Thao Le
Thao N. Le, PhD, MPH is currently serving as Professor & Chair in the Family Consumer Sciences Department, in the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources at the University of Hawai'i Manoa. She received her Masters in Public Health in Behavioral Sciences at the University of California Berkeley, and PhD in Psychology at the University of California Davis. Her current research interest and focus concerns farmer mental health, where she is Project Director of the Seeds of Wellbeing project, funded by Hawaii Department of Agriculture and USDA-NIFA. She also works with Native Hawaiian cultural practitioners on projects to restore and investigate the effects of using traditional ecological knowledge on human resiliency and well-being, such as the restoration of a royal Native Hawaiian fishpond as a culturally, place-based activity for character development and youth well-being. Her research also includes mindfulness-based prevention and interventions for youth socio-emotional development,; more than 4,000 copies of her children's books, Mindfulness with Aloha Breath; Akahai; and Ha'aha'a, have been disseminated by Office of Youth Services, Department of Human Services across the islands. Prior to joining academia, she worked at a non-profit think tank agency for 14 years on program evaluation focusing on youth development and delinquency prevention. She is very interested in infusing values and ethics to build socio-emotional skills, resiliency and flourishing across all ages and sectors of development, and to partner with others to support structural and system level changes using transdisciplinary approaches.
