Steven Lopez

University of Southern California

A professor of psychology and social work at the University of Southern California, Steven Lopez has demonstrated a passion for studying cultural and diversity issues with a particular emphasis on individuals suffering from severe mental illness. Lopez’s research has shown how sociocultural processes can shape the way family caregiving affects the course of illness. He found, for example, that the absence of family warmth, rather than the presence of criticism, predicted relapse in Mexican Americans with schizophrenia. Lopez also has led efforts to increase mental health literacy within the Latinx community. Using both single group and randomized controlled designs, he has demonstrated that a psychosis literacy educational program he developed for Spanish-speaking communities improves participants’ knowledge of psychotic symptoms, their ability to identify such symptoms in a hypothetical story, and the likelihood that they would recommend professional help for a given case. Lopez’s vital work has enhanced knowledge around diversity issues and has offered clear models to help reduce disparities in mental health care for minoritized communities and other disadvantaged communities.  

Margaret Beale Spencer

University of Chicago

Margaret Beale Spencer is the Distinguished Service Professor, Emerita at the University of Chicago. Her momentous work has focused on the resiliency, identity, and competence formation processes of America’s diverse youth of color as well as European American youth. Spencer’s research has illuminated the emerging capacity of young people to seek healthy outcomes and constructive coping methods under generally unacknowledged and highly stressful conditions. She laid the foundation for demonstrating resilience in Black populations who face adverse systematic circumstances and the development of positive group identity in response to the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement. In the 1990s, she developed the Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory (PVEST), incorporating culture, development, and contextual perspectives as a framework for studying marginalized and privileged individuals. The framing guides her scholarship and provides an identity-focused cultural ecological perspective, which recognizes the universality of vulnerability as diverse humans situated both in the United States and abroad. Spencer’s work moved scholars toward conducting research that centered on African American children rather than the previous standard of White, middle-class participants. Her pivotal research continues to inform school practices and youth programs and is used widely by those serving youth across a range of settings.