About Debi

Born in Havana, Cuba, Debi and her family, moved to the United States  when she was a pre-teen after spending nearly 3 years in Mexico. She completed middle and high school in South Florida and earned a Summa Cum Laude Associates in Arts degree from Miami Dade College prior to her high school graduation. Debi graduated from Harvard University in 2021, where she was awarded a Cum Laude bachelor's degree with Highest Honors in Sociology with a Secondary in Government and a citation in Portuguese. She pursued a quantitative track and earned a certificate of Latin American and Iberian Studies. 

Debi's upbringing fostered a deep interest in understanding human behavior from multiple perspectives. She was fortunate to do just that at Harvard, where she pursued a range of interdisciplinary courses and research projects. During this time, Debi was also a tutor and education advisor through Harvard Student Agencies, a research assistant at the Kennedy School's Student Social Support Lab, and a Learning Lab Fellow at the Derek Bok Center for Teaching & Learning. She served as a mentor through the DRCLAS MLAB program, PBHA South Boston Big Sib, and Christian Impact. ​Through the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Debi obtained a 2-month fellowship with America Solidaria Peru in 2018 through which she worked alongside clinical psychologists, educators, and policy-makers as she designed and re-structured an education inclusion project aimed at facilitating the integration of children with disabilities into the Peruvian public education system. In that time period, she worked closely with children, their families, and the project's various stakeholders to create an attainable plan of action with measurable objectives and secured funding for three years from philanthropic partners.​

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Debi commenced her post-college career as an investment management analyst at Morgan Stanley, during which time she volunteered to help low-income families seeking educational support for their children. These families' concerns around their children’s mood dysregulation, anxiety, irritability, and self-harm reshaped many of the empirical questions she had pondered over the years through a clinical lens, emphasizing the immense need for evidence-based mental healthcare in underserved low-income, rural, and immigrant communities. After her Associate promotion at the investment bank, driven by her passion for youth mental health and research impact, Debi sought out a clinical research position to further prepare herself for doctoral studies.

Following her time in industry, Debi worked as a Clinical Research Coordinator for the PREDiCTOR Study at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and as a Research Assistant at the Laboratory for Clinical and Developmental Studies at Columbia's Teachers College.

Currently, Debi is a Clinical Psychology PhD student at Florida International University. In addition, Debi is co-founder of Aid For Families in Need Corp., a non-profit organization, where she also serves as an Education Advisor for underserved families. 

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