Featured Psychologist
Lara-Muñoz's research centers on the social functioning of people with mental illness, focusing on quality of life and disability. Her epidemiological projects include her work with the National Institute of Psychiatry in Mexico City where she helped create the National Mexican Survey of Mental Disorders, and provided the first national estimates of mental illness and mental health service use in Mexico. She has various leadership positions as researcher, administrator and educator in both the United States and Mexico.
Lara-Muñoz is a professor of psychiatry in the School of Medicine and the chair of the department of psychiatry at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, in Mexico. She is also a faculty mentor at the University of Southern California's (USC) Latino Mental Health Research Training Program, an 11-week summer research training program developed to prepare undergraduate and graduate students researchers to address mental health disparities in Latinos in the United States. She has received formal training in clinical psychiatry, psychology and medical sciences, and received postdoctoral research training at Yale University from Alvan Feinstein, an epidemiologist and founder of the field of clinimetrics, the science of clinical measurement. Her research covers many areas in psychiatry, with her main interest concerning the social functioning of persons with mental illness, specifically quality of life and disability. Lara-Muñoz has studied the social side of functioning (quality of life) beginning first with cancer patients (Lara Muñoz et al., 1995) and patients with major depression (Mendieta Cabrera, Lara-Muñoz , et al., 2007). Throughout her longstanding professional affiliation with the National Institute of Psychiatry in Mexico City, Lara-Muñoz has participated in numerous epidemiological projects.
Source: https://dornsife.usc.edu/latino-mental-health/faculty-mentors/