Faculty & Staff
Faculty
Linda M. Callejas, PhDAssociate Research ProfessorPhone: 813-974-5163 |
Research Interests:
Behavioral health equity; community-driven research; parents involved in child welfare systems
Linda M. Callejas, Ph.D. is an applied anthropologist with expertise in qualitative methodologies and in community-engaged research. Her work is focused broadly on evaluating the implementation and outcomes of programs and interventions designed to address the behavioral health needs of diverse children, youth, young adults, and their families, especially those that experience persistent disparities.
Over two decades, Dr. Callejas has served as principal investigator, project director, and lead evaluator on numerous collaborative and community-engaged studies funded by the Administration for Children & Families, SAMHSA, PCORI, HRSA, NIDLRR and the Annie E. Casey Foundation among other funding agencies. She has published qualitative and mixed methods findings in interdisciplinary refereed journals in various fields, including social work, psychiatry, and anthropology, in specialty areas such as child welfare, child and youth services, mental health services research, and evaluation. Her publications often analyze the perspectives and experiences of diverse community partners, including service recipients, neighborhood residents, community-based providers and others to better understand the policies and practices that shape how health and human service systems operate. Dr. Callejas’s early research on the concept of community-defined evidence has contributed to innovative mental health policy and funding in California, scholarship on increasing equity in implementation science, and practice change in the field of child and maternal health to reduce mortality and increase healthy births among Black mothers.
Dr. Callejas serves as a lead faculty member and advisor for the USF Master of Science Program in Child and Adolescent Behavioral Health, which prepares students to serve in public sector and nonprofit organizations that address the behavioral health needs of children, youth, and families. She leads the program’s Leadership Focus Area and teaches courses designed to prepare students for positions of executive leadership with skills and knowledge in organizational capacity building, program implementation, and research translation.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Callejas, L.M.; Scarimbolo, K., Chou, C., Hammond, K., & Agazzi, H. (2024). Identifying implementation barriers and facilitators in an integrated behavioral health training program to improve workforce development. Translational Behavioral Medicine, ibae040,
Callejas, L., Jones, N., Watson, A., & Marino, M. (2024). A county-level case study of early psychosis in the context of a hybrid juvenile competency restoration and mental health problem-solving court and linkage to coordinated specialty care services. Community Mental Health Journal, Advance online publication.
Jones, N., Callejas, L.M., Brown, M., Colder Carras, M., Croft, B., Pagdon, S., Sheehan,
L., Oluwoye, O., & Zisman-Ilani, Y. (2023). Barriers to meaningful participatory mental
health services research and priority next steps: Findings from a national survey.
Psychiatric Services, 74(9):902-910.