Our Founder

Dr. Sylvie Naar is the Distinguished Endowed Professor in the College of Medicine’s department of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine at Florida State University, where she is the founding director of the Center for Translational Behavioral Science. She is trained as a pediatric health psychologist and has conducted health disparities research with minority youth for over 20 years.  She has had several federally funded projects developing and evaluating interventions to improve health behaviors in minority adolescents including obesity, diabetes and asthma management. She has both clinical and research expertise in behavioral interventions for youth living with HIV focusing on adherence to medications, adherence to appointments, substance use and sexual risk. She has had several federally funded projects utilizing Motivational Interviewing to improve health behaviors in adolescents both in randomized clinical trials and in implementation evaluation contexts.  She has had experience in multi-site evaluation studies of complex, multi-level interventions for Health Resource and Service Administration’s Special Projects of National Significance and NIH clinical trials.  She has worked with the Adolescent Trials Network for HIV/AIDS for many years including as chair of the executive committee.  She is a national and international expert on Motivational Interviewing, with particular emphasis on adolescents and young adults.  She is a member of MINT (Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers). She has worked closely with the developers of MI (Miller and Rollnick) to author the first textbook focusing on adolescents and young adults for Guilford Press’ Motivational Interviewing series (Naar and Suarez, 2nd edition, 2021).  Most recently she was awarded an NIH center grant to address HIV and alcohol self-management in young adults in Florida and the NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award to develop antiracism interventions in patient-centered medical homes.

Dr. Naar is no longer the owner of or an employee at BCC.

Over the years Dr. Naar's research has been published and is widely acclaimed with over 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals. Below is a link to one of Dr. Naar's articles from Scientific American Psychiatry: