Meet the MFP Mentors!

MFP Mentors

 

Ruben Parra-Cardona, Ph.D.

 

Areas of Expertise

• Research Design
• Publications
• Evidence based practices with disadvantaged groups
• Cultural Adaptation Research with Diverse Populations
• Federal Grant Writing

Bio

Dr. Parra-Cardona is an Associate Professor in the program of couple and family therapy at Michigan State University. He is currently involved in research focused on the cultural adaptation of evidence-based parenting interventions for Latino populations. He is the principal investigator of a R34 study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). The primary goal of this investigation is to compare and contrast the differential treatment efficacy and cultural relevance of two culturally adapted versions of an evidence-based parenting intervention. Dr. Parra-Cardona is also a core member of the MSU Violence Against Women Research and Outreach Initiative. Currently, his violence research focuses on the evaluation of cultural relevance of services for Latino survivors as well as Latino men who batter and abuse.

Dr. Parra-Cardona serves on the editorial boards of three leading journals in the fields of family therapy and family studies (i.e., Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, Family Process, and Family Relations). Dr. Parra-Cardona’s clinical experience has included the provision of services to Latino street children engaged in drug trafficking and prostitution, child and adult victims of sexual abuse and violence, federal adult probationers convicted for drug trafficking, Latino parents, Latino youth involved in the justice system, large-scale parenting programs in Latino populations, and couple therapy with Latinos. Dr. Parra-Cardona has also served as cultural consultant for the Hispanic Healthy Marriage Initiative, funded by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), US Department of Health and Human Services.

Dr. Parra-Cardona is a member of the board of directors of a leading family therapy institute in Mexico and Latin America (Centro de Investigación Familiar A.C; CIFAC) and adjunct clinical faculty in a leading family therapy institute in northern Mexico (Instituto Regional de Estudios de la Familia, IREFAM). Most recently, Dr. Parra-Cardona was invited to join the board of directors of the Family Process Institute. Dr. Parra-Cardona has published 18 refereed journal articles in leading family therapy and family studies journals and 3 book chapters. All published materials focus on Latino populations. He has completed 38 peer-reviewed presentations (papers, workshops, and posters) in national and international conferences.

Darren Moore, Ph.D.

Areas of Expertise

• Research Design
• Evidence based practices with disadvantaged groups
• Job seeking
• Professional association leadership
• Advocacy on State and National levels

Bio

Darren D. Moore, Ph.D. is originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Dr. Moore successfully defended his dissertation on March 28, 2012 and received his Ph.D. in Human Development: Marriage and Family Therapy from Virginia Tech University. His dissertation explored the impact of significant weight loss on men and their couple/marital relationships after weight loss surgery.

Dr. Moore is an academic all-star! He graduated from high school at the age of 16, receiving numerous scholarships for college. He graduated from the University of Minnesota with a Bachelors’ degree in African American Studies at 20. Dr. Moore took a year off before moving to Valdosta to gain work experience and then started the Masters’ program in Marriage and Family Therapy, graduating at the age of 23. After graduation, he worked as a therapist before enrolling in the doctoral program. Dr. Moore graduates with his Ph.D. just a few months after turning 28.

Dr. Moore has worked in the field of addictions and minority mental health in a variety of clinical settings (residential, inpatient, outpatient, and home based) in Minnesota, Georgia, Florida, and Virginia. Dr. Moore has collaborated on research projects that have been presented both in the community and at prestigious conferences, and is currently involved in a number of writing projects and community based initiatives. He has a variety of clinical, research, and teaching interests which include but are not limited to 1) obesity, weight loss, and couple relationships, 2) male body image, eating disorders, and addictions, and 3) obesity within the African American community.  

Dr. Moore currently holds the title of Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and teachers in the Masters’ program in Marriage and Family Therapy at Mercer University School of Medicine. Prior to teaching at Mercer University, he taught at Valdosta State University in the Masters’ program in Marriage and Family Therapy and the undergraduate program in African American Studies.

