Cristina Bares is an Associate Professor at the UM School of Social Work who has been on the faculty since 2015. She was born in Montevideo, Uruguay and immigrated to the United States as a child with her family in the 1980s. As a result of leaving behind a large extended Italian family and many friends in Uruguay, feelings of isolation, the experiences of not knowing English, economic uncertainty, and adjusting to a new culture in Detroit, Michigan shape her personal and professional decisions to this day. She attended the University of Michigan for undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral training and was fortunate to have been exposed to a few minority faculty during her training who have made all the difference in the types of activities Dr. Bares has pursued and the mentoring she received. Dr. Bares’ research area focuses on an issue that is highly prevalent in her home country of Uruguay: adolescent drug use. She employs advanced statistical techniques to examine biological, psychological, social, and contextual influences on the development of substance use behaviors and associated problems in childhood and adolescence. Her recognition of the importance of context in both providing opportunities for behaviors that are considered adaptive and maladaptive in various settings has led to her desire to understand how these contextual influences work together, how contextual factors differentially impact individuals when one examines these separately by race and ethnicity, but also to pursuing the of design prevention intervention focused on addressing contextual factors in drug use. Dr. Bares currently lives in Wayne County with her partner, adolescent twins, and their labradoodle; a few miles away from her mother and brother.