Juan Sebastian Castillo Perez

Juan Sebastian is an ASCP Ph.D. student Dr. Stephens’ Health Disparities and Cultural identities (HDCI) Research Lab. Over the past decade of teaching, research, and professional practice in Colombia, Juan Sebastian has combined counseling and research approaches to focus on well-being and its relationship with familiar, cultural, and social environments, precisely in interventions targeting different forms of violence across contexts, such as IPV, domestic violence and community violence. Specifically, he has focused on the intersections between mental health, socioeconomic status, and culture and how they inform the risk of different criminal forms of violence, including victimization. He has worked predominantly in socio-economically vulnerable populations, such as (ex)combatants of the Colombian internal war and their families; internally displaced people; homeless adolescents; pregnant teenagers; and (physically and sexually) victimized children and youth, both in rural and urban contexts of Colombia.