Dr. Sylvie 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 is a national and international expert on Motivational Interviewing, with particular emphasis on adolescents and young adults. 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 also an MPI of an NIH FIRST Award; an initiative to recruit and retain underrepresented minority faculty.