Gloria Abura-Meerdink, MSc, MSW, PhD

The overall goal of Dr. Gloria Abura-Meerdink’s research is to understand the pathways to child and adolescent mental health disparities and to develop and adapt cost effective mental health interventions and assessments for children and adolescents in low resource community-based settings, humanitarian contexts and post conflict regions globally. Furthermore, the motivation for this research has been influenced by several factors, including, Dr. Abura’s many years of experience working as a community and clinical psychologist in resource constrictive settings in Uganda and more recently her work in rural and city schools in the United States’ Deep South in the past four years.

Dr. Abura champions community engaged research methodologies in her work and is a firm believer in its ability to help bridge the current adolescent mental health gap, more so, in low resource settings. The development of culturally appropriate, contextually relevant and age specific mental health interventions and assessments for today’s youth globally can be actualized through community engaged research. For her project on the ACHIEVE fellowship, Dr. Abura will be conducting, “A Community Engaged Approach to Investigating the Transferability of Youth Readiness Intervention (YRI) for Adolescents facing Adversity in Post Conflict School Based Settings in Northern Uganda.”