Eve Puffer
Director, Duke Center for Global Mental Health
Pamela and Jack Egan Associate Professor
Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Associate Research Professor of Global Health
Dr. Puffer is a global mental health researcher and a licensed clinical psychologist. Her research focuses on developing and evaluating integrated community-based interventions to promote child mental health, improve family functioning, and prevent HIV risk behavior. She has conducted much of this work in rural Kenya. Before joining Duke, Dr. Puffer was a research advisor at the International Rescue Committee conducting evaluations of humanitarian programs in refugee settings. She is an investigator on multiple studies of child mental health and parenting interventions in Thailand, Ethiopia, and Liberia.
Projects
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Community-sourced Interventions for Global Mental Health
Kenya
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Developing a direct observational measure of family functioning for low-resource settings: Establishing reliability and validity in a Kenyan sample
Kenya
- National Evaluation of Quality of Childcare
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Development and Evaluation of a Family- and Church-based Intervention for Mental Health Promotion and HIV Prevention for Adolescents in Rural Kenya
Kenya
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Development of culturally-grounded assessment tools to measure family functioning and mental health in Kenya
Kenya
- Parenting Program Evaluation: Monrovia, Liberia
Publications
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Bosqui T, Brown FL, Farah S, Elias J, Ghossainy ME, Mayya A, et al. 'Sawa Aqwa' (Stronger Together): A multi-site randomized controlled trial of a brief family systemic intervention for adolescent mental health in Lebanon. Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines. 2026 Jun;Johnson SL, Hamisi HZ, Owity OJ, Ochieng YA, Goel P, Bielskis M, et al. The Intersection of Mental Health and Intimate Partner Violence Among Adolescents in Kenya: A Qualitative Study. Violence against women. 2026 Jun;32(8):2172–96.Johnson SL, Rasmussen JM, Bielskis M, Falls A, Hamisi HZ, Owity OJ, et al. The PREvention Program for Adolescent Relationship and Emotional Development (PREPARED): a proof-of-concept study. BMC public health. 2026 Mar;26(1):1320.Ochieng YA, Patel SM, Nazareth A, Rono W, Owino L, Githinji CN, et al. "I just want to be normal": Psychosocial experiences of adolescents and young adults with sickle cell disease in Kenya. Glob Ment Health (Camb). 2026;13:e56.
See more publications at Scholars@Duke