Dr. Mary A. Garza, MPH, PhD

Dr. Mary A. Garza is a tenured associate professor in the Department of Public Health, where she has taught since the Fall 2018 semester. Born and raised in Fresno, she left to attend graduate school at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, MD. She loved the East Coast but returned after twenty years for family reasons.

During her tenure on the East Coast, she had the opportunity to serve in multiple leadership positions, including as Associate Director of the Maryland Center for Health Equity and Co-director of the Community Engagement and Outreach Core for our previous P20 Center of Excellence (2010-2018). She also served as Co-chair for the Maryland Community Research Advisory Board (MD-CRAB) and Co-chaired the Human Subjects and Research Committee for the Department of Behavioral and Community Health. In addition, at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, she served as Deputy Director for the Center for Minority Health P60 Center of Excellence (2005-2010). Her research activities encompass the entire intervention research process, from planning and developing to implementing, evaluating, and disseminating research findings, all using a community-based participatory research approach. Trained as a behavioral scientist, she has been working in racial and ethnic health disparities research for the past 20 years, promoting the use of community-engaged research and practice to address the health and well-being of minority and underserved populations. Dr. Garza brings a wealth of experience in community-engaged research, cultural competency, research methods, the design and implementation of community-based interventions, and the management of clinical trials with a focus on health disparities research.

During the summer of 2019, Dr. Garza started working at the Central Valley Health Policy Institute (CVHPI) as a research fellow and she got involved in a recently funded research study to improve birth outcomes. By the end of the summer and for the past five years, she has served as the Site Director and Principal Investigator for the Fresno State subcontract titled “Engaging Mothers & Babies: Reimagining Antenatal Care for Everyone (EMBRACE) Research Study”—a five-year, $5.6 million grant funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). This award included a research collaboration with the University of California, San Francisco, to conduct a comparative effectiveness study on two prenatal care models aimed at improving birth outcomes among African American and Latine women in the Central Valley, actively engaging the community partners throughout the research process. 

Dr. Garza provided leadership and oversight for the CVHPI team, which comprised three full-time research staff members (Program Manager, Recruitment and Retention Specialist Coordinator, and Research/Communication Specialist) and six part-time employees (four undergraduate students from Fresno State, one graduate student from UC Merced, and one community member).

She used the EMBRACE study to provide unique research experiences for students through didactic learning, e.g., presentations on social determinants of health, health literacy, research 101, and research ethics. In addition, students learned research skills through role-playing and shadowing at clinical sites, including recruitment strategies for study participants at prenatal clinics, such as interviewing potential participants to assess their eligibility and administering quantitative surveys.

She is currently a full-time faculty member in the MPH Program and teaches undergraduate courses for the Public Health major. Dr. Garza has mentored undergraduate, master's, and doctoral students, as well as postdoctoral fellows, in health disparities research. She is strongly committed to training the next generation of public health leaders and ensuring continued progress in increasing minority representation in research and practice.