Martha Bernal

Born: April 13, 1931 in San Antonio, Texas
Died: September 28, 2001 in Black Canyon City, Arizona

Education and Work

In 1962 she earned her PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Indiana
Following her postgraduate studies, she received many letters of rejection from jobs that would not hire women.
Her inability to secure a working position after completing her PhD propelled her to pursue a U.S. Public Health Service Fellowship.
With the Fellowship she finalized her research on human psychophysiology at the Health Sciences Center of University of California at Los Angeles.
In 1966 she received a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to build a laboratory and study classical conditioning and orienting responses in children with autism.
In the 70s she applied her efforts to ensure that minority students could receive graduate training and devoted much of her time to increasing the recruitment, retention and training of these students.
In 1986 she became a professor at Arizona State University where her focus continued to be students and workers of color.

She was the first woman of Mexican descent to obtain her PhD in clinical psychology in the United States.
She was a pioneer in implementing the rigorous theories of learning and its methods to assessing and treating children with behavior problems.
Her efforts contributed greatly to the increasing use of experimentally validated treatment techniques for children.
She was one of the most effective early advocates for a multicultural psychology.
In 1979 she was one of the establishers of the National Hispanic Psychological Association and later became the president of the organization.
In that same year she received a National Research Service Award to study how APA-accredited clinical psychology programs prepared for treating multicultural populations. She found that the curricula were inadequate.
In 2000 she was recognized for her contributions at the Latino Psychology Conference.
In 2001 she was awarded the Contributions to Psychology Award by the Public Interest Directorate