Zsuzsa Kaló is an associate professor at the ELTE PPK Institute of Psychology, Head of the Department of Counselling and School Psychology. She is a psychologist and linguist, a founding member of the Research Group on Qualitative Psychology at ELTE PPK, and the head of the Research Group on Criminal Psychology. Her research interests include qualitative drug research and interdisciplinary approaches to data collection and analysis. Her recent research interests pertain to women’s addictions and trauma narratives of girls and women. She started her research career at the Institute of Psychology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences as a young researcher between 2006 and 2010, and since May 2015 she has been a staff member of the Institute of Psychology at ELTE PPK.
She has been involved in several international research projects, for example, in the development of an online qualitative method on new psychoactive substances. In addition, she designs and conducts her own studies: in 2016, she was awarded a grant to assess substance use among girls in children’s homes in Hungary and to explore the availability of care, and from 2018 to 2019, she developed a trauma-informed group counselling method for women substance users and evaluated its impact.
Zsuzsa Kaló is the author of the book “Introduction to the World of Female Substance Abusers”, and she has also published 29 journal articles, 10 books or book chapters as editor or author, and delivered 45 national and international conference presentations.
She has been a member of the Hungarian Psychological Society and has been its Scientific Secretary since 2020. She has also been a member of the European Society for Social Drug Research (ESSD) since 2009, elected Vice President of the European organization in 2022, a board member of the Hungarian Addiction Society (since 2017), and an elected member of the International Committee of the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology (SQIP) of the American Psychological Association (APA) since 2018, and was the chair of the committee from 2020 to 2022.