L. Patty Flores is a Chancellor’s Fellow and PhD student in Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on system-impacted youth, trauma, and how systems shape the lives of immigrant and foster youth.
Patty holds an MSW and previously worked as a Mobile Crisis Therapist in Los Angeles County, providing trauma-informed crisis intervention to the community. She has extensive experience working with foster youth and former foster youth in clinical, community, and advocacy settings. She is also the founder of Defying Labels, a platform rooted in lived experience, consulting, advocacy, public scholarship, and community education.
She has been featured by SAGE Publications, The Imprint, NBC4, LAist, Univision, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Field Center, where her perspectives and experiences contribute to national conversations on child welfare, youth voice, and culturally responsive practice.
As a bilingual clinician and scholar-practitioner, Patty brings both professional expertise and lived experience as a former foster youth to her research, aiming to advance policy and practice that strengthen youth-serving systems. She is committed to producing scholarship that bridges academic rigor and community voice to support the well-being and belonging of marginalized young people.