Lutcher Brown Fellowship
Unfilled chairs and professorships are used to support recently tenured faculty and help accelerate the success of their research through fellowships. The fellowships are one-year, nonrecurring honorific appointments. Fellows are nominated by academic leadership and selected by the provost through a competitive process.
Alan Meca, Ph.D.
Lutcher Brown Fellowship
Associate Professor, Psychology
Alan Meca’s research interests include identity development across multiple domains, including ethnic and racial identity, parental identity, and military identity; cultural identity development among ethnic and racial minorities; and acculturation and cultural stress among immigrant populations.
Meca has an h-index of 37 with over 4,800 citations to date. He has published over 100 articles in various peer-reviewed publications, including Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, Journal of Youth and Adolescence, Addiction Research & Theory, the International Journal of Intercultural Relations, and the Journal of Research on Adolescence. He has also presented his work at multiple refereed conference proceedings in the U.S. and abroad.
His research has been supported by over $3.7 million in competitive grant funding from organizations like the U.S. Department of Education, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and the American Psychological Association.
He directs the Team on Acculturation, Risk, and the Development of Identity and Self (TARDIS) Lab at UTSA, which seeks to understand identity development across various domains and uncover links between one’s identity and their psychosocial functioning, risk behaviors and educational achievement.
Meca has received multiple awards for commitment to his students, including the UTSA McNair Scholars Program Faculty Mentor of the Year Award and numerous awards for outstanding teaching at Old Dominion University and Florida International University.
Meca earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in Developmental Psychology from Florida International University. Prior to joining UTSA, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and was a faculty member at Old Dominion University.
