Michael Sladek Email & Phone Number

I am a researcher who strives to situate the intricacies of youth development within a contextualized understanding of intersecting societal stratification systems (e.g., racism, sexism, cisgenderism) and how these pervasive and pernicious systems shape the health and well-being of all young people. As one avenue to disrupt this status quo, my overarching goal is to conduct research using strengths-based identity-affirming approaches to inform policies and practices that best support socially marginalized youth. I am particularly interested in grounding the research process in community-based approaches and using multiple methods (e.g., daily diaries, longitudinal surveys, interviews, focus groups) to better understand how the everyday experiences and identities of ethnoracially diverse sexual and gender minority (SGM) youth uniquely shape their health and well-being. This work is done collaboratively within the Contexts of Health, Adolescent Resilience, and Measuring Stress (CHARMS) Lab, which is currently engaged in a longitudinal mixed methods study of LGBTQ+ young adults’ resilience and a daily diary study of adolescents’ ethnic-racial identity development during a school-based health promotion intervention. My collaborative work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and the William T. Grant Foundation. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at The University of Oklahoma where I am affiliated with the Applied Social and Developmental Psychology doctoral program, the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, and the Institute for Community and Society Transformation. I completed a B.A. with honors in psychology at Northwestern University and M.A. and Ph.D. in developmental psychology at Arizona State University. I completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.