Martínez Named 2025 Public Engagement Faculty Fellow
As a PEP fellow, she will write news articles and engage with the media and share her work with policymakers.
Content
Airín D. Martínez, Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management in the Department of Health Promotion and Policy, has been named a 2025 Public Engagement Faculty Fellow by the Public Engagement Project (PEP) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is among the six UMass faculty members who will draw on their substantial research records to impact policy, the work of practitioners and public debates.
The PEP Fellows Program, of which this group constitutes the 11th cohort, facilitates connections between fellows and lawmakers in the U.S. Congress and Massachusetts State House, journalists, practitioners and others to share their research beyond the walls of academia. The faculty fellows will receive a stipend and technical training in communicating with non-academic audiences.
Martínez studies how social policies and institutional practices produce health inequities in U.S. Latinx populations. Her goal is to destigmatize public health issues like suicide and obesity as individual-level problems and advocate for policies that address these inequities. During her PEP fellowship, she will develop policy briefs for state legislators and public health officials and engage in podcasts and radio communication to reach a wider audience.
“For more than a decade, the expanding network of PEP Faculty Fellows has made significant impacts,” says Lisa M. Troy, director of the Public Engagement Project and associate professor of nutrition in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences and the Commonwealth Honors College. “By training UMass faculty members to translate their scholarship to an audience beyond academia, they are having broader impacts locally, nationally and internationally. PEP Fellows have been invited to governor task forces, onto the National Academy of Sciences committees, and for congressional testimony, as well as informing the general public through various media outlets. In this way, PEP Fellows are facilitating the mission of UMass Amherst as a land grant university, ‘to advance knowledge and improve the lives of the people of the Commonwealth, the nation and the world.’”
The Public Engagement Project is a faculty-driven initiative building on a collaboration of the Institute for Social Science Research (ISSR), the Center for Research on Families (CRF) and the Transportation Center (UMTC). The PEP Faculty Fellowship has been made possible by funding from the College of Education, College of Engineering, College of Humanities and Fine Arts, College of Natural Sciences, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, School of Public Health and Health Sciences, Office of the Provost and University Relations.