Welcome to the Culture, Community, and Global Mental Health Research Lab!

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Lab members engage in applied research that serves to advance mental health knowledge of under-served populations and address urgent socio-cultural issues. Collaborative partnerships with various communities (e.g., schools, clinics, NGO's) are central to our research, which aims to understand and help solve real world problems. Lab research projects use various research methods (e.g., focus groups, interviews, surveys, secondary data analysis), and involve communities local to the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia.

 

Recent Research Projects:

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Immigrant mental health include risk and resilience among newcomer immigrant adolescents, needs assessment of immigrant families released from detention centers at the Texas/ Mexico border, school-based prevention for newcomer youth, and clinical services for adult refugee survivors of torture.

 

Global mental health include understanding mental health needs in humanitarian settings and the large-scale interventions introduced by international organizations such as the WHO to target mental health needs in these settings, evaluation of front lines mental health programs to combat modern slavery in Ethiopia, India, Nepal and Thailand, a task shifting intervention to heal trauma and promote peace in the Central African Republic, a study of traditional birth attendants in Kenya, and a study of post-traumatic growth following natural disaster in Puerto Rico.

 

Community mental health include various intervention and program evaluations, such as an after-school soccer program for immigrant girls, an attachment-focused intervention for parents experiencing homelessness, and stigma reduction for Korean - American seniors.

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In addition to conducting applied research, lab members are involved in adjunct university teaching, policy advocacy, professional training, asylum evaluation, and international clinical training through a lab partnership in Kenya. Lab members are the recipients of numerous awards, including APA's Minority Fellowship Program and Kaiser Permanente's Latinx Association Scholarship.