Principal Investigators
Ana Martínez-Donate
Ana P. Martínez-Donate, PhD, is an associate professor of Community Health and Prevention in the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University. Her work has focused primarily on Latino immigrants in the U.S. and abroad. Martínez-Donate's areas of expertise include health promotion, behavioral epidemiology, immigrant health, and health disparities. She applies a social ecological framework and participatory methods to the analysis of behavioral and social determinants of population health and to the development and evaluation of community-based interventions to promote the health of disparity populations. At Drexel University, she leads the Migration, Ethnicity, Race and Health Working Group, a group of faculty, fellows, and students interested in the intersection of these social determinants of health. Martínez-Donate is the principal investigator of the Migrante Project. For more information about Dr. Martínez-Donate, see her Personal website. |
Maria Gudelia Rangel Gomez
Dr. Rangel Gomez has a distinguished public and academic career in health public policy, research, and teaching. Most of her academic research has been at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana, Baja California, where she served as Director for Population Studies from 2003 to 2004, and as General Director of Academic Affairs from 2004 to 2007. From 2008 to 2011, she served as Deputy General Director for Migrant Health for the Mexican Ministry of Health and now works for the Mexico Section of the US-Mexico Border Health Commission. She currently serves as the Commission's Executive Secretary and was previously the Coordinator of the Commission's Baja California Outreach Office. She is the co-principal investigator for the Migrante Project. |
Co-Investigators and
Consultants
Consultants
Ahmed Ali Asadi González
Dr. Ahmed Asadi is a Psychology professor at Universidad Autonoma de Baja California. He has over a decade of experience working with Dr. Martinez-Donate in research in Mexico and the U.S. He has served as interviewer, supervisor, and site coordinator for studies led by Dr. Martinez-Donate investigating HIV risk among Mexican high school students, tobacco use and home smoking policies in California and Mexico, and social marketing strategies targeting Latino men who have sex with men in North San Diego County. He currently collaborates with Dr. Martinez-Donate and Dr. Rangel to oversee data collection on the U.S.-Mexico border for an NIH-funded study on Mexican migrants’ access and utilization of healthcare. He supervises and coordinates 10 data collectors at the Tijuana bus, airport and deportation station to collect survey data from 2,000 participants. |
Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes
Dr. Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes is professor of economics at University of California, Merced, a Research Fellow at CReAM, FEDEA, GLO and IZA, an Advisory committee member of the Americas Center Advisory Council at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, and the Western Representative in the Committee for the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) since 2015. Her areas of interest include labor economics, international migration, immigration policy and remittances. Her work has been funded by the Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA), the Hewlett Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, among other agencies. She was the 2013-2014 Border Fulbright García-Robles Scholar, Department Chair at San Diego State University between 2015 and 2018, President of the American Society of Hispanic Economists (ASHE) in 2014, and has held visiting positions at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, the Center for Human Resource at Ohio State University, the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and at the Public Policy Institute of California. |
Carlos Magis Rodríguez
Carlos Magis Rodríguez is a medical doctor, professor, Doctor of Public Health, and member of Mexico's Sistema Nacional de Investigadores del Conacyt. He is also a professor of public health at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)'s School of Medicine. He was worked in the field of AIDS research since starting his work with Conasida in 1988. Between 1990 and 1995, he was the head of the National Register of Cases of AIDS (Registro Nacional de Casos de Sida). Between 1996 and 2010, he was the Director of Research for Conasida and Censida. Between 2011 and 2012, he was the research coordinator for the Condesa clinic in Mexico's Distrito Federal. Finally, from 2013 to June 2019, he was the director of comprehensive care for Censida, where he supervised the care of more than 90,000 people with HIV. He has published more than 160 articles in scientific journals, the majority of which are epidemiologic and/or social in nature. Many have focused on HIV and people who inject drugs. He is the editor of Censida's and Instuto Nacional de Salud Pública's public health manual for AIDS. He is also the editor of a series of books about research called Ángulos el Sida. To date, 15 books written by various authors have been published as part of the series. In 2000, he published the first secretary of health manual on harm reduction for injection drug use. |
Christina J. Diaz
Christina Diaz earned a Ph.D. in Sociology with a concentration in Demography and Ecology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of social demography, immigration, and family formation. Many of these projects shed light on the health and well-being of Latin American immigrants who reside in the U.S. or have returned to their country of origin. In her most recent work, Christina examines whether—and to what extent—immigration-origin populations influence social, cultural, and economic change in the U.S. She is particularly interested in understanding how “American” culture contracts and expands in response to immigration. Christina is a 2018 Career Enhancement Fellow through the (formerly named) Woodrow Wilson National Foundation and has received recognition for her scholarship from the American Sociological Association, the Population Association of America, and the National Council for Family Relations. She is a current Councilmember of the Population Section for the American Sociological Association. Before joining Rice University in 2021, Christina was an assistant professor in the School of Sociology at the University of Arizona. |
