MFP Honors Four Alumni
During the 2011 APA Convention in Washington DC, the APA Minority Fellowship Program held an award ceremony honoring four MFP Psychologists. Andrew Austin-Dailey, Director of the Minority Fellowship Program, presented the awards to the honorees.
Dr. Melba J.T. Vasquez
Dr. Melba J.T. Vasquez received a special MFP award for her leadership as 2011APA President and the distinction she brings as an MFP alumna.
Dr. Vasquez received her doctorate from the scientist-practitioner counseling psychology program at the University of Texas at Austin in 1978. She is an independent practitioner in Austin. Her areas of scholarship are ethics, multicultural psychotherapy, psychology of women, supervision and training. She has provided leadership service to the profession of psychology for three decades.
Before becoming a psychologist, Vasquez taught English and political science in middle school. While working on a master's degree in counseling, she was encouraged to apply to UT's doctoral program. As a member of the first generation in her family to attend college, Dr. Vasquez had never until then considered obtaining a doctorate. Involvement as a member of the first cohort of the APA Minority Fellowship Program provided a powerful socializing process into the profession and incentive to contribute to the discipline.
After graduation, Dr. Vasquez served as a psychologist in the university counseling center, directed the internship training program, and taught in the counseling psychology doctoral program at Colorado State University and later, the University of Texas. After 13 years, she embarked upon full-time independent practice while continuing active involvement in scholarship, mentoring, professional leadership and advocacy.
Dr. Vasquez has served on the APA Board of Directors and in various roles in APA governance, including as member or chair of a dozen APA boards, committees and task forces. Her experience initiating new, major projects include co-founding the National Multicultural Conference and Summit as well as Divs. 45 (Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues) and 56 (Trauma Psychology). Dr. Vasquez is a past president of APA Divs. 17 (Society of Counseling Psychology) and 35 (Society for the Psychology of Women), and the Texas Psychological Association. She served as an APA council representative from Divs. 17, 42 (Psychologists in Independent Practice) and 45. She has advocated for psychology at the state and federal legislative levels, receiving both the Heiser Award and the AAP Advocacy Award.
An author and editor, Vasquez has published extensively. She is co-author of three books, including Ethics in Psychotherapy and Counseling (Pope & Vasquez), How to Survive and Thrive as a Therapist (Pope & Vasquez), and APA Ethics Code Commentary and Case Illustrations (2010, Campbell, Vasquez, Behnke & Kinscherff). She has written more than 65 journal articles and book chapters, and served on the editorial boards of 10 journals. She is currently writing a book on multicultural therapy for an APA Theories of Psychotherapy Monograph Series.
Honors and awards include: Fellow of APA Divs. 1 (Society for General Psychology), 17, 31 (State, Provincial and Territorial Psychological Association Affairs), 35, 42, 44 (Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Issues), 45, 49 (Society of Group Psychology and Group Psychotherapy), 52 (International Psychology), 56 and member of Divs. 9 (Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues), 29 (Psychotherapy), & 51 (Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinity); diplomate in counseling psychology from the American Board of Professional Psychology; Distinguished Practitioner of Psychology in the National Academies of Practice; and recipient of over 30 awards for distinguished service, advocacy and mentoring.
Dr. Ana Cauce
Dr. Cauce, Earl R. Carlson Professor of Psychology, joined the faculty of Arts of Sciences at the University of Washington in 1986. She completed her undergraduate degree, with majors in English and Psychology at the University of Miami, and her Ph.D. in Clinical/Community Psychology at Yale University. She holds a joint faculty appointment in American Ethnic Studies, and secondary appointments in the Department of Women’s Studies, Latin American Studies, and the College of Education. Her previous administrative positions include Chair of the Department of American Ethnic Studies and the Department of Psychology, Director of the UW Honors Program, and Executive Vice Provost. Her term as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences began in April 2008.
Throughout her career Dean Cauce has been an active teacher and mentor to scores of undergraduate and graduate students. Her students have included winners of the Guthrie Senior Thesis award in Psychology, the Office of Minority Affairs (OMA) Vice Presidential Award, and Presidential Medalists. She is the recipient of the University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award and continues to teach every summer in the OMA Summer Transition Program.
Dean Cauce is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society. Her primary area of research focuses on competence and problem behavior among adolescents, especially those growing up in at-risk environments, including youth from ethnic minority backgrounds, and homeless youth. Her work in this area has been recognized with the Excellence in Research Award from the American Psychological Association, the Dalmas Taylor Distinguished Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, and the Distinguished Contribution Award from the Society for Community Research and Action. She is presently Co-Principal Investigator on the “Familias” study which is examining social and cultural factors affecting Mexican American families and their early adolescent children.
