Anilena Mejia PhD

Anilena is an Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Psychological Sciences and a full-time Monitoring & Evaluation Officer at UNICEF in Panama. Anilena has an MSc in Clinical and Health Psychology (1:1) and a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Manchester. After completing her Ph.D., she worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Queensland (Australia) and as a researcher at INDICASAT (Panama) where she led a lab to prevent violence against children. She now works as a Monitoring & Evaluation Officer at UNICEF (Panama).

Her research so far has evaluated early childhood development, parenting programs and family-based interventions in low- and middle-income countries. She is also interested in understanding and preventing violence in urban and rural low-resource settings, particularly in Latin America. Her research focuses on testing and developing culturally-relevant and cost-effective preventive interventions for parents and children from high-risk vulnerable communities.

She has engaged in participatory research using visual anthropology techniques. In 2013 she produced a short documentary to showcase the life and resilience of the women in the high-risk Panamanian neighborhood of San Joaquin, Central America. The idea was to give voice to unheard communities, increase their international visibility and promote action. You can watch the documentary here. Then in 2018, she produced another short documentary filmed and directed by the children themselves. You can watch the documentary here.