About Dr. Wright
Dr. Blanche Wright conducts research and clinical practice across the lifespan, as she has focused on and worked with both youth and adults. She has specific expertise in implementing and sustaining of evidence-based treatments (EBTs) with minoritized youth/parents, strengthening client engagement in mental health services, and cultural considerations in mental health access, service utilization and ongoing engagement. She has gained specialized training in health care policy and population health research. Dr. Wright's overarching goal is to help close the research to practice to policy gaps in pursuit of health equity. Dr. Wright has emergent interests in digital mental health, population mental health, and the integration of research findings into the mental health policy making process.
Dr. Wright is bilingual (English/Spanish), a mixed-race daughter of Central American immigrants and a first-generation college student. In addition to research, Dr. Wright is passionate about mentoring the next wave of and equity scholars. She has also been involved in department and university campus wide DEI efforts.
Education and Selected Training
Dr. Wright is a double Bruin as she received her B.S. in Psychobiology with a minor concentration in Theater, and her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology with a minor concentration in Quantitative Psychology from UCLA. In 2021-2022, she was a Clinical Fellow at Harvard Medical School during which she completed her HRSA-funded Predoctoral Psychology Internship (Population Health Track) at Cambridge Health Alliance, and gained public health training through the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Wright has also received a NIMH-funded Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Individual Predoctoral Fellowship to support her work from 2019-2021. During 2016-2021, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholar. Dr. Wright is currently an AHRQ-funded T32 Postdoctoral Fellow in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health-Health Policy and Management Department and the RAND Corporation; she is also a 2023-2024 NIMH CHIPS fellow.