Q&A with Denise Diaz Payán, PhD, MPP, UCI Public Health’s new Assistant Professor of Health, Society, and Behavior

An expert in community-based approaches to health policy research, Dr. Payán brings years of experience working directly with communities to address food insecurity through equitable public policy

Q: What drove you to pursue a career in public health? Academia?

Mentorship has always played a major role in setting my career trajectory. As a pre-med student in college, I was surrounded by mentors that took the time to understand my interests and encouraged me to explore different areas of study related to health. Their support came naturally when I began expressing an interest in health policy during undergraduate study. They encouraged me to explore graduate programs in public health and public policy and helped me understand that I could always go back to clinical medicine later in life if I wanted to. Several applications later, I was enrolled in the Harvard Kennedy School’s Master’s in Public Policy (MPP) program where I would begin my career in health care policy. After a year of taking classes in economics and health policy, I knew that I’d found my passion.

The transition to a doctoral program in public policy came organically after that. I chose the University of Southern California’s PhD in Public Policy and Management program to hone in on policy research on issues from nutrition and food insecurity to advocacy and health disparities. At the time, I was also working as a research assistant at the RAND Corporation, a think-tank aimed at developing solutions to public policy challenges worldwide. I enjoyed pursuing different lines of scientific inquiry through my work at USC and RAND, and from there, I realized that a career in academia might be a great fit after all.

Following my PhD degree, I began working at UC Merced and leading their Community Health & Innovative Policy (CHIP) Lab, a group dedicated to advancing community health and policy research by addressing health inequities. From there, my passion for public health and policy grew and I’ve been dedicated to the causes ever since.

Q: What do you hope to achieve in the first five years of your UC Irvine tenure?

I’m thrilled to be involved in expanding health policy research and practice at UCI Public Health. I look forward to continuing my work in investigating the impacts of public health and healthcare policies on individual behaviors and outcomes, all while working with colleagues and students to build a robust research team.

Food insecurity and obesity are major issues here in Orange County, where low-income areas are disproportionately impacted. I’ll be working closely with students in all program levels to address the issues that our residents face and get to know some of the frontline organizations that play a major role in safeguarding community health. It will be useful for our students to have the hands-on training and opportunity to take a deeper look into what community-engaged policy research looks like at the state and local level.

Q: What are the crossroads that have come up between your work and the pandemic?

The pandemic revealed existing inequities in the U.S. healthcare system that have long gone unaddressed. When the pandemic started and projects like in-person data collection had to take a pause, I was forced to shift to other projects that were related to food insecurity. I used this time to explore barriers to nutrition among Latinas and worked with colleagues on publishing a commentary on the subject. Across the U.S., Latina populations were especially hit hard economically during the pandemic due to issues with job security, lack of childcare, school closures, and more. We wanted to explore the ways in which these structural barriers impacted their risk of obesity, malnutrition, and food insecurity, then use our findings to make equitable policy recommendations. Our findings were published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

We also conducted a study on telemedicine implementation in federally qualified health centers, exploring the challenges that patients and providers faced as services were rolled out during the pandemic. Our goal was to better understand disparities in access to telehealth services and make recommendations on how to improve access and quality for populations with low digital literacy and limited English language proficiency. The paper was recently published in the journal SSM – Qualitative Research in Health.

Q: The pandemic has put public health center stage. Where does public health go from here? And how can higher education and institutes of learning help so we are in a better place moving forward?

The pandemic reminded us how important it is to invest in public health resources to better prepare for future pandemics and crises. It’s a lesson that our local, state, and federal governments should act on now.

In academia, we should think critically about how we are training future generations of public health personnel to take on challenges. Public health in the real world involves policy advocacy training, writing, and critical analysis skills, all of which our students need to gain experience in now. And that needs to happen in the classroom and in real-world settings, like out in our local communities.

We also learned a lesson about civic engagement and trust in our political institutions, which is a major issue right now. Policies without support don’t mean much, so academia and governments need to work together to boost civic engagement. We should be asking ourselves: “How do we, as members of academia and individuals in the spaces we’re in, collectively work together to promote policy?”

As educators, we need to train our students with an active learning approach that emphasizes the importance of developing effective oral skills. When students graduate, they should be able to go out into the world and be able to effectively talk about and analyze policies. And equity should be central to those analyses. The onus is on educators to embed health equity in our teaching so that our students embark on their careers in public health knowing to question how policies aren’t just effective in general, but effective for certain groups and can help to narrow disparities.

Q: What do you enjoy most about teaching? What has been the most rewarding part about mentoring and training future public health practitioners?

I’ve always enjoyed teaching, but especially love seeing students improve their writing skills. I do my best to help them understand how important the skill is to be successful in the field, so it is always rewarding to see them build this skill set over time.

It is always a joy to see how enthusiastic our students are, especially our undergraduate students who see the world as open and ripe with opportunity. To play a role in helping them discover all of the possibilities that come with a career in public health has and always will be one of the best parts of mentorship and training.