Mona Amer serves as a Research Associate at The Family & Youth Institute. She completed her PhD in Clinical Psychology from The University of Toledo, Ohio, and her Pre-doctoral and Post-doctoral fellowships in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut. She is an Associate Professor of Psychology at The American University in Cairo, Egypt.
Dr. Amer’s primary research and policy interests are in ethnic/ racial disparities in behavioral health, with a specialization in the Arab and Muslim minorities. Within that framework she is interested in how immigration and acculturation affect mental health, mental illness stigma and other cultural barriers to service utilization for diverse racial/ethnic groups, and the design of culturally valid research measures.
She has developed cultural competency training programs for practitioners working with Muslim and Arab clients, and served on the Steward Group of the National Network to Eliminate Disparities, U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Dr. Amer has over 30 publications including a paper on conducting research with Muslims that was published in the American Psychologist and two books: Counseling Muslims: Handbook of Mental Health Issues and Interventions and the newly released Handbook of Arab American Psychology. She is moreover the former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Muslim Mental Health.