About.Network of scholars at any career stage from graduate students, to post-doctoral fellows, junior investigators, and seasoned researchers for the support of peer mentorship, exchange of knowledge and collaboration on research presentations, publications and advocacy.
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Our Team
Ana Martínez-Donate, PhD
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Felice Lê-Scherban, PhD
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Brent Langellier, PhD MA
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Jessi Pintor, PhD MPH
Assistant Professor Dr. Pintor is a mixed-methods health services researcher whose work addresses immigration and healthcare policy, disparities in access to and quality of care for children and families, and the effectiveness of population health interventions. Her work uses a range of quantitative and qualitative methods, including community-based participatory approaches, to measure and understand healthcare access.
Research Interests:
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Tran Huynh, PhD
Assistant Professor Dr. Tran Huynh's research interests focus on exposure assessment strategies for occupational epidemiological studies as well as for risk management. She has also collaborated on the chemical exposure assessment for the GuLF STUDY funded by NIEHS. Dr. Huynh is also interested in developing theory-based health and safety interventions that target workers employed in very small businesses such as nail salons. She is a certified industrial hygienist.
Research Interests:
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Mariana Lazo, MD, PhD, ScM
Associate Research Professor Her current research interest includes: 1) understanding the contributions of socioeconomic (SES) and neighborhood conditions to the distribution of chronic liver diseases (and risk factors) and alcohol-related health outcomes, and 2) the study of the observed disparities by race/ethnicity (particularly among Hispanics) and by SES on these outcomes. Her work has employed a broad scope of methodologies from primary data collection, to secondary data analyses of US national surveys and cohort studies, systematic reviews, and the conduct of clinical trials. Dr. Lazo has conducted work in the U.S. but also internationally in Latin America.
In addition to the Drexel affiliation, Dr. Lazo retains an appointment as Associate Professor (Adjunct) at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and as faculty of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity. Research interests:
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Jourdyn A. Lawrence, PhD, MSPH
Assistant Professor Jourdyn A. Lawrence, PhD, MSPH, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Dornsife School of Public Health as part of the FIRST (Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation) program.
Her research uses interdisciplinary theories and epidemiological methods to examine racism as a cause of racial health inequities, with a specific interest in healthy aging and cognitive health. She also explores how social policies, such as reparations, can act as health-related interventions to mitigate health inequities among Black people in the U.S. Dr. Lawrence received her PhD in Population Health Sciences from Harvard University and a Master of Science in Public Health (MSPH) in Epidemiology from the University of South Carolina. |
Headen, PhD, MS
Assistant Professor Her research interests investigate the social and structural determinants of racial/ethnic disparities in adverse pregnancy outcomes. In particular, her work focuses on identifying neighborhood and community factors underlying these disparities and understanding how systems thinking can help translate these factors into multilevel interventions to improve Black maternal health outcomes. Central to Dr. Headen’s work is placing pregnancy within the context of women’s reproductive life course and developing ways to understand how structural racism operates over the life course to create racial/ethnic disparities during this critical window. She uses both epidemiologic and mixed methods approaches to conduct her research.
Research Interests
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Ana Ortigoza, MD, PhD, MPH, MS
Senior Research Scientist II Ana Ortigoza, MD, PhD, MPH, MS is a Senior Research Scientist II at Urban Health Collaborative- Drexel University-USA, working for a project on Urban Health in Latin American cities (SALURBAL). Her research focuses mostly on understanding how health inequalities among women and children/youth are linked to social and built urban environment and climate change in cities.
She is also interested in the connections between health and urban poverty (particularly in slums), and in the use of data for intelligent urban systems, making data and evidence more findable, shareable, and usable in a way that could empower grass-root organizations and inform decision makers to generate societal changes. She is pediatrician by training and holds a MD degree from Universidad Nacional de Rosario (Argentina), an MPH from Universidad Nacional de Lanus (Argentina), and a masters and PhD in Epidemiology from Drexel University. Research interests:
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Agus Surachman, PhD, MS
Assistant Professor Dr. Surachman is a developmental and health equity scholar interested in understanding the social, psychological, and biological factors of aging. His research focuses on the intersectional impact of life course socioeconomic status (SES) and other minoritized identities in differentiating exposure to psychosocial risk factors that contribute to accelerated aging.
