Gabriela Livas Stein's research attempts to identify individual, familial, and cultural processes that promote positive development and mitigate risk for minoritized youth, with a focus on immigrant and Latine populations. Her work grounded is cultural models of child development incorporates tenets of developmental psychopathology to understand trajectories of mental health and educational outcomes. Her work also uses community-engaged approaches to develop and test prevention and intervention programs that address the mental health and cultural needs of minoritized youth and their families.

The CAMINOS lab led by Dr. Stein focuses on basic science questions involving risk and resilience processes in minoritized communities including understanding the impacts of racial-ethnic discrimination, acculturative stress, and econonmic stress on youth and family outocomes, as well as the promotive roles of critical civic engagement, coping, racial-ethnic socializaiton, and familism values. Her translational work focuses on prevention programming for minoritized families (e.g., racial-ethnic socialization interventions) and increasing mental health access for underserved communities (e.g., community health worker delivered mental health interventions).