Ruth Enid Zambrana
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Research Topic: Women’s health, maternal and child health, and socioeconomic and life course impacts on health and mental well-being and the persistence in higher education of historic underrepresented minorities.
“I have acted on three major passions in my academic career: conducting intersectional research for social justice and action to uncover the structural roots of negative stereotypes and life course social determinants among low-income Puerto Rican and Mexican origin groups; pedagogical practices and approaches that seek to inculcate critical thinking skills in students to encourage them to engage in advocacy for social justice; and mentoring the next generation of research scholars from these historically underrepresented groups and other social and economically disadvantaged communities. Counternarratives to dismantle unfounded stereotypes and racism are an important responsibility in the knowledge-producing enterprise of academia.”
Dr. Zambrana is strongly committed to mentoring historically disadvantaged undergraduate and graduate students and early career faculty. Her research applies an intersectional lens to the effect of race, class, ethnicity, and gender identities on social/economic inequality, population health and pathways to higher education. Her major research concentrations are women’s health, maternal and child health, and socioeconomic and life course impacts on health and mental well-being and the persistence in higher education of historic underrepresented minorities.
While at the LRI, Dr. Zambrana plans to contribute to the development of a Latino-centric data repository lab on studies conducted by predominantly Latino investigators on Latino community populations from the late 1960s to late 1990s. She also plans to explore digital humanities archives to identify and catalogue the accomplishments of Mexican American and Puerto Rican biomedical, public health, and sociomedical scientists and insure their longevity through a partnership with an institutionalized national archive; conduct a deep synthesis of empirical studies on Latino women's health; and to continue her collaborative work with the LRI in the development of mentoring programs by exploring partnerships in Puerto Rico and with Hispanic Serving Institutions in Texas.
Dr. Zambrana is a Distinguished University Professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also an adjunct Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, School of Medicine. Her scholarship applies a critical intersectional lens to structural inequality and racial, Hispanic ethnicity, gender and economic disparities in population health and higher education. A prolific researcher, Dr. Zambrana has published 12 books and more than 150 articles; her most recent book is Toxic Ivory Tower: The Consequences of Work Stress on the Health of Underrepresented Minority Faculty (Rutgers University Press, 2018).
Dr. Zambrana has also dedicated her career to mentoring upcoming generations of underrepresented scholars, and established the Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity’s week-long Intersectional Qualitative Research Methods Institute at the University of Maryland for early-career academics as part of this commitment to mentoring.
She is the recipient of numerous awards, most recently the 2021 Lyndon Haviland Public Health Mentoring Award for her dedication to the development of the next generation of public health professionals. In 2020, she was named Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland for her outstanding contributions to her field.