Ughetta Moscardino
Ughetta Moscardino is an Associate Professor in the Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialization at the University of Padova, Italy. Her research activity involves the application of mixed method approaches to investigate cross-cultural mental health in children, adolescents, and their families, identity and acculturation processes among ethnic/racial/religious immigrant and minoritized groups, and resilience and protective factors in at risk populations.
Ughetta is a licensed psychologist who received her PhD in Developmental and Educational Psychology from the University of Padova, and completed her post-doctoral training at the same university. For several years she collaborated on an international, NICHD-funded project concerning the role of culture in children’s social-emotional development. She subsequently coordinated a multi-year action-research with children, families, and teachers who survived a terrorist attack against a school in the North Caucasus. For this project, she received a Certificate of Merit from the Italian government in 2009.
In the past decade, she has obtained funding from the Italian Ministry of Education to study the impact of micro- and macrolevel factors on the psychological adjustment of youth with an immigrant background, including unaccompanied minors and young adult asylum seekers. She is also part of the Global IP, an international network of scholars working on the promotion of ethnic-racial-cultural identity development through the adaptation and implementation of an evidence-based intervention in multicultural schools (the Identity Project). She is the recipient of a grant from the European Union (Marie Curie Doctoral Networks) focused on developing countermeasures to mitigate the impact of violent, migration-related discourse on adolescents’ attitudes and beliefs.
The outcomes of her research have been published in national and international journals and books, and the policy implications of her research have been disseminated to the general public and local stakeholders. She closely collaborates with NGOs and local municipalities to provide consultancy and raise awareness about best practices concerning the integration of immigrant and asylum seeking youth. She also serves as a reviewer for the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research to evaluate the quality of research outputs of national Universities.