Leopoldo Cabassa, Ph.D., M.S.W.
Approved Mentor (Primary Mentor, Mentoring Committee)
Washington University in St. Louis, Brown School
Dr. Cabassa is a bilingual Hispanic social worker, Associate Professor at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Cabassa’s research centers on examining physical and mental health disparities in historically underserved populations, particularly among racial/ethnic minorities with serious mental illness (SMI; e.g., schizophrenia, major depression, bipolar disorder). Dr. Cabassa’s research program blends quantitative and qualitative methods, community engagement, intervention research, and implementation science. His work to date has been published in leading journals in the fields of social work, mental health services research, public health, implementation science, and health disparities research, and has attracted external funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the New York State Office of Mental Health. He has been continuously funded by NIMH since 2012. He is a fellow of the Society for Social Work and Research and a standing member of the Health Disparities and Equity Promotion study section of the National Institutes of Health. He is currently the Director of the NIMH T32 program on mental health services research where he provides mentorship to pre- and post-doctoral fellows.
Dr. Cabassa has 13 years of experience mentoring doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows, many from underrepresented minority groups, given his faculty appointments at the University of Southern California School of Social Work, Department of Psychiatry and School of Social Work at Columbia University, and more recently as a tenured Associate Professor at the Brown School. His long-term career goal is to establish a program of research and training that focuses on understanding the factors that fuel inequities in health and mental health care and use this knowledge to inform the adaptation and implementation of interventions to reduce disparities.