Research Interests:
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Elizabeth (Libby) Salerno Valdez, PhD, MPH
Assistant Professor Dr. Elizabeth “Libby” Salerno Valdez is an assistant professor in the Department of Community Health & Prevention. Her research program fosters ethical and mutually beneficial academic-community partnerships using participatory, social justice-oriented approaches to examine the structural factors that influence health among marginalized and racialized populations.
Dr. Valdez received the Kirschstein-National Research Services Award F31 (F31MD01243) from NIMHD to conduct her dissertation, which engaged adolescents in a youth participatory action research project using mixed methods to examine environmental factors that influence adolescent substance use at the U.S.-Mexico border. She is currently co-PI on the four-year study Using Participatory Methods to Examine Structural Drivers of Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health Inequities in Massachusetts, funded by MA Department of Public Health. Community-led study findings are actively used by the MA Department of Public Health to initiate policy and systems change in the areas of sexual and reproductive health, housing, transportation, childcare, and other social services. She is also co-PI on a pilot study funded by MA Dept of Public Health to develop a peer-to-peer family ambassador program to combat the effects of structural violence on young parents and their families. Dr. Valdez’s future research is focused on developing community-led health equity structural interventions that attempt to change the social, physical, economic or political environments that affect the health of young people from historically marginalized backgrounds. Relatedly, she is also interested in testing youth participatory action research as an intervention to combat the negative effects of structural violence on adolescent health. Research Interests:
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Bertranna A. Muruthi, PhD
Assistant Professor Dr. Muruthi's research looks at the family as the unit of analysis within the context of communities and the community-based organizations that serve them. As such, family needs and resilient behaviors are understood at a systemic level. There are three areas she addresses to develop her program of research: (a) migration, resettlement, and transnationalism of documented and undocumented immigrants; (b) predictors of risk and resilient behavior in immigrant families; and (c) development of intervention and prevention programming for immigrant families. Her research uses culturally responsive community-based collaborative methods. She uses this strength-based model to look at individuals and families within the context of communities and the community-based organizations that serve them. She incorporates community culture and knowledge and practices throughout research with the aim of producing culturally effective actions that lead to community transformation and social change.
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Luis Arturo Valdez, PhD, MPH
Assistant Professor Luis Arturo Valdez, PhD, MPH, is an assistant professor in the Department of Community Health & Prevention. Valdez joined the Dornsife School of Public Health as part of the Drexel FIRST (Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation) program.
Dr. Valdez is a first-generation Mexican immigrant of Yaqui and Opata lineage raised and trained in the US-Mexico borderlands. They earned their PhD in Health Behavior & Health Promotion with a minor in Epidemiology at the University of Arizona in 2017. Dr. Valdez uses community-led mixed-methods approaches to understand and address the impact of systemic processes (i.e., racism & patriarchy) that perpetuate health inequities in historically marginalized populations. The work that they facilitate is community-centered and works from a foundational aim to build mutually-beneficial and ethical research collaborations with communities that foster critical consciousness, capacity building, and collective advocacy. Currently, Dr. Valdez is interested in understanding how individual-level characteristics interact with macro-level factors to influence the health-related behaviors of Latino men. Broadly, his research examines a range of behaviors related to alcohol and substance misuse, chronic stress, healthy food choice, and physical activity, with an emphasis on developing and testing scalable, multilevel, culturally-, regionally-, and gender-responsive interventions that intentionally consider the heterogeneity that exists in distinct Latinx communities in the U.S. Dr. Valdez approaches their work with an intersectional gender-transformative framework that disentangles the complex roots of inequity in aim of reshaping unequal power relations toward health equity. |
Stephanie Hernandez, PhD, MS
Assistant Professor Stephanie Hernandez, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. She joined the Dornsife School of Public Health as part of the Drexel FIRST (Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation) program. Stephanie is a demographer whose research examines sexual and gender minority health. She received her PhD in Demography from the University of Texas at San Antonio and a Master of Science (MS) in Demography from Florida State University.
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Claudia Zumaeta-Castillo, PhD(c), MPH
Doctoral Student Claudia is a Public Health PhD student at Drexel University's Dornsife School of Public Health. She has experience working with underserved Latino communities in Philadelphia. She is currently working in the CRiSOL intervention with Ana Martinez-Donate to improve the impact of SAVAME syndemic in the Latino immigrant community in Philadelphia.
Claudia is a psychologist by training with a degree in Clinical Psychology from la Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia (Peru). Research Interests:
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