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Biography
Joana Lara Ferreira Soares is currently a Contracted Researcher at the Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences of the University of Porto. She is a co-founder of the Group of Research and Intervention in Adoption and Out-of-Home Care (Grupo de Investigação e Intervenção em Acolhimento e Adoção - GIIAA). Additionally, she is the Co-principal Investigator of the AdoPt Project: Follow-up in Post-Adoption. In 2019, she was recognized by the University of Massachusetts Amherst as a specialist in adoption research, becoming a Rudd Adoption Research Scholar. Since 2008, she has been fully dedicated to child protection research, with a particular focus on adoption and foster care fields. Her PhD, completed in April 2019, concentrated on the social competence of school-aged adopted children, aiming to identify predictors at individual (child-related), familial (parent and parent-child relationship-related), and extra-familial (school/teachers and classmates-related) levels. This research project addressed the development of competent social behavior from a complex ecological and transactional theoretical approach, considering the primary developmental contexts of school-aged adoptees (the adoptive family and the school/peer group) and involving multiple informants (adopted child, mother, father, teacher, and schoolmates). It was funded by a doctoral scholarship from the Foundation for Science and Technology during the initial four years of the PhD (2012-2015). Over the past 12 years, she has dedicated herself to developing a career as a researcher in Child Protection, consistently integrating research with teaching, training, and the dissemination of scientific knowledge. She has numerous scientific outputs, including papers published in specialized indexed journals. Her research interests encompass adoption, foster care, residential care, child protection, children's rights, early adversity, family relations, social competence, child development, and quantitative methods of data analysis. She specializes in Clinical and Health Psychology. Additionally, Joana Lara Ferreira Soares has been dedicated to training psychologists in the areas of child protection, early adversity, and trauma, serving as a member of the advisory council of the Portuguese Psychologists Association. She provides training for professionals in the field of child protection, as well as scientific consultancy and supervision in residential care centres. These activities demonstrate her commitment not only to research and clinical practice but also to the development and training of professionals working with children in vulnerable situations.