Ester Shapiro

Dr. Shapiro, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and Research Associate at the Mauricio Gaston Institute for Latino Public Policy and Community Development. As Practicum Coordinator for the Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program at Umass Boston, she has helped found a clinical training program dedicated to delivering urban services from cultural, developmental, interdisciplinary and health promotion perspectives. She is the author of Grief as a Family Process: A Developmental Approach to Clinical Practice (Guilford, 1994)ON SALE NOW!; coordinating editor of Nuestros Cuerpos Nuestras Vidas (Ballantine, 1999), the Spanish language translation and cultural adaptation of Our Bodies, Ourselves for use in Latin America and by U.S. Latinas; and co-editor with Murray Meisels of Tradition and Innovation in Psychoanalytic Education (Erlbaum 1990). She has written professional articles on family development, culture and grief, resilience among urban immigrant adolescents and families, and multi-method program evaluation based on a sociocultural developmental model. She has also written personal and family narratives about the impact of multiple immigrations on intergenerational relationships and shared development in her Cuban Eastern European Jewish family. Dr. Shapiro has collaborated in founding interdisciplinary clinical training programs in psychoanalysis, family therapy, grief therapy, and culturally sensitive therapy. She helped design the University of Massachusetts at Boston Latino Studies program, and is a member of its Advisory Board. Her teaching, clinical practice, supervision, research and public health consultations apply a social developmental and resilience-building approach to work with children, parents, families, and social systems.

Through her work at the Mauricio Gaston Institute and the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, she has been applying this social developmental approach to community health education initiatives. At the Gaston Institute, she has specialized in developing an approach to program design and evaluation in health and mental health which utilizes a social resource theoretical model and participatory methodology. This approach is dedicated to helping community and hospital based treatment and prevention programs serving Latinos and other diverse communities actualize their own goals. She has worked with the BWHBC since 1994, first as a participant in the Latin American Adaptation and since 1995 as a Board Member. Her projects in the area of child, maternal and family health include collaborative research and writing on culturally competent maternal substance abuse treatment and domestic violence treatment and prevention; prevention programs for young women and men targeting teen pregnancy, smoking prevention and substance abuse prevention; design and evaluation of support services for pregnancy and early post-partum transitions for women and their families at high medical and social risk, including AIDS diagnosed, maternal PKU, and exposure to poverty and racism.

Office: McCormick Hall, 4th floor, room 210

Email: ester.shapiro@umb.edu
Phone: 617-287-6360

Office Hours: MW 2:30-4:00