People

María E. Contreras Pérez, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University. She earned her PhD in Social Welfare from Florida International University, where she examined Motivational Interviewing outcomes among participants from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds. Her community-engaged research focuses on substance use, evidence-based interventions, and the mechanisms of behavioral change in Motivational Interviewing. Her prior work includes adapting and evaluating a brief substance use intervention for adolescents and contributing to intervention training for clinicians and educators in México and Colombia. At Rutgers, Dr. Contreras Pérez studies how and why behavioral interventions promote change, with the overarching goal of ensuring that the treatment strategies we use are culturally valid, relevant, acceptable, and effective, especially when they are implemented with participants from underrepresented groups.