Clariana Vitoria Ramos de Oliveira, PhD, MSC, RN
Assistant Professor
Biography
Dr. Ramos, Ph.D., MSc, RN, joined the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), School of Nursing (SON) faculty in July 2022. She came to UNLV from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in early child development in global health. Dr. Ramos worked as a Research in many low-and-middle-income countries such as Brazil, El Salvador, Pakistan, Rwanda, and Tanzania, developing and evaluating parenting programs to improve parents’ mental health and children’s development outcomes. Dr. Ramos worked through the Children's Behavioral Health Initiative (CBHI) services in Massachusetts as a Mental Health and Child Development consultant. Through these experiences, she narrowed her interests to working with under-resourced communities in the U.S, focusing on the mental health of minorities, including immigrants. Prior to academia, Dr. Ramos worked as a Family Registered Nurse attending families in vulnerability, poverty, and living in violent communities. She also worked as Epidemiologist in preventive medicine in Brazil.
Expertise
Dr. Ramos is an interdisciplinary global scientist with a significant experience in community-based programs, epidemiological methods, and years of clinical practice working with vulnerable children and families in Brazil and the United States.
Classes taught (or will teach)
Dr. Ramos teaches the undergraduate course of community health at UNLV. In the past she taught introduction to epidemiology, social determinants of health, early child development and public health in Universities in Brazil,
Education Background
Dr. Ramos has a strong interdisciplinary background – Dr. Ramos completed her bachelor and master of science in nursing at the Federal University of Rio Grande in Brazil, earned her doctoral degree at the University of São Paulo with a scholarship to study for one year as a visiting graduate student at Harvard University, and completed a four-year post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public health.
Research
Dr. Ramos’s work concentration:
- Determining the impact of social determinants, such as violence, on parental and child mental health
- Identifying the impact of parents' mental health on early child development
- Improving mental health programs and systems for children and families from minority groups
Her research focuses on applying epidemiological methods to analyze and understand the relationships between parents' mental health, exposure to violence, and early childhood development to identify targets of positive intervention in unstable social environments. Her recent work includes 1) an analysis of chronic maternal depressive symptoms on early childhood development in a disadvantaged population in rural Pakistan published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2) A global systematic review and meta-analysis that was commissioned by the World Health Organization on the effectiveness of parenting interventions for promoting parenting and early child development outcomes during the first three years of life published in PLOS Medicine, 3) Analysis of the maternal experience of violence, feeling of safety and nurturing care in middle-income countries.
Awards, recognitions, or group affiliations
Dr. Ramos received an International Fellow from CAPES Federal Agency at Harvard University in 2017. She received the 2009 Junior Researcher Award at the Federal University of Rio Grande during her BSN program. Dr. Ramos has been a member of the Society for Research in Child Development since 2019.