Ana Carolina Florence, PhD

For the past decade, Dr. Florence has been committed to addressing the challenges faced by individuals with serious mental illnesses, poverty, homelessness, exposure to violence, and other adversities both in Brazil and the United States. Dr. Florence, a clinical psychologist, completed her MS at the University of Sao Paulo, her PhD at the State University of Sao Paulo, and a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University. She brings a unique combination of clinical, policy, and research experience locally, regionally, and internationally in the prevention and treatment of serious mental illness, both emerging and established.

At Columbia University, Dr. Florence is the project manager for the Early Psychosis Intervention Network NIMH grant (PIs Dixon; Bello), which aims to establish a learning healthcare system for early psychosis treatment on a national scale. Dr. Florence was awarded a New York State Policy Scholar grant to examine the experiences of young adults experiencing early psychosis enrolled in coordinated specialty care in New York State.

Dr. Florence is a founding member of the Centre for Mental Health, Human Rights, and Social Justice at the University of Essex and has established a partnership with the Ministry of Human Rights and Citizenship in Brazil to provide technical assistance and consultations in the development of a national policy to implement Housing First in the country. Her real-world experiences set the stage for her research agenda seeking to better understand the social drivers of mental illness and support the implementation and scale-up of interventions that target modifiable neighborhood, family, economic, and other community-based factors in vulnerable communities in the US and in low and middle-income countries. Dr. Florence is committed to the involvement and leadership of individuals with lived experience of psychiatric diagnoses in research about them.