Meet the Director

Blanche Wright, PhD

Preferred name in Spanish: Blanca

(she/her/ella)
  • Hometown: Los Angeles, CA
  • Favorite part of living in Eugene/Oregon: How special and welcomed the community has made me feel, and of course all of the cascadas across the state!

Dr. Blanche Wright is a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in supporting the mental health needs of minoritized communities and the systems and providers who serve them. Her overarching goal is to help close the research to practice to policy gaps in pursuit of equitable mental health care. Dr. Wright is proud of being a mixed daughter of immigrants (El Salvador & Belize), bilingual (English/Spanish), and a first-generation college student. 

Dr. Wright prioritizes community partnerships and scalability. She leverages quantitative and qualitative methodologies to investigate three streams of research: 

  1. Identifying elevated risk in youth mental health status, and understanding strengths and stressors that shape the mental health of youth from low-income, ethnoracial minoritized and/or immigrant family backgrounds 
  1. Strengthening youth and parent engagement within the delivery of evidence-based practices with specialized foci on Latinx/Latiné families and community-based providers 
  1. Exploring pathways to integrate research into the mental health policymaking process and optimizing government financing strategies to help sustain evidence-based practices in publicly-funded services. 

Dr. Wright is a triple Bruin as she received her B.S. in Psychobiology, and her  M.A/Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology with a minor concentration in Quantitative Psychology from UCLA. Unique for a clinical psychologist, she has pursued and obtained specialized training in public health and policy as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholar (2016-2021), a clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School (2021-2022) and an AHRQ-funded T32 Postdoctoral Fellow in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health-Health Policy and Management Department and the RAND Corporation (2022-2024). Her research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.