Dr. Pulgaron is an Associate Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine, and the Director of Psychosocial Services for the John T. McDonald School Health Initiative. She provides direct clinical services, supervise social workers, psychology residents, and fellows, and engage in clinical research in community settings. Dr. Pulgaron has  developed and successfully implemented mental health screening protocols in school based health centers (Pulgaron et al., 2023; Pulgaron et al., 2025), collected and synthesized qualitative data from parents, teachers, staff, and youth to inform research design and identify meaningful outcomes (Kenworthy et al., 2022, St. George et al., 2017); and adapted evidenced based treatments to community settings (Bernstein et al., 2021; Pulgaron et al., 2010). Most recently, Dr. Pulgaron was an MPI on an NIH funded Return to School grant focused on COVID testing and vaccination in community settings (Kenworthy et al., 2024; Pulgaron et al., 2023) and is currently the Co-I on an Institute of Education Sciences funded project focused on adapting an evidence-based anxiety and depression treatment for adolescents to school-based settings (St. George et al., 2024). In addition, she advocates for students’ psychosocial functioning by serving as the Co-Leader for the School Health Advisory Committee for Miami-Dade County Public Schools and lead the Promoting Behavioral Health Interprofessional Collaborative at the Mailman Center for Child Development. She also leads the Community Based Participatory Research workgroup for the Strategic Planning of the Center. She has extensive experience in pediatric mental health, advocating for community-based research, working with interdisciplinary teams and mentoring, and implementing randomized control trials.