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. She conceptualizes mental health as a public health issue. Her overarching goal is to help close the research to practice to policy gaps in pursuit of equitable mental health care in publicly-funded settings. Dr. Wright is proud of being a mixed daughter of immigrants (El Salvador & Belize), bilingual (English/Spanish), and a first-generation college student. 

She is currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the University of Oregon’s Psychology Department in the Clinical area. In 2026, she was selected to be an advisor on Oregon Department of Education’s Immigrant/Refugee Student Success Advisory Group. Nationally, she is the chair of the Association of Behavior and Cognitive Therapies Latinx Special Interest Group (2026-2028).

Dr. Wright prioritizes community partnerships and scalability. She leverages quantitative and qualitative methodologies and has published dozens of articles 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

Her research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Education and Training Background

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 Health Policy and Management Department at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and RAND (2022-2024).