Frosso Motti-Stefanidi

Frosso Motti-Stefanidi is Professor of Psychology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. She is an internationally recognized scholar of immigrant and refugee youth adaptation. Taking a strengths-based approach, she examines immigrant youth adaptation from a resilience perspective. In her work she addresses the question “Who among immigrant and refugee youth adapt well and why? She has developed the Athena Studies of Resilient Adaptation (AStRA) project, which includes two large longitudinal studies of over 2500 middle school students, focusing on the adaptation and well-being of immigrant youth, and of their Greek classmates, in the school context. One was conducted before and the other during the Great Greek Economic Crisis. She has presented the social policy implications of her work at different Working Groups of the European Parliament as well as at conferences organized by NGOs interested in the adaptation of migrant and refugee youth. She has also organized a number of summer schools and experts’ meetings on behalf of European and American scientific societies on the topic of immigrant youth adaptation, development and acculturation. 

Frosso received her PhD in 1986 from the Institute of Child Development of the University of Minnesota, USA. She has received the Distinguished International Alumni Award from the College of Education and Human Development of the University of Minnesota in 2005, she is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS, 2010), and a Chen Yidan Visiting Global Fellow at the Graduate School of Education, Harvard University for the academic year 2019-2020. 

She has served as Chair of the Department of Psychology, University of Athens, Greece, as President of the European Association of Developmental Psychology (EADP), and as President of the European Association of Personality Psychology (EAPP). She is currently a Member of the Governing Council of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) and a Member of the Secretariat of the International Consortium of Developmental Science Societies (ICDSS). 

She has served as Member of the Editorial Board of the European Journal of Developmental Psychology. She is currently a Member of the Editorial Board of the SRCD journal Child Development Perspectives. She has also served as Panel member for the evaluation of Consolidator Grant proposals at the European Research Council (ERC) in Brussels, and as Chair of Panels for Economics and Social Sciences of the European Science Foundation (ESF) in Strasbourg.