Dr. Moore is passionate about the work that he does and will make contributions to the fields of marriage and family therapy, public health, African American studies, and addictions, through community based intervention, scholarly inquiry, advocacy, education, and mentoring.

Christine Ajayi, Ph.D.

Areas of Expertise

•     Research Design
•     Evidence based practices with disadvantaged groups
•     Job seeking

Bio

Dr. Christine Ajayi is from Dallas, Texas and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Therapy program at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Dr. Ajayi earned a Ph.D. in Marriage and Family Therapy from The Florida State University in 2011. She received her Master’s degree in Marriage and Family Therapy from The University of Houston-Clear Lake, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology from Spelman College.

Dr. Ajayi came to NSU in the fall of 2011, and served in the capacity of a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Family Therapy Department. She has enthusiastically decided to continue as a permanent faculty member in the department. Dr. Ajayi teaches Diversity, Ethics, Research, External Practicum Supervision, and Narrative Therapy in the Masters and Doctoral programs. She also serves on dissertation committees, and is currently the chair of a dissertation committee.

Her past clinical experience includes working as the Director of Counseling Services as New Mount Zion AME Church in Tallahassee, Florida. She also served as a clinician at DePelchin Children’s Center, where she provided services to foster and adoptive families. Christine is currently involved in a number of research projects. She is involved with the Program for Strengthening African American Marriages (ProSAAM) project, and has helped to publish some of the program’s findings. This research study, which includes over 400 couples, is aimed to help African American couples maintain healthy relationships and reach the goals that they have set for themselves. Christine has served as a marriage educator in ProjectRELATE, which was funded by a federally-funded grant, where she provided relationship education to undergraduate students at Florida State University. Christine is currently using the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997(NLSY97), which includes nearly 10,000 participants, to study relational processes during the period of emerging adulthood.

Her program of research centers on healthy relationship processes for those most at risk for encountering high conflict and violent relationships. Her primary interest is in the study of relationships over the course of emerging adulthood, when intervention may help to counter social and family risk factors that oftentimes lead to dysfunctional patterns in later adulthood. Dr. Ajayi is committed to social justice and the provision of relevant mental health services to minority families through best practices in training and service delivery. She has received extensive training on issues of cultural competence as a SAMHSA/AAMFT Minority Fellow.

Arnold Woodruff

Areas of Expertise

•     Job seeking
•     Professional association leadership Advocacy on State and National levels
•     Working in an agency setting and supporting mft's in isolated practice settings, e.g., public mental health, etc.

Bio

Arnold Woodruff, currently the program manager for a series of community based programs in the Central Virginia region for individuals with serious mental illness, has been a Clinical Member of AAMFT since 1982. Nearly his entire professional career has been in public mental health and child welfare agencies with a couple of ventures into full-time or part-time private practice. Arnold received his M.S. degree from the COAMFTE approved program at Northern Illinois University and is also an Approved Supervisor. He has also served on the divisional boards in both Virginia and Illinois and is currently the Past President of the Virginia Association for Marriage and Family Therapy.

Karen Quek, Ph.D.

Areas of Expertise

•     Gender Issues in Couples Relationships
•     Cross-cultural Couple and Family Studies
•     Multicultural Competence in Clinical Practice
•     Supervision Development of the Self-of-the-Therapist

