Dr. Beniam Aster Megabi Awoke Betsiha built his career on a simple premise: the people furthest from care often need it most, and the systems meant to serve them rarely speak their language, literally or otherwise. Born in Ethiopia and raised as a refugee in Kenya before settling in Texas, he now works at the intersection of trauma counseling, refugee and immigrant education policy, and rehabilitation counseling, bringing lived experience into every classroom and clinical setting he enters.

Dr. Beniam holds a PhD in Counselor Education and Supervision from Saybrook University, a Master's in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Saybrook University, a Master's in Rehabilitation Counseling from the University of Texas at El Paso, and a bachelor's in Psychology from the University of Texas at Dallas. He is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC), Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor (LCDC), Certified Rehabilitation Counselor (CRC), and National Certified Counselor (NCC). His dissertation on counselor trainees' self-efficacy with suicide-risk clients earned him the 2025 Saybrook Standout Award. He is currently an Ed.M. candidate in the International Education Policy and Management program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), Class of May 2027, where he serves as Vice President of Internal and Campus Affairs for the Harvard Black Graduate Student Alliance, liaising across Harvard's twelve graduate and professional schools.

His scholarship spans a book chapter in press with Cognella Academic Publishing, co-authored with Dr. Avery and Dr. Horton, and a published chapter, "Strengthening teacher AI literacy in Mexico," in a Harvard Graduate School of Education volume edited by Professor Fernando Reimers. He has presented at Harvard on institutional legitimacy under crisis conditions and on closing the learning poverty gap in Ethiopia, delivered an invited guest lecture at New York University (NYU) on the legal and cultural implications of digital exclusion, and contributed to the UNETE collaborative presentation on technology and teacher capacity in low-resource contexts at the Harvard GSE Global Education Policy Conference. 

His clinical range covers some of the most marginalized populations in the field: incarcerated adolescents at the Denton County Juvenile Detention Center, where he designed an original resilience curriculum focused on coping and emotional regulation; chronically homeless adults and foster youth aging out of the system at CitySquare-TRAC, coordinating care across housing, behavioral health, employment, and legal systems; and clients in inpatient substance use treatment and intensive outpatient counseling. He has also stood in the room for kids who otherwise had no advocate, meeting directly with principals, senior district officials, and superintendents to represent children from refugee and immigrant families facing school expulsion, with a consistent record of getting them reinstated.

Dr. Beniam is currently an adjunct professor at the University of West Alabama (UWA) and Sul Ross State University (SRSU). From 2020 to 2023, he co-instructed graduate- and doctoral-level CACREP-accredited courses at Saybrook University and Capella University, including doctoral instructional theory and practice, crisis and trauma intervention, counseling practicum and internship, cultural humility and responsiveness, basic counseling skills, and professional orientation and ethical practice, while providing individual clinical supervision and contributing to CACREP-aligned curriculum development throughout. Earlier, as a Graduate Assistant with the Rehabilitation Services Administration at UTEP, he conducted federal policy analysis and compliance review under the federally funded Rehabilitation Long-Term Training grant program, working directly with UTEP's project director and officials from the U.S. Department of Education.

Dr. Beniam is also a co-founder of Safe Space Connect, PLLC, a sliding-scale practice delivering trauma-focused counseling in English and Amharic to marginalized, immigrant, and refugee communities across North Texas.