About Us

Welcome to the RAÍCES MATTERS Lab! We are an interdisciplinary team collaborating with community members with the goal of making mental health interventions more accessible through innovative, non-traditional service models that can better support youth and families who are least likely to access care.

Dr. Stiles-Shields leads the Making Accessible Tech for Teens Equitably, Responsively, and Safely (MATTERS) arm of the lab, with a focus on digital mental health interventions. Our goal is to partner with pediatric patients—primarily teens and their families—to make digital mental health tools work better and be more accessible to them in their daily lives.

Dr. Gustafson leads the Research on Access and Ínnovación for Community-based Empowerment in Salud mental (RAÍCES) arm of the lab, with a focus on community health worker (CHW) led mental health interventions. Our goal is to partner with community members as local experts with lived experience – such as CHWs, promotoras de salud, lay health workers, etc. – and give them the tools to expand access to contextually and culturally relevant mental health supports for communities that are underserved in standard models of mental healthcare.

In recognition of the systemic barriers that mental health services can create, perpetuate, or exacerbate for youth and families in trying to access the supports they need to improve their mental health and wellness, we focus on the use of community-engaged research practices, Human-Centered Design and Implementation Science methodologies, and an anti-racism lens to ultimately work with and for youth and parents in the spaces that they regularly visit (e.g., primary care, school, community space).