Juan Sebastian Castillo Perez

About Juan

Juan Sebastian has been working in both public and private contexts, leading programs to promote healthy relationships, social change, community empowerment, and collective innovation. Over the past decade of teaching, research, and professional practice in Colombia, Juan Sebastian has combined counseling and research approaches to focus on well-being and its relationship with familiar, cultural, and social environments, precisely in interventions targeting different forms of violence across contexts, such as IPV, domestic violence and community violence. Specifically, he has focused on the intersections between mental health, socioeconomic status, and culture and how they inform the risk of different criminal forms of violence, including victimization. He has worked predominantly in socio-economically vulnerable populations, such as (ex)combatants of the Colombian internal war and their families; internally displaced people; homeless adolescents; pregnant teenagers; and (physically and sexually) victimized children and youth, both in rural and urban contexts of Colombia. These experiences with diverse youth have allowed him to observe how systemic forces can strongly inform individual developmental outcomes, such as national war, economic poverty, food insecurity, community norms, or migration.

Among his professional background, Juan Sebastian worked in an intervention-action-investigation Grant titled "Laboratorios Vivos de Innovación y cultura". Through this initiative, rural and socially vulnerable youth and their families were engaged with cultural and innovation programs, such as an after-school program of digital and artistic creation, to facilitate social change through culture and sustainability of the communities. One of the biggest ever conducted in Colombia to promote culture and technology, this project was awarded nationally for its outstanding results. Currently Juan Sebastian is collaborating with the Sexual and Intimate Partner Violence Team ascribed to the Research and Evaluation Branch of the Division of Violence Prevention of the Centers for disease and control prevention in a project titled “Identifying Prevention and Intervention Strategies to Disrupt the Developmental Pathways Toward Intimate Partner Violence (IPV)”. Specifically, he is conducting a systematic review within the policy component of the project that aims to assess the gap between current research on IPV and public policy implementation

Juan's Research Foci

Juan Sebastian’s research centers on Hispanic/Latino Men Social Systems and Intimate Partner relationships from a developmental approach to help-seeking behaviors and healthy relationship building. Specifically, through his master’s project, he will be exploring the meaning that Latino undergraduate men attending a large HIS in the Southeastern region of the United States (U.S.). have of key foundational concepts such as sex, sex education, and sexual empowerment. Additionally, he will collect data from Latino samples located in the United States, Colombia and Peru to understand the dynamic between gender, culture, and well-being. For more information about her research, please email Juan Sebastian directly.

Juan's Research Project Video