Peter Guarnaccia (Ph. D., Medical Anthropology, Connecticut, 1984; Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, 1984-1986) is Professor in the Department of Human Ecology at the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences and Investigator at the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. From 1996-2008, he was Faculty Director of Project L/EARN, a NIMH-funded mental health research training program for undergraduates from underrepresented background. His research interests include cross-cultural patterns of psychiatric disorders, cultural competence in mental health organizations, and processes of cultural and health change among Latino immigrants.
He was a member of the NIMH Task Force on Culture and Diagnosis which contributed cultural material and guidelines to DSM-IV. He was also a member of the NIMH National Advisory Mental Health Council's Behavioral Science Workgroup recommending future directions for translating behavioral sciences research into public mental health outcomes. He was one of the collaborators on a SAMHSA-funded project, entitled “Crossing Cultural Bridges,” to develop a cultural competence training program for mental health professionals. He continues to do cultural competence training for mental health professionals through the Cultural Competence Training Center at the Multicultural Family Institute under a grant from the NJ Division of Mental Health Services.
His current research examines mental health among Latino individuals in the U.S. and in Puerto Rico. He is working on the National Latino and Asian American Study funded by NIMH and based at the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research at the Cambridge Health Alliance. He has also collaborated on several projects at the Behavioral Sciences Research Institute at the University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus. Recent publications include “Assessing Diversity among Latinos: Results from the NLAAS” published in the Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences (30:357-378, 2007, with Igda Martinez-Pincay, Margarita Alegria, Patrick Shrout, Roberto Lewis-Fernandez, and Glorisa Canino) and “Ataque de Nervios as a Marker of Social and Psychiatric Vulnerability: Results from the NLASS” forthcoming in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry (with Roberto Lewis-Fernandez, Igda Martinez, Patrick Shrout, Jing Guo, Maria Torres, Glorisa Canino and Margarita Alegria). He was Associate Editor of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry from 2000-2002 and Co-Editor-in-Chief from 2002-2007. He is co-editor, with Keith Wailoo and Julie Livingston, of A Death Retold: Jesica Santillan, the Bungled Transplant, and Paradoxes of Medical Citizenship, published by the University of North Carolina Press (2006). He is the narrator of a recent DVD entitled “No Soy Loco/I’m Not Crazy: Understanding the Stigma of Mental Illness among Latinos” (2009).