, and joined Sarah’s lab only a month after my Ph.D. defense. Although my initial contract was 3 years, I was so happy and excited about the work that I stayed until now, which is 5 years in January.”

The article, titled “Organic molecules revealed in Mars’s Bagnold Dunes by Curiosity’s derivatization experiment,” is the culmination of the research Millan started at Georgetown in 2017 to search for organic molecules on Mars as well as the work she performed at Goddard to help understand Martian data and optimize the future experiments to be done on the Red Planet. It is not only a monumental paper for Millan but a milestone in Martian exploration and in astrobiology.

Millan says that the reason this particular research is so significant is that “it presents the results of the first successful wet chemistry derivatization experiment performed at the surface of another planet.”

Typically, the SAM instrument can extract and analyze organic molecules through pyrolysis, which requires intense heating of rock and mineral samples to release organic compounds. However, some molecules that are key indicators of life such as amino acids and fatty acids cannot be identified through pyrolysis alone.

In their experiment, Johnson and Millan applied a technique called derivatization. Instead of only applying heat to rocks and minerals, the SAM instrument uses chemical liquids in conjunction with pyrolysis to extract organic molecules in a process known as “wet chemistry.” 

Although SAM did not detect amino acids or fatty acids, several “derivatized” molecules were found in the analysis, which indicates that this first derivatization on Mars was successful. While the origins of these modified molecules remain under investigation, the detection is proof that the new approach was successful, paving the way for its widespread use. 

“Most chemical biosignatures we target at the surface of Mars, other planets and satellites such as amino acids, nucleobases, sugars and lipids require wet chemistry techniques to be detected,” explains Millan. “These results are not only important for Mars and the current research goals of the Curiosity rover, but also for future missions.” 

The paper also details how the flight experiment can be optimized to detect molecules that might be missed under standard flight protocols. 

Mentorship: More than Molecules on Mars

After finishing her postdoctoral fellowship next year, Millan will begin as a full-time scientist at LATMOS. She was one of five people selected from almost 200 applicants for a position in the Solar System and Far Universe division. Her research project proposal directly combines the work she completed while working at Georgetown and Goddard — the preservation and detection of organic biosignatures in the Solar System in order to understand the conditions of the emergence of life. 

Millan says that she felt fulfilled scientifically and personally while working with Johnson and that the experience “was a huge stepping stone for my career and an amazing experience.”

“From my first day, Sarah treated me like her colleague, introduced me to the right people so I could pursue my projects and did everything to make me feel comfortable and integrated in her lab which smoothed my transition to the US and made me happy to be here,” says Millan. “She is one of the best mentors I’ve had and she taught me that you can do it all: build your dream laboratory from scratch, become a known scientist, a caring teacher and a writer all while managing a healthy work/life balance, which can be quite challenging as a woman researcher.”

“This journey has been one of the most incredible experiences I’ve ever had, and I would not have been able to get this permanent position in France, my dream since I was a little girl, without the incredible and unconditional support of Sarah,” continues Millan. 

As part of their work together, Johnson and Millan visited places like New Zealand and Australia to conduct research in planetary analog environments on Earth. Millan was not only able to see some of the most beautiful and remote places in the world from these trips, but also had the opportunity to present her work at conferences, meet other scientists, and “gained enough confidence to pursue my own research ideas.” 

Johnson says that Millan helped her build her lab from the ground up and that she learned a great deal from the postdoc. 

“Working with MaĂ«va has been an absolute delight — she walked into my lab with the skills, knowledge, and interests of a scientist much further along in her career and from there she has developed world-class expertise in detecting traces of organic molecules on Mars,” says Johnson. “MaĂ«va is an explorer in the finest traditions of Mars science. She is a brilliant chemist and an extraordinary young scholar, and a wonderful person, too.  It has been a gift that our paths crossed in this way — she’s the kind of postdoc that makes being a professor a joy!”