Amanda Baden (she/her/hers) is a leading scholar in the adoption field. She is a professor at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey. She teaches and advises students in the Master’s and the PhD Counseling programs. She is trained as a counseling psychologist and earned her PhD at Michigan State University. Amanda has both personal and professional experience with adoption. She was adopted from Hong Kong and raised in a transracially adoptive family. Her experiences both personally and professionally have led her to focus her research and clinical practice on adoption triad members, transracial/international adoption issues, racial and cultural identity, adoption microaggressions, and multicultural counseling competence. Amanda has written extensively on adoption issues including having created a model of identity for transracial and international adoptees called the Cultural-Racial Identity Model. She is one of the editors of the  book entitled, The Handbook of Adoption: Implications for Researchers, Practitioners, and Families (Sage Publications).

She was the recipient of the John D. Black Award in 2014 for the Outstanding Practice of Counseling Psychology and was named the Outstanding Graduate Advisor for Montclair State University in 2017. Amanda serves on the Board on the New York State Board of Psychology, the Advisory Board for the Rudd Adoption Research Program (UMass-Amherst), the Board of Creating a Family, as Senior Fellow for the National Center on Adoption and Permanency, as chair of the Adoption Initiative Biennial Conferences held in NYC, and was a Senior Fellow for the former Donaldson Adoption Institute. She is on the editorial boards of the journals, Adoption Quarterly and Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless.