Lourdes Baezconde-Garbanati

Lourdes Baezconde-Garbanati, PhD, MPH, is a tenured professor in preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. She is also a Member of the Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center where she is co-Director and Project Leader of the Patient Education and Community Outreach Center. She is Director of community outreach and education at the Institute for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Research, is in a Multiple PI structure, a PI of the Office of Community Engagement of the Southern California Clinical Translation Institute (CTSI). She is an internal advisory committee member to the Center for Environmental Health Community Outreach Core, and a founding Director of an international effort, the Center for Health Equity in the Americas, a KSOM program out of the Dean's Office, focused on research and education with the goal of reducing disparities and achieving health equity throughout the Americas. She is Co-Director of the Global Health Leadership Track in the Masters of Public Health Program, and conducts and promotes student and faculty research on a variety of topics among vulnerable population groups. She has a Courtesy Appointment at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Baezconde-Garbanati has a solid reputation as a widely recognized national and international community engaged scholar in the areas of culture and community health, with an emphasis on Hispanic/Latino health. Her work is known for its creativity, and transdisciplinary nature, where academic disciplines and community talent converge with ingenuity to produce unique programs of research that advance science while fulfilling community needs. She develops and tests innovative interventions that help modify cultural and lifestyle risk factors for cancer and tobacco control at the community level. She teaches courses on gender and ethnic minority health, health promotion and disease prevention, culture, and on community organizing and mobilization for health locally and globally. She has mentored well over 200 students in research from undergraduates to doctoral and postdoctoral fellows and is widely sought out as a mentor among Junior Faculty. She is strongly engaged in community participatory and population-based research and serves in the community as a community/academic broker for culturally and community grounded research.