Gabriela Livas
Department Chair
Gabriela Livas’s research attempts to identify individual, familial and cultural processes that promote positive development and mitigate risk for minoritized youth, focusing on immigrant and Latine populations. Her work, grounded in cultural models of child development, incorporates tenets of developmental psychopathology to understand trajectories of mental health and educational outcomes. Her work also uses community-engaged approaches to develop and test prevention and intervention programs that address the mental health and cultural needs of minoritized youth and their families.
Marci Gleason
Associate Chair for Undergraduate Education
Marci Gleason’s research interests center on the influence of major life transitions on adults’ mental, physical and relationship health. The focus of her research program is on the fundamental question of how close relationships, as social contexts, influence individuals’ ability to cope with both big and small stressors associated with major life transitions. To gain a deeper understanding of this question, she conducts intensive longitudinal studies of dyads and groups that allow her to explore adjustment and change at the individual, group and societal levels.
Fatima Varner
Associate Chair for Graduate Education
Fatima Varner's major research interests include the roles of stressors, context, and sociodemographic characteristics on parenting, family processes, and adolescent outcomes. She is especially interested in the pathways through which racism-related stressors influence parenting and adolescents’ academic achievement and well-being in Black families. In addition, she studies how contextual factors and coping influence African American parents’ psychological well-being. Currently, she is a Co-PI for the evaluation of the Travis County Transformation Project, a community-based program research-practice partnership, funded by WT Grant, Doris Duke, and Bezos Foundations. She teaches Adolescent Development in Context and Socioeconomic Problems of Families. Varner is a Board Member of the Society for Research on Adolescence.