Biography

Ana Teixeira de Melo is a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra. She was awarded a PhD in Clinical Psychology, by the University of Coimbra, and the title of Specialist in Clinical Psychology, with Advanced Specialty in Community Psychology, by the Portuguese Order of Psychologists. She is interested in processes of human flourishing and well-being, positive change and development and resilience, in Families and Communities. She especially targets contexts of multiple risks and challenges and of child protection and promotion and issues of social justice in these contexts and contexts of psicossocial interventions with populations living in conditions of poverty. She adopts a Systems and Complexity-Informed approach to the study of Family Processes. She investigates Love (Love-Force) as an emergent relational force, from a complex systems perspective and its role as a key human resilience and flourishing process. She has conducted action-based and applied research focused on the development, implementation and evaluation of models, resources and tools for family assessment and intervention. She is interested in the field of Complexity studies from a theoretical, methodological and applied point of view, in relation to processes of change in complex systems. Her research aims at the development and evaluation of theoretical models, resources and strategies for the practice of 'Complex Thinking' applied to the decision-making and the management of interventions in conditions of high risk, complexity and uncertainty. She focuses on complex human systems in the coupling with their environments. She explores the implications of a Complexity paradigm to understanding human experiences and managing individual and collective modes of Relating and our understanding of the nature of relations in constructing transformative realities. Additionally, her work encompasses themes related to Interdisciplinary Methodologies and Methods and Inter/Transdisciplinarity processes, in relation to scientific creativity and abductive modes of knowing, and other themes of the Philosophy of Sciences (e.g. Epistemologies). She is an elected Vice-President and Secretary, member of the Executive Committee (2020-2023; 2023-2026) and of the Council (2019-2022; 2022-2025) of the Complex Systems Society, Academic Editor of the journal Complexity (from 2021) and Associate Reviewer of Informing Science. She was an Associate (2016-2023), of the York Cross-Disciplinary Centre for Systems Analysis, where she was a visiting academic (2016-2018), along with the Department of Health Sciences of the University of York.