Rewriting the script for research that heals.

Dr. Flores’ research seeks to transform how we understand, measure, and intervene in serious mental illness — with a focus on Latine individuals living with schizophrenia. Through community-rooted, equity-centered inquiry, her work interrogates the cultural validity of social cognition measures and challenges systems that render marginalized populations invisible in mental health research.

She leads studies that explore the intersection of social cognition, structural inequities, and recovery, applying advanced quantitative methods to ask deeper questions: Whose functioning is being measured? What knowledge is being privileged? And most importantly, What would culturally congruent, healing-centered research look like?

Dr. Flores is committed to building a research agenda that is not only NIH-competitive, but also community-accountable — with methodologies that honor the stories behind the statistics.

Current projects include:

• A scoping review on social cognition and social networks in serious mental illness

• A longitudinal analysis of personal recovery as a mediator in quality of life outcomes

• Cross-cultural psychometric validation of gold-standard measures among Latine individuals with schizophrenia