Carolina Vélez-Grau is an NYU Provost’s Postdoctoral Faculty Fellow. She received her PhD and MSW degrees from Columbia University School of Social Work, and the equivalent of her BS and MS degrees in Psychology, from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Facultad de Psicología, Bogotá, Colombia, her native country. She is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW).
Dr. Vélez-Grau’s research interests are suicide prevention and intervention development, adolescents’ mental health; implementation and evaluation of mental health services for minority adolescents; direct social work practice; quantitative and mixed-methods; and Community- Based Participatory Research (CBPR).
While completing her PhD, Dr. Vélez-Grau was a graduate research assistant on a number of National Institutes of Health research project grants. She was a consultant for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in a community-based clinical service pilot that used an online platform to provide, in Spanish, culture-specific psychosocial support to mothers of children and adolescents who experienced toxic stress due to their migratory status. She was also a trainer in qualitative analysis at Columbia University Global Health Research Center of Central Asia and an adjunct lecturer in advanced clinical practice at Columbia University School of Social Work.
Prior to pursuing her PhD, Dr. Vélez-Grau was a senior social worker and program leader in the Home-Based Crisis Intervention Program (HBCI) at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of New York-Presbyterian/ Columbia University Medical Center.