Bio

Karen Quek, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the Couple and Family Therapy Program at Alliant International University. She has a PhD in marital and family therapy, and has achieved national “Approved Supervisor” status of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, and MFT licensures in both California and Washington states. Karen has been providing therapy for individuals, couples and families from diverse background and experiences for the last 20 years. Her clinical and research interests are related to cultural sensitivity supervision and training, couples’ process and power, and gender construction. Specifically, her longitudinal study on Singapore couples’ relationships examines the interplay of various diversity constructs in the context of evolving societal changes. Her research data includes Greek couples from Athens, Greece; Singaporean couples from Singapore; Asian American couples from the US and Korean fathers from Seoul, Korea. Karen has published several articles using qualitative and quantitative data. Her chapter titled “We” Consciousness: Creating Equality in Collectivist Culture” was published in “Couples, Gender, & Power: Creating Change in Intimate Relationships” edited by Carmen Knudson-Martin and Anne Mahoney. She co-wrote a chapter on “Culturally Sensitive Supervisory Practices in a Chinese Context” in the Chinese translation of T. Todd and C. Storm, (2011) The Complete Systemic Supervisor:  Philosophy, Context, and Pragmatics, Taipei, Taiwan. An article on “Chinese Values in Supervisory Discourse: Implications for Culturally Sensitive Practices” was recently published in the Contemporary Family Therapy (2012). A significant effort is also devoted to presentations at international, national, and local conferences on issues related to multiculturalism, internationalism, couple relationships and mentoring. She continues to serve as a peer-reviewer on several journals including journal of Marriage and the Family, Journal of Marriage and Family Therapy, Journal of Family Issues, Journal of Social and Personal Relationship, just to name a few. She also serves as a Content Expert & AMFTRB Task Force Member with the Association of Marital and Family Therapy Regulatory Board.

Mary Sue Green, Ph.D.

Areas of Expertise

•     Research Design
•     Professional association leadership

Bio

My background is in couple and family therapy, as well as human development. I am currently licensed as a LMFT in Texas and Iowa. In addition, I have the AAMFT-approved Supervisor designation and am a board approved supervisor in Texas. My clinical experience spans the substance abuse field, adult chronic mental illness, and childhood behavioral and mental health issues. I have provided services to a variety of underserved populations from diverse cultures and backgrounds.

As a faculty member and clinical supervisor, I believe that therapists need to be cognizant of what they bring to the therapeutic relationship that could influence therapeutic outcomes. From that position, I have been involved in research on communication and decision making in heterosexual couples and, most recently, I was the principal investigator for a funded project that explored communication and decision making in same-sex relationships. I have been successful in procuring small internal grants to explore family therapists' comfort working with sexual minority couples and families and expanded on that research to include the influence of therapist religiosity on comfort working with sexually diverse clientele. I successfully completed a project on the influences on a common experience of therapy from the perspective of lesbian couples and their therapists and expanded to a funded study on the graduate school experience of lesbian and gay male therapists. In addition, a national organization's research award allowed me the opportunity to explore the extent to which clinical supervisors in couple and family therapy programs attend to diversity in clinical supervision from the perspective of supervisors and supervisees and the influence of that attention on learning outcomes and satisfaction with clinical supervision. I also co-investigated the silence surrounding transgender issues in the family therapy field by co-conducting a content analysis of family therapy journals and addressed the lack of research and knowledge and the continued silencing about this marginalized population. An external grant from the Williams Institute allowed my colleagues and I to explore the relationships of same-sex couples who chose to marry in the state of Iowa after it became legal in 2009 utilizing a mixed-methods paradigm. Additionally, I have conducted research and published on the topic of mentoring in the family therapy field and was, in fact, honored with a Research Mentoring Award from the Dean of the College of Professional Education at Texas Woman's University (TWU). I have utilized both quantitative and qualitative research designs and posit that the methodology is influenced by the research questions being asked.

My primary teaching focus is the core curriculum in family therapy; however, I have also been fortunate to be able to teach across the curriculum in our department and that includes teaching research methods and doctoral level courses in theory building (the philosophy of science) and a readings class that covers classic and contemporary material in the family sciences field (e.g. family therapy, family studies, and child/adolescent development and early education).

As faculty, I have had the opportunity to serve on dissertation committees and am currently advising a dissertation and several theses. Although I am fairly new to chairing dissertations and theses, I have a proven publication record that speaks for itself. Finally, I serve as the advisor for the TWU Student Association for Marriage and Family Therapy and truly believe that those of us who go before have a responsibility to mentor those who follow. In summary, I have demonstrated a record of successful and productive research projects from small internal and external grants, I truly believe in the mentorship process, and I would be honored to have the opportunity to mentor a student in their journey to contributing to the knowledge base in regard to underserved, diverse populations.

