Friday Fellow Feature: Alexa Riobueno-Naylor

Our Featured Fellow for July 2024 is Alexa Riobueno-Naylor (she/her). Alexa is a fifth-year PhD candidate in counseling psychology in the Department of Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology at Boston College, where she works with Dr. Betty S. Lai. Alexa is dedicated to supporting youth and families affected by disasters and other traumatic stressors through both research and clinical work. Her research spans psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and public health, and she has worked with clients in diverse treatment settings, including college counseling, schools, partial hospitalization, residential, and inpatient facilities. She is a dedicated mentor, passionate about supporting the development of the next generation of researchers. In recognition of her contributions to the field, she recently received the 2024 Council of Counseling Psychology Training Program Outstanding Graduate Student Award.

Alexa’s dissertation is a rigorous evaluation of the impact of multiple disaster exposures on youth mental health. She is building a large, integrative data set and employing advanced statistical modeling techniques. Her study is particularly important in the age of climate change, as it investigates how youth mental health is affected by the increasing frequency and severity of disasters. Given the differential impact of climate disasters on marginalized communities, her research aims to understand how such events differentially affect children based on race, class, and geography. To support the completion of her dissertation research, Alexa received the Boston College Lynch School of Education Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Alexa joined the Bill Anderson Fund (BAF) in 2020 and served on the communications committee from 2020-2022 and the culture committee from 2023 to the present. She was selected as a BAF Lightning Talks presenter at the 2021 Hazards Workshop, where she presented her research on the impact of social determinants of health and COVID-19 stressors on depression and anxiety outcomes in adults. This research led to a first-author manuscript accepted by the journal Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness.

Alexa plans to defend her dissertation in spring 2025 and will be applying to APPIC internship sites in clinical psychology in fall 2024. During her internship, she looks forward to honing her clinical and research expertise. As a psychologist, she hopes to focus her research on shedding light on the impact of systemic inequities on mental health outcomes for youth and developing evidence-based solutions to address these disparities.

RESEARCH INTERESTS: Cumulative disaster exposure, youth mental health, trauma, depression, suicidality, social determinants of health, advanced quantitative analysis.