Laura Patricia Minero, PhD
(she/her/ella)
Dr. Minero is the second-year LGBTQ Youth Trauma, Resilience and Community Education Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Division of Population Behavioral Health. She provides LGBTQ-affirming care to youth, young adults, and their families and also supervises advanced trainees on the provision of clinical care through the EMPWR program. She is bilingual in English/Spanish.
Dr. Minero has experience working with LGBTQ, Latinx, and immigrant populations in clinical, advocacy, supervisory and teaching settings. As a social justice researcher, Dr. Minero examines how policy impacts the lived experiences of undocumented immigrant and LGBTQ+ communities to identify how to better-serve these populations through more inclusive implementation of policy and distribution of services. Dr. Minero worked on national, consensus scientific studies that were utilized to influence and inform policy as a 2019 Christine Mirzayan Science Policy and Technology Fellow with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Her research on undocumented and asylum-seeking transgender immigrants and their lived experience at the intersection of gender identity, race, citizenship status, and mental health has been supported by Ford Foundation Predoctoral and Dissertation fellowship awards. Her dissertation which critiqued U.S. Detention and Asylum-seeking processes for incurring trauma and psychological sequala on Latinx, transgender immigrants earned her APA’s Division 44’s (Society for the Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity) 2020 Transgender People and Gender Diversity Research Award.
Dr. Minero graduated with her PhD in Counseling Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She completed her Predoctoral Clinical Psychology internship at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior Stress, Trauma and Resilience clinic where she provided bilingual and bicultural, trauma-informed, evidenced-based treatment (e.g., FOCUS, CPT) to children, youth, and families experiencing various forms of medical, complex, and interpersonal trauma.