Michelle Meital Sanabria is a PhD student in Counseling Psychology at the University of Miami studying eudaimonic well-being across cultures, identities, and experiences. She earned dual bachelor's degrees in Psychology/Biology and Communications/Philosophy from Florida State University, where she researched psycholinguistics, children with autism, and suicidality in clinical populations. After studying cross-cultural conceptualizations of mental health in psychiatric hospitals in Indonesia and India, she spent three years at Stanford conducting affective neuroscience research on stress, depression, trauma, and suicidality in children and adolescents before beginning her doctoral work integrating Aristotelian virtue ethics with cross-cultural approaches to flourishing.

Michelle's current work lives at the intersection of research, clinical practice, and art—always with populations facing trauma, grief, and marginalization. She practices existential and meaning-centered psychotherapy with bereaved parents, collaborates on translational community programming with QTPOC communities, and has been teaching on discovering wellbeing since high school. She asks: How do humans make meaning from what breaks them? What are our whys—and how do they shift across cultures, identities, and life's ruptures?

A ballroom dancer, world traveler, poet, painter, and nature lover, Michelle lives the questions she studies. She believes meaning isn't found—it's forged in the asking, the living, the becoming.