Dr. Yolanda Vasquez-Salgado is an Associate Professor of Psychology at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). She earned her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology, with a minor in Culture, Brain and Development, from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her program of research utilizes a variety of methodological techniques (qualitative, survey, experiment, assessment of biological and clinical markers of health) to investigate the role of cultural mismatch in historically marginalized students’ health and academic outcomes during the transition to college.
In her early career, Dr. Vasquez-Salgado has published a total of 20 scholarly works (18 peer-reviewed articles, 1 chapter, 1 protocol). Her research is currently being funded by an R16 SuRE First Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and has received previous support from sources such, NIH BUILD PODER, the USC/UCLA Biodemography Center for Population Health, the UCLA Institute of American Cultures, the Ford Foundation, and the American Psychological Association. In 2022, Dr. Vasquez-Salgado received CSUN’s High Impact Innovation Award for saliva collection protocols she developed, which enabled her and her colleagues at the Health Equity Research and Education (HERE) Center to continue their work during pandemic conditions. These protocols informed campus-wide policies for biospecimen research. In addition, her findings surrounding cultural mismatch are actively shaping interventions at the community college and university levels – through courses and programs – designed to promote health and educational equity for historically marginalized students pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering, math and medicine.
Dr. Vasquez-Salgado has mentored dozens of undergraduate and graduate students, many of whom have gone on to graduate programs. Training, mentoring, and inspiring the next generation of scientists is her life purpose, and she is passionately committed to this work.