Naomi Guerrero Reyes

Naomi Guerrero Reyes is a doctoral student in Health Policy and Management in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the first in her family to obtain a bachelor's degree in public health from Westminster University in Salt Lake City, Utah. During her undergraduate years, she conducted research on assessing domestic violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, barriers to receiving aid, and experiences with domestic violence advocacy organizations among women of color living in Utah. During her time in the Summer Program for Undergraduate Research (SPUR) at the University of Utah, she did an extensive literature review on the association between acculturation, acculturative stress, and suicidal behavior among Hispanics in the US. For her senior capstone, she evaluated the awareness and knowledge of skin cancer among construction workers, with an emphasis on Hispanic/Latinx workers in Utah, which led her to present results at the Utah Public Health Association conference and receive 2nd place in the best poster presentation. During her post-graduate years, she worked as a Health Educator/Patient Navigator for Hispanic/Latinx cancer patients at the Huntsman Cancer Institute, where she was able to identify and reduce barriers to help Hispanic cancer patients access healthcare.

Her current research topic interests are in immigrant health and the health disparities/inequalities that Hispanic/Latina/o/x individuals face in the US healthcare system. Her most recent in-progress work with the help of Dr. Airin Martinez and Dr. Evelyn Mercado's Biobehavioral Study of Latinx Parent-Youth Experiences of Discrimination in Western Massachusetts data, is an ancillary qualitative study that seeks to explore, through semi-structured interviews, how the current presidential administration and immigration enforcement operations, as forms of institutional racism, are affecting Latinx US-born and foreign-born adults' help and health-seeking behaviors for themselves and their families in Western Massachusetts.