J. Eduardo González-Fagoaga
Dr. Gonzalez-Fagoaga is a researcher at the US-Mexico Border Health Commission, Mexico section and a faculty member at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universidad Autónoma de Baja California. His research areas are the health of migrant populations, border health, and border demographic dynamics. He has participated in many research projects; currently, he is an investigator for the Group of Research and Incidence in Migration and Health, a research program funded by Mexico’s National Science Council (Conacyt). In addition, he is a consultant for the regional office of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), implementing projects centered on the health of migrant populations in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. |
Emilio Parrado
Emilio A. Parrado is the Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor of Sociology and Director of the Population Studies Center at The University of Pennsylvania. He received his bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University of Buenos Aires and his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago. His area of specialization is social demography, with particular emphasis on international migration and family and fertility behavior. His research explores multiple dimensions of Latin American immigration and adaptation to the United States as well as demographic behavior in Latin America. His focus crosses the areas of ethnicity, demography, sociology of immigration, and cross-national sociology. Most of his published work falls into five interrelated domains: 1) Hispanic migration to new areas of destination, 2) Hispanic fertility and reproductive health, 3) the new geography of Hispanic settlement, 4) determinants and consequences of international migration for sending and receiving regions; and 5) social and demographic change in Latin America. Underlying these foci is a common interest in issues of inequality, development, and stratification. |
Felice Lê-Scherban
Dr. Lê-Scherban is Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health. Her research centers on health disparities with a focus on children’s health disparities, life course determinants, and immigrant health. Her work has examined intergenerational socioeconomic influences on mental and physical health; neighborhood social contexts; and cardiovascular risk among immigrants. She currently serves as lead of the Philadelphia site of Children’s HealthWatch and co-lead of the West Philly Promise Neighborhood Data & Research Core. |
Fernando Riosmena
Fernando Riosmena an Associate Professor of the Population Program and the Geography Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He specializes in three areas of study. The first is related to the causes of international migration, particularly between Mexico and the United States, with a comparative inter and and intra-national focus. The second is related to the impact of migration on the health and wellbeing of migrants, their descendents in the United States, and/or their non-migrant family members in sending communities. Both as part of this area of study and independent of it, Riosmena also studies ethnic-racial disparities in health and wellbeing in Mexico and the United States, including the social determinants of health and aging. |
Sylvia Guendelman
Dr. Guendelman is a Professor Emeritus of Maternal and Child Health, Health Services and Policy Analysis at the University of California - Berkeley School of Public Health. Personal website. |
Xiao Zhang
Dr. Zhang is a clinical research scientist in the Division of Pediatric Cardiology in the Department of Pediatrics. She is a trained researcher in population health sciences, with 7 years of experience in doing population health, translational, and clinical research. Through her research, she has accumulated extensive experience with study design and data collection using both quantitative and qualitative methods, as well as with the management and analysis of large databases. Her work has led to a series of publications in peer-reviewed journals and presentations at national and international conferences. During her previous research activities, she has collaborated with researchers from different disciplines, and has a proven track record of creating and fostering great interpersonal relationship to ensure the success of team-based projects. |
Staff
Tijuana
Tijuana
Gabriela Escalante
Ms. Escalante provides data management and administrative support for Migrante. She is currently the Planning Coordinator at the United States-Mexico Border Health Commission, Mexican Section. |
Additional Staff in Tijuana
Daniela Rosas Rangel Emmanuel López Torres Kerén Jasso Flores Omar Varela Rene Cuautle Tecuapetla Staff in Ciudad Juárez
Dr. Martha Sánchez Óscar Balcázar |
Jesús Alejandro Morales Ramos
Jesús has a degree in Psychology from the University of Baja California. As part of his work for the Mexico Section of the U.S.-Mexico Border Health Commission, he has participated in various projects, including Dr. Martínez-Donate and Dr. Rangel's NIH-funded "Entre Líneas" study for which Jesús served as a field research assistant. As a psychologist for the Commission's migrant health clinic, he has also participated in a project called "Prevention and Detection of HIV/AIDS in Mexican migrants repatriated from the United States through Tijuana and Mexicali, Baja California." In addition to his other roles, he currently works as a supervisor for the Migrante Project in Tijuana. |
Staff in Matamoros
Gustavo Padilla Dr. Leonardo Ríos Mario Rodríguez |