María Cecilia is a visiting fellow at the LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre and an assistant professor at the School of Government at Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia, where she teaches qualitative methods. She is also a research officer for the project “Pathways to reconciliation in Colombia” at the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at the LSE.

Maria Cecilia is a socio-cultural psychologist. Her research focuses on adolescent development under contextual adversity with a focus on the group and cultural level dynamics that shape both positive and negative psychological outcomes in these contexts. Her PhD project, completed at the LSE, focused on violent and non-violent socialisation processes amongst the young in Colombia. The research looked comparatively at resilient youth and gang-involved youth to identify the similarities and the differences between “positive” and “negative” youth groups, the key differences in moral reasoning about violence between members of these groups, and what works for violence prevention. To do this, she employed mixed methods, including in-depth interviews, participant observation, and surveys.

María Cecilia is a consultant for the World Health Organization and the World Bank, and has conducted mixed-methods research to evaluate the development process of global guidelines and the decision making process of health stakeholders at the global level. She has worked for several years doing research on the subjective experience of mental disorders by culturally diverse populations in the United States and has also researched the processes of identity formation, resilience, and moral reasoning among Afro-descendants and internally displaced young adults in Colombia, as well as undocumented young adults in the US.

She holds a master’s degree in the social sciences from the University of Chicago and a degree in clinical psychology from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.