Honorary Consult Dana Bucin participated as a keynote speaker in the online conference sessions organized under the auspice of the Romanian Academy Days, 37th edition, “Key topics and ideas in Psychology and Educational Sciences”. The conference held on October 20 2022 was hosted by "Gh. Zane" Institute for Economic and Social Research, an institute of the Romanian Academy dedicated to economic and social science research, located in Iași, Romania. Among other topics, the conference discussed the following topics focused around the ongoing global and regional crises: empirical and scientific underpinning of psychosocial community interventions; social, legal and psychological management of the refugee crisis to ensure basic and long-term psychological needs; original community-based approaches used to improve people's quality of life in a post-pandemic context and in the light of managing the refugee crisis in Ukraine.
The Honorary Consul’s keynote speech, titled “The US response to the Ukrainian refugee crisis – challenges, opportunities and open questions for researchers” focused on the main barriers, challenges and dilemmas related to the United for Ukraine (U4U) program which is currently aiming to admit into the United States over 100,000 Ukrainians displaced by Russia’s war. The talk asked for collaborative interdisciplinary and transnational research teams to tackle these issues, in order to protect the long-term well-being and prospects of humanitarian parolees, including the design of appropriate monitoring and evaluation tools, trauma- and culturally-informed training for sponsors and volunteers, and designing effective ways to mobilize involvement and support for the initiative. Also, the Honorary Consul discussed the successes and lessons of conducting the sponsors-refugees matching initiative led by the Honorary Consulate of Romania to Connecticut, aimed at mobilizing sponsors from the state and connecting them to displaced Ukrainians seeking to move to the US.