Martínez Receives Distinguished Community-Engaged Research Award
The award recognizes a faculty member for a record of community-engaged research, scholarship, and creative activities.
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The UMass Amherst Provost's Office has selected Airín D. Martínez, Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management, as the 2023 recipient of the Distinguished Community-Engaged Research Award. The award recognizes a faculty member or librarian for a record of community-engaged research, scholarship, and creative activities, in all disciplines and fields, which contributes to their community partner organizations, UMass Amherst, the academy, and communities at large.
Martínez’s research examines how institutional racism from immigration enforcement policies, housing, and food environments, create material deprivation, psychosocial stress, and biobehavioral effects in Latinx adults and children.
Martínez has several community-engaged and participatory research projects in Massachusetts, including a community-based study with Assistant Professor Evelyn Mercado in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences examining the biobehavioral effects of racism in Latinx parent-youth dyads. She is also leading the behavioral science team of a CDC-funded comprehensive suicide prevention program examining help-seeking behaviors, facilitators, and barriers to suicide care for Latinx men and other vulnerable populations in the Commonwealth. Through her partnership with Let’s Move Hampden County 5-2-1-0, she leads the evaluation team on a project funded by the USDA Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program to examine the health benefits of culturally tailored diabetes nutrition education and a produce prescription program for diabetic Community Care Cooperative (C3) patients implemented by Nuestras Raíces and the Holyoke Health Center.
Martínez hopes that her research can inform community-based prevention strategies and inform equitable policies that support historically marginalized immigrant and racial and ethnic populations in the United States.
“I ground my research in community engagement and participatory methodologies because I believe it facilitates power-sharing between community members, who are often subjects and not agents of research and evaluation,” says Martínez. “Moreover, integrating local knowledge has the potential to innovate research and inform local interventions.”
Distinguished Community Engagement Awards have been made annually by the Provost’s Office for more than two decades. The awards recognize “individuals within our campus community for their outstanding contributions to community-engaged scholarship and teaching, and campus/community partnerships, with impacts at the local, regional, national or international level.”