Violeta Rodriguez Palacios

Dr. Rodriguez is accepting applications from prospective graduate students interested in joining her lab as a primary research advisor beginning in Fall 2027. She will consider applicants to both the Ph.D. program in Clinical-Community Psychology and the M.S. program in Psychological Science. 

I wrote a piece for Nature Careers on application/interview advice. Please read it here.

Please note that although Dr. Rodriguez holds an appointment at the University of Illinois Chicago, she is only able to recruit graduate students through the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Violeta J. Rodríguez directs a multidisciplinary research program focused on improving the measurement, understanding, and promotion of mental and behavioral health among children, adolescents, caregivers, and families. Her work integrates developmental psychology, clinical science, psychometrics, artificial intelligence, and implementation science to address pressing public health challenges and reduce health inequities across diverse populations.

A central focus of her research is advancing measurement science. Her lab develops innovative approaches for assessing parenting, family functioning, mental health, well-being, and health-related behaviors across diverse cultural and social contexts. By combining psychometric methods, qualitative research, ecological momentary assessment, intensive longitudinal designs, and multimodal data collection, her work seeks to create more precise, equitable, and contextually valid tools for research and practice.

Dr. Rodríguez's research also examines the developmental, social, and contextual processes that shape mental health and well-being. Her studies investigate how parenting, stigma, discrimination, emotion regulation, family relationships, sleep, and other behavioral health factors influence outcomes among youth and families. Much of this work focuses on populations that have historically been underrepresented in psychological research, including racially and ethnically minoritized communities, immigrant families, LGBTQIA+ populations, Spanish-speaking communities, and families affected by chronic illness.

An emerging area of her research explores how artificial intelligence can enhance mental health assessment, intervention, and implementation. Her lab collaborates with researchers in human–AI interaction, natural language processing, computational social science, and health informatics to develop ethical, culturally responsive AI tools that support caregivers, improve behavioral health monitoring, and expand access to evidence-based resources. These efforts include ParentPal, an AI-enabled platform designed to support parenting, caregiver well-being, and personalized family interventions.

Methodologically, Dr. Rodríguez's work spans psychometric modeling, item response theory, explanatory IRT, latent variable modeling, machine learning, natural language processing, network analysis, ecological momentary assessment, mixed methods research, and implementation science frameworks. By integrating advances across psychology, data science, and artificial intelligence, her research aims to create scalable solutions that improve mental health and well-being for families worldwide.