Professor Sheila Murta

Professor of Psychology at the University of Brasília

Professor Sheila Murta is Principal Investigator of the Health Prevention and Promotion Across the Lifecycle Research Group. This group investigates connections among prevention science, translational research, and public policies.

Throughout Sheila’s career, she has been researching the development, evaluation, and diffusion of mental health promotion and risk factors prevention interventions during the life course. This includes child maltreatment prevention for first-time parents, dating violence prevention for adolescents, the meaning of life and forgiveness for young adults, occupational stress management for adult workers, and retirement planning for middle-age workers. Her work can be seen here. Developing culturally-informed interventions that are socially valid, feasible and scalable is her main interest, and the reason why she has been increasingly incorporating participatory perspectives in the design of her studies.

Sheila is currently Co-I on the British Academy project “Amplifying the voices of young people for sustainable development in mental health” in collaboration with the NEUROSEC Team, and President of the Brazilian Association for Health Promotion and Prevention Research (2019-2020; 2021-2022). 

Sheila holds a PhD in Occupational and Social Psychology from the University of Brasilia with an exchange period at Queensland University of Technology, Australia, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Maastricht, Oxford Brookes and the Federal University of Sao Carlos (Brazil).