CIFFTA Team
Daniel Santisteban
Psychologist
Professor
Director, Dunspaugh-Dalton Community & Educational Well-Being Research Center
School of Education and Human Development
University of Miami
Daniel Santisteban, Ph.D. is a Clinical Psychologist, Professor, and Director of the Dunspaugh Dalton Community & Educational Well-Being Research Center, with over 25 years of experience in:
- Developing the Culturally Informed and Flexible Family Based Treatment for Adolescents (CIFFTA)
- Treating children and adolescents with mental and substance use disorders
- Treating the entire family so as to bring about more lasting change
- Documenting the unique stressors and life experiences important to minority families
- Designing and testing innovative treatments that can be increasingly effective
- Training front-line professionals on the new CIFFTA intervention
- Working with community agencies and the school system to improve our effectiveness of programs.
Santisteban began this new program of treatment research and implementation in 2002 because of the realization that the effectiveness of treatment for kids and families was still not what it should be and because treatments were not systematically addressing some of the most important experiences that families were confronting, such as discrimination, acculturation and immigration stress.
Much of the work Santisteban and his team have undertaken involves the documentation of how cultural factors can impact adolescents and families, and their success in treatment.
His extensive experience with large National Institute of Health-funded clinical trials has led to expertise in the planning, organization and implementation of complex and multi-component projects and ensuring fidelity in the delivery of complex treatments.
Dr. Santisteban has over 40 publications, was the 2004 recipient of an Award for Distinguished Contributions to Family Systems Research from the American Family Therapy Academy and the 2012 Excellence in Civic Engagement Award for his engaged role in the community.
He has partnered with the Addiction Technology Transfer Center in Florida and in Puerto Rico to create training materials for treatment providers which include workshops and provider oriented monographs for "Engaging Reluctant Family Members Into Adolescent Drug Treatment" and “Family Therapy for Substance Abuse in Hispanic Adolescents”.
”We must admit that there are many ways in which we are not serving the kids and families in our community well. Too often we do little to promote well-being, we ignore the warning signs in an adolescent’s behavior, and we ignore the warning signs that our mental health system is doing a very poor job of engaging and providing culturally informed counseling to those youngster and families that are most in need” “We can do better!”
Maite Mena
Clinical Psychologist
Research Assistant Professor
School of Education and Human Development
University of Miami
Maite P. Mena, Psy.D., has a Doctorate in Psychology and is a Research Assistant Professor at the UM SEHD. She was the recipient of a NIDA funded Diversity Research Supplement Grant and a Health Foundation of South Florida grant to help develop services in the Little Havana community.
Her research expertise includes study design, coordination and treatment implementation. As Co-PI she has led the successful execution of three complex treatment protocols with Hispanic adolescents and their families. She has played a central role in making cultural adaptations to family-based treatment, has worked on the integration of Motivational Interviewing into family based treatments, and has led efforts to measure treatment adherence/fidelity in complex interventions. Dr. Mena work on discovering barriers Hispanic parents identify as reasons for not speaking to their adolescent children about sex, protection, and the consequences of engaging in risky sexual behaviors was used to enhance the CIFFTA treatment.
Dr. Mena also has expertise in clinical work, teaching, and training. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the area of Family Systems Theories and Lifespan Human Development, and has taught an on-line course in psychiatric issues. She currently supervises Master’s students at the SOEHD teaching clinic and supports their use of family interventions, Motivational Interviewing, and SBIRT screening and brief interventions. Dr. Mena regularly conducts large training events on CIFFTA, SBIRT, and Motivational Interviewing and she has successfully worked with several community sites to implement SBIRT. Dr. Mena won a Community Partnership Award in 2014 for her work in Little Havana.
Clara Abalo
Supervisor, Clinical Therapy
Youth and Family Development Program
University of Miami
Clara Abalo, M.S., LMHC, is highly experienced in working with minority adolescents and families, adolescents with problems related to disruptive behavior and substance use, delivering treatment with a high level of fidelity, and most importantly as a CIFFTA and Motivational Interviewing trainer and supervisor. In addition to being the primary trainer on the Culturally Informed and Flexible Family Based Treatment for Adolescents (CIFFTA), recently she was trained by an expert Motivational Interviewing trainer and met the stringent criteria needed to receive certification as an MI trainer. Ms. Abalo teaches counselors to deliver services with a high level of clinical and cultural competence.
As a practitioner for many years, Ms. Abalo has also been instrumental in translating clinical and training material into Spanish to facilitate training for front-line providers and community workers for whom English is not the primary language. Because of her expertise in training counselors to work with Latino populations, she and Dr. Santisteban were asked to work together to create a training package that could be implemented around the country as part of a counselor training initiative by the Addiction Technology Transfer Center network. Ms. Abalo conducted train-the-trainer activities throughout the country in the past several years. An important part of this work is ensuring that both treatment and training processes are culturally informed and sensitive.
Brian McCabe
Counseling Psychologist
Research Assistant Professor
School of Nursing and Health Studies
University of Miami
Brian McCabe, Ph.D. Dr. McCabe is a Counseling Psychologist and Research Assistant Professor at the School of Nursing and Health Studies. He has extensive research and evaluation experience in the area of behavioral interventions and substance use he has been an integral part of the program of research that has tested and evaluated CIFFTA’s effectiveness. He has also been an integral part of the team that has published the evaluation results.
Dr. McCabe has worked on numerous research teams at the University of Miami for over 10 years. Dr. McCabe teaches research methods, statistical analysis, and evidence-based practice for health care and behavioral sciences. His primary research and clinical interests are the etiology and treatment of alcohol use disorders, health disparities in the incidence of and interventions for alcohol use and mental health disorders, evaluation and data analysis methods, and the influence of culture on measurement.