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Martinez, Gubrium Elected to APHA Leadership Roles
Airín D. Martínez and Aline Gubrium in the department of health promotion and policy recently assumed leadership roles in the American Public Health Association (APHA).
Martínez, who joined the faculty as assistant professor in September, has been selected to a three-year term as scientific co-chair for the Latino Caucus on Public Health (LCPH). The LCPH represents the unique perspectives and special public health problems common to Spanish-speaking individuals in the U.S., and provides programs that explore the special issues of migrant workers, illegal immigrants, legal immigrants and those individuals who lack access to Western medical systems and rely on traditional indigenous systems of care.
“I’m honored and humbled to be selected to co-chair to the scientific section of the LCPH,” says Martínez. In this leadership role, she hopes to collaborate more with other caucuses, special primary interest groups and sections in APHA; increase the membership and thematic sessions about non-Spanish speaking Latinx persons; and promote participatory, transnational and multidisciplinary public health research and practice that promote Latinx health equity.
Gubrium, an associate professor, has begun her two-year term as chair of the Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) section following the completion of her one-year term as chair-elect. The SRH section works to improve the health of women, men and children by ensuring that population, reproductive and sexual health remain major domestic and international priorities.
In her candidacy statement, Gubrium said her goals for the position would be to promote opportunities for public health students, faculty and practitioners that nurture and strengthen a fruitful multidisciplinarity in the section, across the biological and social sciences, humanities, and health professions; encourage community-based research and engaged scholarship; work from a reproductive justice orientation that promotes dignity and respect in research and practice; and tap into the discipline’s critical and creative wellsprings and activist inclinations to address social inequality and health inequity.
Founded in 1872, the APHA is the pre-eminent association for public health professionals, championing the health of all people and all communities and advocating for public health issues and policies backed by science.