Jodi Berger Cardoso
Professor | Kantambu Latting Endowed Professorship for Leadership and Change
Email: jabergercardoso@uh.edu
Room: 407 Social Work Building
Phone: 713-743-1157
Personal Statement
Jodi Berger Cardoso, PhD, LCSW has over 20 years of clinical and research experience working with children, youth, and families. Her research examines how exposure to stress and trauma impact the mental health of children and their caregivers. She is particularly interested in how psychological stress before, during, and post-migration affects the mental health and family processes of immigrants and refugees from Latin America. Dr. Berger Cardoso is a leading scholar on migration-related family separation and children’s mental health, and her work has been foundational in shaping how migration-related family separation and deportation are understood as threats to child and family well-being in immigrant communities. Her research shows how these stressors function as chronic relational trauma, affecting attachment, behavior, and emotional development. Dr. Cardoso has been instrumental in testing culturally attuned prevention and intervention programs that reduce psychosocial stress and treat developmental trauma and its consequences, such as complex posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, and other trauma-related consequences. Recently, she has been working with the Houston community to co-develop a culturally responsive, relational intervention to address parent–child relational distress and child mental health in immigrant families impacted by migration trauma, including family separation. Since coming to UH in 2012, Dr. Cardoso has been funded to examine the unique stressors associated parenting in the context of deportation risk (Hogg Foundation for Mental Health); the integration of unaccompanied minors in the U.S. communities (Department of Homeland Security); the effects of immigration enforcement on mental health outcomes of Latinx high schools (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation); and the implementation of Journey of Hope to reduce psychosocial stress in children exposed to multiple natural disasters (National Institute of Mental Health). Dr. Cardoso is a practicing social worker, who delivers the interventions that she teaches about and who works with humanitarian organizations around the world that focus on providing legal and mental health services to immigrants, unaccompanied minor youth, and refugees that have experienced trauma. She has served as an expert witness in asylum, child trauma, human trafficking, and family separation cases and has testified on behalf of vulnerable populations. Dr. Cardoso was elected twice to the national board of directors for the Society for Social Work Research and was elected as a SSWR Research Fellow in 2020. She is one of the founding members of the Central American Minors Workgroup—one of the largest volunteer networks of legal service, mental health, health, educational and post-release service providers in the United States. Prior to getting a degree in social work, Dr. Cardoso was a Peace Corps volunteer in Santo Domingo, Ecuador (1999-2002).
Education
PhD, The University of Texas, Austin, TX, 2012
MSSW, Columbia University, New York, NY, 2004
BS, Portland State University, Portland, OR, 2000
Licenses and Certifications
2007- Present, Licensed Clinical Social Worker in Texas
2004-2006, Licensed Master Social Worker in Texas
Courses Taught
- SOCW 6306 - Social Work Practice Skills Lab
- SOCW 7324 - Clinical Applications of the DSM