Mariana Juras, Ph.D.

Dr. Juras is a psychologist and marriage and family therapist from Brazil. She came to the US in 2015 as a visiting research scholar in the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri.

She taught for three years in the Psychology Department at Eastern Illinois University and its Clinical Psychology Master of Arts program, and for one year at Florida Gulf Coast University, where she taught clinical psychology courses and mentored undergraduate and graduate students in research, thesis, and internship.

Dr. Juras is committed to the scientist-practitioner-advocate model, in her teaching, research, service and clinical practice, where research is informed by clinical practice, clinical practice is informed by science and all these capacities must address social transformation within the social justice approach.

Therefore, Dr. Juras research interests are broad and her scholar agenda includes family matters on clinical and forensic psychology. She is also particularly interested in mixed-method research and believes that the integration of quantitative and qualitative data is particularly important to inform best practices in psychology, with participant/client-centered orientation.

Her previous and current studies have particularly focused on topics of divorce, remarriage, domestic violence, parenting interventions, and multicultural differences. Currently, she has ongoing mixed-methods research projects in collaboration with scholars from the US, Mexico and Brazil, and with former and current graduate students.

Her future research agenda will include cross-cultural studies in child-custody evaluations, which aim to inform multicultural competencies in the context of forensic psychology.

She currently serves as a board director of the American Family Therapy Academy, which is an organization devoted to social justice practices with families and communities.