Fiorella Carlos Chavez

Dr. Fiorella L. Carlos Chavez is an Assistant Professor in Community Health at the Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation at Arizona State University. She earned her Ph.D. in Human Development from Florida State University in 2018 and in 2021, she completed a competitive postdoctoral fellowship in Human Development and Family Science at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Dr. Chavez has served as a principal and coinvestigator on privately and state funded research grants, and is a consulting editor of Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, Journal of Research on Adolescence, and Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology. She is a pioneer in the study of unaccompanied migrant farmworker youth’s health and development using qualitative and mixed-methodologies. Her work aims to understand the mental health implications of work-life stressors and migration decisions among Latin American migrant youth in U.S. agriculture.

Dr. Chavez has a strong affinity to Youth’s International Migration from Latin American to the United States by virtue of her international upbringing in Peru, coming of age in Virginia and California, migrating to Florida and Missouri to pursue higher education and work, and residing in Phoenix, Arizona since 2021. In 2003-2007, She was a Fulbright undergraduate scholar to Virginia, U.S., where she pursued an undergraduate education in Economics & Business Administration, learned about domestic and international migrant work as a family/household strategy to diversify sources of income and to provide a better future/education to their children (i.e., social mobility). In 2016, she received both, a fellowship and an initiative’s grant from Kappa Omicron Nu (KON), the Honor Society for the Human Sciences to study ‘The Health and Cultural Challenges of Male Latino/Hispanic Emancipated Migrant Farmworker Youth (EMY) in the U.S.’

In 2018, she was one of four postdoctoral fellows (out of a pool of 160 applicants) to be selected for the Preparing Future Faculty Postdoctoral program for Faculty Diversity at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Her research was recognized twice for excellence by the Society for Research in Child Development [SRCD] and the SRCD Latino Caucus who each awarded their 2019 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. In 2019, she was awarded one of 14 Small Grants Program (out of a pool of 126 applications) for Early Career Scholars from the Society for Research on Child Development (SRCD) to conduct a mixed-methods exploration of the Adult-Like Behaviors and Experiences of Latino/a Emancipated Migrant Youth in their Origin Countries and in the U.S. In 2020, Chavez received a COVID-19 Needs Assessment grant from the National Urban League; focusing on the effects of stress and household food insecurity on Latinx youth and essential workers’ mental health. She served for three years (from 2020 to 2022) as the National Latinx Psychological Association (NLPA) Newsletter Editor.