Member Spotlight: 2025 Spence Awardee Juan Del Toro on Exploring Identity and Discrimination

2025 APS Janet Taylor Spence Award recipient Juan Del Toro is an assistant professor and developmental psychologist at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on how socialization, discrimination, and identity shape development across the lifespan. 

Learn more about Del Toro and the six other Spence Award recipients.

Asking questions from an early age 

On a personal note, I grew up identifying as low income, Brown, and gay. As a janitor supporting my family, I noticed stark discrepancies between our neighborhood close to the Chevron factory in Richmond, California, and the neighborhoods of offices we cleaned, including one in Sausalito. In addition to noting segregation at the intersection of race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status, my sexual orientation predisposed me to questions about sexuality and the degree to which my sexual interests reflected mainstream culture. Most folks could interpret my upbringing as one filled with challenges, but my social identities and the experiences tethered to them enabled me to think critically at an early age about how society functions and to even envision a world for nonmainstream children to grow up in and freely express themselves.  

Growing up, I was also exposed to limited career paths, as I was told from an early age that you could only be a doctor or a lawyer. Because I wanted to help people, I thought medicine would be an ideal career path.  

While I was premed in college, I met my first mentor, Dr. Desdamona “Desi” Rios. She shared with me that she received her doctoral degree in women’s studies and psychology, and I naïvely asked, “You can get your PhD in that?” She then talked about the work coming out of her lab. My naïve questions continued as I followed up and asked, “That’s a lab?” as my only exposure to labs was in my biology and chemistry classes. At the time, Desi was analyzing qualitative interviews she collected as part of her dissertation to understand the experiences and barriers among female faculty of color in STEM. After doing work with her for a semester as a research assistant and becoming fascinated with the topic, I remained in her lab for another 2.5 years. This period was a turning point in my life when I became motivated to pursue the research I conduct today.  

Hidden resilience 

There are two highlights of my work, and they both pertain to resilience among adolescents of color. In one of my lines of work, I’m working to illustrate that the intended resilience tied to messages that youth receive about their race/ethnicity (i.e., racial/ethnic socialization) may not always be apparent in psycho-social measures but rather in distal indicators of well-being that can be captured in biological indicators of their health. I have been calling this phenomenon “hidden resilience” because biomarker indicators of well-being are not visible to the naked eye but rather are hidden “underneath the skin.”  

In a second project, I have been working to illustrate that messages from different agents of racial/ethnic socialization do not carry equal value, but rather racial/ethnic socialization from teachers may instill adolescents with more resilience than that from other agents (e.g., parents, peers). As most readers may recall from their own upbringings, or even from witnessing their teenage children’s experiences, teenagers face a lot of pressure to be independent and autonomous outside the family, making them less inclined to want to listen and reach out to their parents for support. Instead, teenagers are more likely to lean on others, such as close adult figures in school, for support, and I’m finding that this support is promotive and protective in the context of racial/ethnic discrimination. 

Researching the spillover of discrimination 

Most of my work has focused on development among children who have experienced racial/ethnic discrimination, and I’m expanding this work to think about how discrimination and other forms of unfair treatment toward one individual can spill over to affect the well-being of a familiar partner (e.g., friends, siblings). For example, in one first-authored article in the American Psychologist, I found that police intrusion (e.g., stop-and-frisks, racial slurs) toward an adolescent was associated with increased defiant-related behaviors among their classmates—in fact, this relationship became stronger for adolescents who were more socially engaged with their classmates, and this relationship was partially mediated by youth’s trust in fair treatment from authority figures. Whereas most studies and theory describe how racism, sexism, and heterosexist stigma advantage some social groups (e.g., White people, men, and heterosexual individuals) and disadvantage others (e.g., Black people, women, and sexual minorities), I am expanding this work by illustrating how it overlooks the fact that individuals are embedded in relationships, implicating that discrimination is a bigger public health issue than we have documented, as it affects many people, above and beyond the victims of discrimination. 

Tips for young researchers 

Don’t forget that you are a scholar! When I was a student researcher, I often felt like I needed to be an “expert” on a topic and know the answers to everything. With that pressure, though, there comes little room for curiosity and to formulate interesting research questions. I encourage young student researchers to genuinely pose questions about things they do not know and want to learn. 

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