I am a clinician-scientist with an emerging program of research addressing mental health inequities among socially disadvantaged and excluded groups, primarily immigrant and refugee communities. I also spend quite a bit of time thinking about how to help health care professionals deliver care that takes into account diverse cultural contexts and identities to better meet the needs of their patients.
I have thus far dedicated my professional life to serving lives of historically minoritized communities as a health equity researcher, educator, and clinician.
I am the daughter of immigrants and am myself an immigrant. I was born in the U.S., yet we migrated during my early childhood to my parents’ home country of Venezuela. In the 1990s, my parents decided to migrate once again to the U.S. fleeing political instability and a repressive regime, as nearly 6 million Venezuelans have done over the last 2+ decades. My immigrant experience was punctuated with many hardships – enduring separation of our family, first learning Spanish (when we moved to Venezuela) and then relearning English (when we moved back to the States), financial strain, and discrimination. Despite many cultural strengths and great pride in being Latin American, the process of acculturation was one of constant struggle whereby I contemporaneously experienced pressure to adapt and assimilate into “American life” and at the same time to maintain major components of our Venezuelan heritage. As is often the case for immigrants, our family surrounded itself primarily with other immigrant families, which instilled in me a keen, sophisticated, and exquisite understanding of the unique challenges of disenfranchised immigrant and refugee communities. Being an immigrant shaped how I think about basic rights like access to mental health care, and how this is often determined by one’s social context and demographic characteristics. There are numerous obstacles for disenfranchised communities, such as poor immigrants and refugees living in ethnic enclaves or in the margins, which make receiving quality mental health care difficult, if not unattainable.
Thus, my research, teaching, and clinical work have consistently held a focus on this reality by engaging in efforts to increase access to care for underserved and disenfranchised communities, thereby reducing mental health inequities. In this way, I am a clinician-scientist addressing mental needs of minoritized populations by leveraging methods and frameworks from health inequities research, community-engaged research, implementation science, and human-centered design.