Luis Arturo Valdez, PhD, MPH, (he/el/they/them) is an assistant professor in the Department of Community Health & Prevention at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health.
Dr. Valdez hopes that the Drexel FIRST program provides them with the necessary resources, mentorship and continued training to become a fully independent and tenured research-focused professor working to diminish health inequities in the Latinx population locally and at a national level.
They are invested in the communities with whom they collaborate, and in so doing, aim to reach this goal as a community-engaged scholar, building long-standing community partnerships to produce efficacious, mutually-beneficial, and sustainable research outcomes that improve health research focused on developing interventions to prevent stress and chronic disease with Latinx communities. He hopes to continue to expand his work at Drexel and in Philadelphia.
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, their 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 Latine 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.
Research Expertise:
Chronic Disease Prevention | Chronic Stress | Community Based Participatory Research | Gender Transformative Approaches | Health Communication | Health Disparities | Indigenous Health Equity | Latine Health Disparities | Migrant Health | Men’s Health | Obesity Prevention and Treatment | Participatory Action Research | Stress | Substance Abuse | Minority Stress
