Ruth Enid Zambrana

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, with a secondary appointment as professor of family medicine at the University of Maryland, Baltimore School of Medicine. As an inter/nationally recognized social scientist, she has published widely on health inequity in her major research areas: race/ethnic population health, women’s health, maternal and child health, socioeconomic health disparities, and life course impacts on health and mental health outcomes of historically underrepresented minorities. Her interdisciplinary work contributes to a deeper understanding of the multiple social and political determinants of health, including discrimination, that intersect to produce long-term systemic barriers to life course health outcomes among economically disadvantaged and underrepresented groups. Her current work, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, examines the perceptions of senior leadership and constructs of fair and equitable institutions of higher learning. She is examining the intersections of equity and inclusion as components of the “ health” of higher education environments and their impact on the academic community.  Her prior work focused on underrepresented early-career scholars and the institutional factors associated with work stress in higher education research institutions.