Keynote Speaker Nina Wallerstein, DrPH, MPH

Nina Wallerstein

Professor, Department of Family and Community Medicine
Director, Center for Participatory Research
University of New Mexico

Biography

Dr. Wallerstein is Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine, and was the founding Director of the Masters in Public Health Program at the University of New Mexico. She currently directs the Center for Participatory Research, V.P. Office of Community Health; and the Partnership for Health Research Unit, Clinical Translational Research Center at UNM; and is a Senior Fellow for the RWJF Health Policy Center at UNM.

For over 25 years, Dr. Wallerstein has been involved in empowerment/popular education, and participatory research with youth, women, tribes, and community building efforts. Her research focuses on community capacity and health development, culturally appropriate translational intervention research to reduce health disparities, participatory evaluation, and community based participatory research processes and outcomes. Her tribal research (funded by CDC, NARCH/NIH/NIDA) includes cultural capacity, social capital, and infrastructure assessments; and community and intergenerational culturally-centered and adapted interventions. She was the PI of the Southwest Addictions Research Group (NIAAA), whose purpose was to train junior faculty of color to reduce disparities among Native American and Hispanic communities; and co-director of the post-doctoral program for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy at UNM, to train minority leaders in health policy.

Dr. Wallerstein is an editor of the first national textbook of CBPR, Community Based Participatory Research for Health: From Process to Outcomes, 2nd edition, 2008, San Francisco, Jossey Bass (with Meredith Minkler); was PI of a national NCMHD-funded grant to identify research strategies to assess facilitators and barriers of community-academic research partnerships; and currently co-PI, with the National Congress of American Indians Policy Research Center and the University of Washington, on a new NARCH V study to conduct internet surveys and case studies of CBPR partnerships nationwide to further enhance the science of CBPR.