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Peter Guarnaccia, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Cook Office Building, Room 206
848-932-9231
gortch@sebs.rutgers.edu
Biography
Peter Guarnaccia, Professor I, has contributed to research, conceptual development and applied applications to many of the important areas in culture and mental health research: cultural analyses of psychiatric epidemiology; the integration of cultural syndromes into psychiatric epidemiology and clinical research; family caregiving for a relative with serious mental illness; cultural competence in mental health services research; and processes of culture change among immigrants. To carry out this research program, he employs a creative tension between in-depth, ethnographic studies of individuals in a family context and broader community and national studies employing epidemiological approaches. He was Associate Editor of “Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry” from 2000-2004 and Co-Editor-in-Chief from 2004-2007. He co-edited “A Death Retold: Jesica Santillan, the Bungled Transplant, and Paradoxes of Medical Citizenship,” published by the University of North Carolina Press (2006), with Keith Wailoo and Julie Livingston. One current area of publication involves studies of mental health among Latino individuals in the U.S. as part of the National Latino and Asian American (NLAAS) mental health study funded by National Institute of Mental Health. He has just been funded by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to carry out a study of “What Makes Acculturation Successful? A Study of Immigrant Students at Rutgers.” From 1996-2008, he was the Faculty Director of Project L/EARN, a research training program in mental health research for underrepresented undergraduates. Project L/EARN was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health from 1998-2008. He currently is Faculty Director of an International Service Learning Program on “Community Health in Oaxaca, Mexico.”