She also conducts research and interventions focusing on increasing the diversity of the academic labor force in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) disciplines, serving as Principal Investigator on the University of Washington NSF ADVANCE grant and on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Maximizing the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering, which produced Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering.
A recipient of the National Institute of Mental Health’s (NIMH) “FIRST” Award for Young Investigators, Cauce’s research has been funded by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Sloan Foundation, and the W.T. Grant Foundation. She recently (2006) completed a term as president of the Society for Community Research and Action and has served as an Associate Editor of the American Psychologist, Child Development, and the American Journal of Community Psychology (see The Seattle Times).
Dr. Michele Cooley
Dr. Cooley-Strickland is a licensed psychologist who joined the UCLA faculty in 2009 and is a Research Psychologist in the Center for Culture and Health, in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine, NPI-Semel Institute. Dr. Cooley is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Mental Health, Bloomberg School of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins University, now Adjunct. She received her bachelor’s, M.Ed., and doctorate in clinical child psychology from the University of Virginia. She completed her clinical internship at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Pittsburgh, PA, and postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Medical University of South Carolina. After her training, Dr. Cooley became an Assistant Professor of (Clinical) Psychology at George Mason University for two years, and then joined the Johns Hopkins University faculty in 1996.
Dr. Cooley-Strickland is a community-based clinical child researcher, preventive interventionist, and teacher. She has been the principal investigator of grants funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) designed to study the emotional and behavioral outcomes of youth’s exposure to community violence. One of the grants was a pilot study of a school-based preventive intervention with inner-city children exposed to community violence who are at risk for anxiety disorders. Dr. Cooley is currently the principal investigator of a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) R01 prospective cohort longitudinal study that investigates community violence as a risk factor for internalizing and externalizing behaviors, co-occurring substance use, and academic achievement problems, as well as protective factors that attenuate those adverse outcomes. The project is entitled the Multiple Opportunities to Reach Excellence (MORE) Project. It contains three annual waves of data collection from 746 urban children, their teachers, and their parents. She has made those data available to numerous colleagues and students for theses, dissertations, presentations, and publications. Dr. Cooley has given almost 100 regional and national presentations and has over 35 peer-reviewed publications, book chapters, and co-authored clinical treatment intervention manuals.
Dr. Cooley-Strickland has been active in the National Institutes of Health, serving on several advisory committees and nearly 30 special emphasis panels. She is a former standing committee member of the Center for Scientific Review’s Child Psychopathology and Developmental Disorders (CPDD) review panel as well as the Social Sciences, Nursing, Epidemiology and Methods (SNEM-2) integrated review group. Dr. Cooley-Strickland has served on many panels and task forces for professional organizations, including the: Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy, Society for Prevention Research, Anxiety Disorders Association of America (Children’s Task Force), Johnson and Johnson’s Pediatric Roundtable, and American Psychological Association (e.g., Member-at-Large for Education and Standards for Division 53 [Society of Clinical Child Psychology]; Chairperson of the Ethnic Minority Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology Task Forces; Member of the Resiliency and Strength Black Child and Adolescent Task Force; Executive Committee of Division 12, Section 6; Committee on Publications and Communications, Division 12). Dr. Cooley-Strickland is a former APA Minority Fellowship Program Fellow. Other professional contributions include service as an editorial board member or reviewer of numerous scientific journals, including acting as Guest Editor of a section of Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology (JCCAP) on Assessing Child and Adolescent Anxiety in Multi-ethnic Populations and Co-Editor for the special JCCAP Youth and Violence section.
Dr. Carlos Valiente
Dr. Valiente is associate Professor of Family Studies in the School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University. He holds a Ph.D. from Arizona State University, a Masters’ degree in Family Science, with an emphasis in marriage and family therapy, as well as B.A. in psychology from Arizona State University. The primary goal of Dr. Valiente’s program of research is to identify ways educators and parents can foster children’s, often Mexican-American children’s, social, emotional, and educational success. Towards this end, he supervises research projects on the development of temperament as well as on the roles of parenting and temperament to children’s social and academic competence. Dr. Valiente has published numerous journal articles and chapters on the contributions of parenting and children’s temperament to developmental outcomes, and he is involved in intervention research designed to promote students’ greater readiness and success in early elementary school. Much of his work is federally funded by the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Dr. Valiente teaches undergraduate courses focused on marriage and family relationships, research methods, and early school success. At the graduate level, he is responsible for teaching a course on family theories. He serves as a peer reviewer for many scholarly journals as well as the National Science Foundation.
