Mauricio Zumba

Mauricio was born and lived in Ecuador, South America until the Age of 10 when he moved to the United States. Mauricio joined the Army reserves after graduating high school at the age of 17. Upon Graduation from basic and advanced training, Mauricio moved to Washington State and began college at Eastern Washington University (EWU) in 2007. He received his B.A. in Psychology and B.S. in Applied Developmental Psychology from EWU in 2014. A Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Army Reserves Engineer Corps, Mauricio served a tour in Iraq in 2009 and a tour in Afghanistan in 2010 as a Team Leader in a Route Clearance Platoon.

Mauricio’s interest in trauma developed throughout his deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, however his focus on prevention and symptom frequency/severity reduction was established during an internship at Providence Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital Behavioral Education and Skills Training (B.E.S.T). Upon earning his Ph.D. Mauricio aspires to use his neuropsychological research of executive function and social cognitive theory, particularly self-efficacy to identify enablement factors of self-efficacy and executive function. Mauricio plans to develop a model of resilience that can be applied to create and refine psychoeducational programs to be used prior to deployments with the goal of reducing the incidences and symptomatology of PTSD while providing deployed soldiers with tools to reduce the effects of PTSD in their lives, and promote successful reintegration to civilian life for post-deployment personnel.