Ana Martinez-donate PhD

Ana Martinez-Donate is a professor of Community Health and Prevention in the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University, joining the School in September 2015. Previously, she was a tenured faculty in the Department of Population Health Sciences, University of Wisconsin–Madison. She was trained in Health Psychology and received her PhD from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, in 1999. She completed post-graduate studies in Epidemiology at the National School of Public Health, Spain (2000) and received post-doctoral training at San Diego State University, focusing on health promotion, behavioral epidemiology, and community health.

Martinez-Donate's research work has focused primarily on Latino populations in the U.S. and Mexico. She applies a social ecological framework to the analysis of behavioral and social determinants of population health and the development and evaluation of community-based interventions for disease prevention and health promotion.

She has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health since 2007. She is the lead investigator of a long-standing binational program of research on HIV risk and access to health services among Mexican migrants. She is also leading several projects that seek to 1) examine the negative impact of immigration and deportation policies on the children of Latino immigrant families; 2) understand syndemic health conditions, such as substance use, violence, HIV/AIDS, and mental health (SAVAME) that disproportionately impact Latino immigrants in the U.S.; and 3) test community-based interventions to reduce the impact of the SAVAME syndemic and the COVID-19 pandemic on Latino immigrant communities in Philadelphia.

At Drexel University, she leads the Migration, Ethnicity, Race and Health Working Group (MERHG), a group of faculty, fellows, and students interested in the intersection of these social determinants of health. She is also the founder of the Latino Health Collective, a coalition of Latino-serving organizations, city representatives, and advocates who work together to promote the health and well-being of Latino communities in Philadelphia.