For Nicole Presley, UCLA is a family affair. Her father, who attended UCLA in the 1950s, was one of the first African Americans to play in the marching band as a saxophonist. She and her sister are also Bruins. After receiving her bachelor’s degree in psychology from UCLA in 1997, Presley earned a master’s degree in education from Harvard with an emphasis on risk and resilience in human development.
Presley’s love of psychology and education — coupled with a deep interest in mental health — led her to pursue a doctorate in counseling psychology at the University of Southern California. There, she examined resilience, equity, access and retention issues for undergraduate students of color, topics that were not being discussed at that time.
In 2004, Presley found her niche at the intersection of mental health and education when she matched as an intern with UCLA’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS). In 2007, she became a clinician at CAPS. She took a leadership role in 2010, creating the Campus Assault & Resources Program (CARE), a sexual violence prevention and advocacy program. Presley became interim director of both programs in 2015. As demand for student mental health and resilience services continued, Resilience In Your Student Experience Center (RISE) was born.
Now senior executive director of student resilience and mental health services, Presley oversees all three programs, which fall under UCLA Student Affairs, and manages the mental health crisis response team. As co-chair of UCLA Connects: Campus Community Conversations with David Myers, UCLA’s Sady and Ludwig Kahn Professor of Jewish History and director of the Bedari Kindness Institute, Presley is now focused on bringing her passion for connection and wellness to even more Bruins.
Newsroom sat down with Presley to talk about her work in support of One UCLA.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell us about your primary role here at UCLA and how it aligns with One UCLA.
I’m a psychologist by training, so my primary role — my biggest role — is at CAPS. Under that umbrella, we have a number of programs with the goal of improving the ecosystem around student mental health. This means clinical services, prevention and education with the primary question: How do we educate our students to improve their mental health to stay healthy? Throughout our lives, we are told to eat healthy and exercise to maintain optimal physical health, but we don’t get a lot of education around improving our mental health.
At the RISE center, we help students build resilience and good mental health hygiene through a few techniques like positive affirmations, watching the way we talk to and about each other, and considering how we think about our basic mental health needs as part of our overall health strategy. We also consider how we can encourage students to access resources like RISE and decrease the stigma of seeking help. We continuously ask questions, such as, How do we increase belonging? How do we have trainings on suicide safe? How do we educate faculty and staff? We’re constantly building.
My job involves thinking critically about a larger vision or strategic plan that outlines and identifies where we need resources. In terms of mental health education and prevention, I think about our campus ecosystem through the lens of a public health framework, which guides three tiers of prevention at UCLA:
- Primary prevention means educating everybody, so that everyone, including students, knows where to go and what to do in a time of crisis. We educate resident advisors, share information during student orientations and direct students to our Be Well Bruin website for accessible resources.
- Secondary prevention is about identifying at-risk students easily and then making it simple for people to refer them somewhere for help. This is where case managers, faculty and our students in crisis website come in as a place to say, “I’m worried about somebody; let me tell someone and get help.”
- Tier three is for treatment, recovery and referral services through CAPS, UCLA Health or the Ashe Center.
Our programs arise out of students’ needs. One of the most recent programs emerging from this frame of thought is the Compassionate Response Team (CORE) mobile crisis unit launched in October 2025, with mental health clinicians at the forefront who also collaborate with UCPD officers during a crisis on campus.
Can you share a little bit about the work you’re doing on Campus Community Conversations? Why is it so important to UCLA?
I’m really excited about this initiative. I think this has been needed for a long time, even before George Floyd, immigration issues or unrest in the Middle East. There has always been a climate on campus where things were happening. The aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s death is a good example of this.
Students would have reactions — but lacked someone to call or lean on for dialogue. They were also in a tough spot if there was conflict between or among groups. They could call CAPS, but there was a larger need for clinicians on-site. I would see students having feelings or reactions to current events, public figures or even actions of the federal government.
We started hosting healing spaces at RISE as concerns arose, which led to UCLA Connects and the formation of Campus Community Conversations. People from across our campus who conduct dialogues have come together in this effort, including my co-chair David Myers. With Campus Community Conversations, we’re pulling from multiple frameworks, including intergroup dialogue basics, radical listening and others we can use to help the community.
What are the desired outcomes of these initiatives?
We have two main goals for Campus Community Conversations. First, we want to hear about the conversations happening across campus so we can build connections and engage. We want to make sure people know that they can connect.
The second goal is to give people new opportunities to connect within and across the Bruin community in meaningful ways, so they can start engaging in tough conversations. We’re monitoring conversations happening across campus and building community by having early “connecting” conversations. Then, we’re strategically moving into tougher and tougher conversations.
One of the larger campus conversations is centered on the current mental health crisis — we’ve lost a number of students to mental health crises over the past 18 months, which is not normal for our campus, and we’re living amidst a loneliness and isolation epidemic. In response, we’re launching a mental health and suicide prevention initiative called “Hope Connects Us.”
We need people to understand what’s happening in our current ecosystem so we can identify gaps. Hope is a good message around a suicide prevention initiative, and an evidence-based approach suggests that infusing people with hope and letting them know that resources are available to them works rather than simply saying, “You’ll get better.’
The core message is that there’s hope, there are resources for you, we support you, and you can access care. We want them to feel as if there is an ecosystem of mental health care in place to support them.
What do you love about working at UCLA?
I think this is such a vibrant, exciting community — there’s always so much going on! Everybody’s so brilliant all the time. I love the people. I love being able to help people reach their mental health goals so they can go out into the world and effect change. Many of these community members will become doctors, lawyers, businesspeople and scientists, so if they’re not well, the community is not well. I can help them be well and affect the trajectory of their lives — and that of their communities.
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