Monica Tsethlikai is a former William T. Grant Scholar, a Native Children's Research Exchange Scholar and the recipient of two Ford Fellowships. She is an enrolled member of the Zuni tribe. Prior to obtaining her doctorate degree, her on-the-ground involvement in juvenile justice led to her interest in studying children's cognitive development as embedded within their social and cultural contexts and biosocial stresses. She uses a process model approach to examine how children’s daily activities and stressful life experiences impact executive function development and both directly and indirectly influence well-being.  Currently, she is conducting research among urban American Indian youth to examine whether active engagement in American Indian cultural and spiritual activities buffers the known negative effects of toxic stress on the development of executive functions. She is also exploring relations among stressful life experiences, stress physiology (using hair cortisol), and trauma symptoms in this population. She is an assistant professor in the T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics and teaches SOC 390 Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences and CDE 232 Human Development.

Tsethlikai graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1991 followed by eight years as a youth counselor and juvenile probation officer. She obtained a master's degree in Indigenous Nations studies in 2001 and doctorate in psychology (cognitive and quantitative) in 2005 from the University of Kansas. She completed a postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California, Santa Cruz, under the direction of Professor Barbara Rogoff followed by a position at the University of Utah - both positions were in psychology.