Margarita Murillo Gamboa
University of Costa Rica
Home country: Costa Rica

I have 23 years of experience in couple and family psychological therapy. I have also spent 15 years as a faculty member at the University of Costa Rica, the last six years at the College Psychology, and I am the former director of the Costa Rican Professional Psychology Magazine. Throughout my professional and personal development, I have given emphasis to the research and analysis as carried out in different countries, obtaining approaches that have been extensively tested in a variety of human groups with different characteristics, and which yielded excellent levels of effectiveness. I have reported these data at different conferences, especially at the 17th World Congress of Sexology, Montreal, in 2005. Since 2000 the Universidad de Costa Rica has considered this method to bear social and educational interest. As a result we developed and carried out a 60-hour teaching program where we trained individuals of all professional levels, and we urged them to formulate proposals using this methodology and using their own professional fields as reference points. The goal of the program is to find ways to lead communities, be it government entities, universities, businesses, the mass media, community organizations or personal interests, to commit themselves to find responses that will help improve sexual health in our countries. Some of my noteworthy achievements include participating in the Foro de las Americas organized by the United Nations in 1999; conducting a training of teachers in Nicaragua to work in the field of sexual health in Guatemalan and Costa Rican communities; participating in television shows on the topics of sexual health in Guatemala on Channel 7 and on Costa Rican channels; in Mexico, training teachers to conduct work on sexual health, and conducting workshops for 10- to 19-year-old students and their parents; in Norway holding a therapy group for Chilean immigrants