Melissa Lewis, Ph.D.

Bio

My name is Melissa Lewis and I am a Visiting Professor at the University of Akron in the department of counseling and I teach both masters and doctoral level Marriage and Family Therapy students. I am passionate about teaching the next generation of clinicians and researchers in this field and have taught practicum, diversity and ethics courses in MFT. I am a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, as well as an Approved AAMFT Supervisor. I am a recent graduate of East Carolina University in the Medical Family Therapy Program which is a rigorous research program with over 50% of the course load dedicated to research literature, method, design, and analysis regarding biological, psychological and social indicators of health, illness, loss, trauma in the context of individual's and their family, community, and medical system. My research focus is on the biopsychosocial health components that lead to health risk and resiliency for high need and low resource families and communities. I have done research specifically with military couples and Native American communities to this end.

I recently published a literature review regarding the biopsychosocial health of military couples in Contemporary Family Therapy and presented results of a larger project at the AAMFT annual conference (2012). This project is based on my interest in couple's health as measured by biological (heart rate variability), psychological (alcohol use, depression) and relational assessment (marital satisfaction) given that stress exposure and response may be significant to understanding health in the military. This effectiveness study follows a longitudinal experimental design and uses statistical modeling to analyze the dyadic data. Integrated care (Medical Family Therapist paired with a physician) is being assessed with military couples' for behavioral and physical health status improvement. My role on this Depart of Defense funded project is as a sub-investigator. In this role I created protocol, a research manual, coordinated the research team and completed fidelity checks, data collection, collaborated with military professionals, and evaluated thesis projects.

In addition, I have presented at several national conferences in 2012 on the state of integrated care in Native American communities. In this research my colleagues and I are working to complete literature reviews and phone interviews with healthcare professionals in an attempt to gain information on what makes for a successful integrated care intervention in Native American communities so they can be implemented successfully (by reducing biopsychosocial health disparities) in the future.

I have experience as a primary investigator and as a research team member on several other research projects both qualitative and quantitative in nature. My research passion lies within many of the projects I am currently involved with. Specifically, I am interested in the systemic experience of stress and the connection to health functioning. Specifically, the social influences (stress or trauma experienced in the social environment) on health can be profound in relation to health-related behaviors and resiliency health risks. Further, exposures to socio-cultural and environmental processes result in health disparities that are passed down to other community and family members through epigenetic processes. I will continue to explore these relationships in an attempt to unfold resiliency processes and provide effective treatment to groups that experience health disparities in my future research.

Tim Nelson, Ph.D.

Areas of Expertise

• Evidence based practices with disadvantaged groups
• Job seeking
• Professional association leadership

Bio

My name is Tim Nelson.  I have a Ph.D. in Child Development and Family Studies from Purdue University.  I also have a Master's degree in Human Development and Family Studies from Colorado State University.  Both programs were CO-AMFTE accredited when I attended them.  I currently serve as a faculty member and am Clinical Director with the Friends University Master of Science Program in Family Therapy in Lenexa, Kansas.  I have been a licensed clinician since 1999 as a Clinical Marriage and Family Therapist.  I am an Approved Supervisor with the AAMFT.  As you will note from my vitae, I have extensive teaching experience.  However, I am far less substantive in the realm of professional publications.    

I am interested to serve in this capacity because I believe it is my responsibility as a Caucasian, male to serve and mentor those who are different from me.  I believe, as a white male, that I am privileged in many arenas.  Many of these privileges I did not earn.  Yet, I benefit from them.  I take it as my responsibility to do whatever I can to share my privileges with others who are different from me.  And, to teach other interested whites about our often unrecognized and complicit participation in structures and systems that exploit those who are not white and male.