International Journal of Emergency Mental Health and Human Resilience
Open Access

Dr. LAURA ELISABET GOMEZ SANCHEZ

Biography

Laura E. Gómez, PhD, is an assistant professor of Psychology at University of Oviedo (Spain) since 2011 and a member of the Institute on Community Integration (INICO) (Spain) since 2004. Previously she has been working at the University of Valladolid (2008-2011) and at the University of Salamanca during four years (2004-2008). She has a European PhD in Disability (University of Salamanca, 2010) and received the PhD Award by University of Salamanca (2010). The title of her dissertation was Assessment of quality of life in social services: validation and calibration of the Gencat Scale, a study about quality of life of a representative sample of social service recipients in Catalonia that ended with the development and validation of one of the tools to assess quality of life in Spain. She has received others awards, such as a PhD award, "Infanta Cristina" National and Iberoamerican Research Award (2010), "Young Researcher Award on Ageing in Intellectual Disabilities" by IASSIDD (2012), "Research Award about People with Intellectual Disability" by AMPANS (Spanish entity providing supports to people with intellectual disability) (2014). During these ten years, she has been focused teaching about intellectual and developmental disabilities at Psychology, Education and Speech Therapy degrees, as well as Master's degrees on Clinical Psychology and Disability. Her research have been mainly focused on the development, calibration, adaptation and validation of quality of life scales for people with intellectual disabilities, but she has also made significant contributions about supports and adaptive behavior, as well as about attitudes towards people with intellectual disability and problem behaviors. To date, she has made about 80 significant contributions to the intellectual and developmental disabilities (23 of them in relevant international journals with high impact factors indexed in Journal Citation Reports, Thomson Reuters' Web Of Science) and more than 140 contributions to relevant conferences in the field. Among others, she works and publishes with Drs. Miguel A. Verdugo and Robert L. Schalock. She is a co-author of five instruments to assess quality of life-related personal outcomes for adults with intellectual disabilities (Gencat Scale, Integral Scale, INICO-FEAPS Scale, Fumat Scale, San Martin Scale) that have been translated into different languages and are being applied in several countries such as The Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, France, United Kingdom, United States, Canada, México, Chile, Colombia, Argentina, Australia, and China. Recently, she is leading the development and validation of a quality of life scale for children: the KidsLife Scale. Dr. Gómez is an editorial board member and reviewer of numerous peer-reviewed journals –such as Research in Developmental Disabilities (RIDD), Evaluation and Program Planning (EPP), International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology (IJCHP), Quality of Life Research, Social Indicators Research (SIR), or Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities (JARID)– and grant reviewer for national and international organizations –such as National Agency of Assessment and Prospective for Ministry of Science and Innovation in Spain and Flanders Research Foundation. She is a member of well-known and respected international societies such as American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (AAIDD, Australian Centre on Quality of Life, International Association for the Scientific Study of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IASSIDD). Thorough all this work, Dr. Gómez has become an international expert on quality of life for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Her research holds great promise for enhancing quality of life of people receiving supports at human services, guiding professionals to develop evidence-based practices, and guiding the development of social and human policies.

Research Interest

Intellectual and developmental disabilities; quality of life; supports; adaptive behavior; test development and validation

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