I am a bi-lingual and bicultural, Latino, clinical psychologist and researcher at the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies and the Anxiety Disorders Clinic at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology (in Psychiatry) at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. My main areas of work are in HIV prevention and in the development of culturally congruent mental health treatment approaches. Although I am now mostly involved in research, I have over 10 years of experience in providing individual and group psychotherapy as part of the Department of Psychiatry at the Columbia University Medical Center. My work in MI has focused on developing MI interventions, usually in combination with other treatment approaches, such as medication management and cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, as part of research studies funded by the National Institutes of Health. For these projects, I have developed the interventions, as well as trained and coached the clinicians providing the interventions. I conduct MI training in English and Spanish, and have provided training in the U.S. and in Latin America. For the past two years, I was also selected to be part of the training teams to deliver the MINT TNTs, which have been among my most rewarding and fulfilling professional experiences.
