The Center for Advancing Racial-Ethnic Equity

Catherine serves as Project Manager for the Imagined Futures (IF) Project, a project sponsored by the Spencer Foundation that explores how family and community events influence how African American youth think about their future orientation.

Catherine Gonzalez is a Doctoral Candidate  in the Community Research and Action program, and is also completing a certificate in Latin American studies at Vanderbilt University. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology with departmental honors and a certificate in Children and Society from the University of Texas at Austin in 2019.

Catherine’s research has been largely inspired by the immigration experience and what this means for family functioning, parent-child relationships, and children’s academic and mental health outcomes. More specifically, she examines how sociocultural stressors filter through immigrant families, how parents and children interpret these stressors and how families cope accordingly. Her interests expand into preventive interventions, focusing on ways to transform systems and institutions to become more linguistically and culturally sensitive and reduce the occurrence of multiple disparities that disproportionately affect the everyday life experiences and opportunities for immigrant families. Finally, she views her work through an ecological lens by examining the intersection of systems and micro-level processes in immigrant families, such as cultural and strength-based assets, that can be harnessed to facilitate positive outcomes.