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10/17/22

A University of Maryland researcher whose scholarship has transformed our understanding of how social determinants of health influence outcomes for minority women and population health was elected today to the National Academy of Medicine.

Medical sociologist Ruth Enid Zambrana, a Distinguished University Professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, joins 90 new members and 10 international members elected to the elite organization in recognition of their outstanding achievement and volunteer service related to medicine and health. She is the only person from UMD, which has no medical school, in this academy, and she brings the number of UMD faculty in the national academies to 62, a record high.

“It’s very emotional and very gratifying to receive this distinction,” Zambrana said. “It’s been a hard road to go against the grain of scientific thinking—to break down biases. This acknowledgment affirms a long-standing struggle for justice and equity.”

A leading authority on racial and ethnic disparities in health across the life course, Zambrana has spent decades shining a light on the experiences of minority groups including Hispanics/Latinos and how their social and material conditions impact health outcomes. She has published over 160 peer-reviewed articles, books, book chapters, reports and monographs on women’s, maternal and child health; racial, ethnic and socioeconomic health disparities; and educational pathways among underrepresented and minority students and faculty in higher education. She has also mentored over 100 scholars in public health, medicine and the sociomedical sciences.

“We are so proud to count Dr. Ruth Zambrana among the ranks of University of Maryland faculty and congratulate her on this incredible and well-deserved distinction from the National Academy of Medicine,” said university President Darryll J. Pines. “The growing number of UMD faculty who are recognized as members of national academies is further evidence that our university attracts many of the brightest minds, boldest leaders and most courageous innovators in the world.”

Zambrana, who has a secondary appointment at the University of Maryland, Baltimore Medical School in the Department of Family and Community Medicine, was a 2021–22 Distinguished Research Fellow at the Latino Research Institute at the University of Texas, Austin. She received the 2021 Lyndon Haviland Public Health Mentoring Award from the American Public Health Association and was named a Distinguished University Professor at UMD in 2020.

At UMD, where she has served on the faculty since 1999, she is also affiliated with the African American Studies Department, the Department of Sociology, the School of Public Health, the Department of Community and Behavioral Science, the Maryland Population Research Center, the U.S. Latina/o Studies Program and the Latin American Studies Center and is the director of the Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity.

Earlier this year, Zambrana co-authored, with Harvard University Professor of Public Health David Williams, “The Intellectual Roots Of Current Knowledge On Racism And Health” in the journal Health Affairs, which encompassed her decades of research on how racism has affected knowledge production in health disparities and equity policy. Despite ongoing discomfort in many public health and medical circles about research on racism, the authors outline the shifts needed to “recognize that dismantling racism is an indispensable component of policies and interventions to achieve racial equity in health.”

 

6/9/21

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Adam Grisé, who completed his Ph.D. in music education in 2019, has won the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Council for Research in Music Education for his dissertation that focused on issues of access, representation and equity in secondary and postsecondary music educational settings. 

The Council, which is based at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has awarded outstanding doctoral dissertations in music education for nearly four decades. 

Grisé’s dissertation, titled "Making It Through: Persistence and Attrition Along Music, Education, and Music Education Pathways," used a nationally-representative dataset to examine uptake, persistence and attrition along pathways to becoming a music teacher, a professional musician or a teacher of a non-music subject.

“I feel incredibly honored to be recognized,” said Grisé, who now works as a systems and data analyst at the School of Music. 

Grisé used data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, an ongoing government study of 21,000 students across the country who have been tracked since their ninth-grade year, and identified those who had said they might like to be a musician, a teacher or a music teacher. He then tracked their development through four key decision points to see where the path narrowed.  

The resulting analysis shows the impact of factors like race, gender and socioeconomic status on students’ paths—and thus on equity in music education as a whole. For instance, Grisé found that music education majors tend to come from high schools with fewer racial or ethnic minority students and lower concentrations of poverty. Schools with high concentrations of poverty produce fewer aspiring music teachers. And women leave the path of being aspiring professional musicians or music educators at twice the rate of men. 

Associate Professor of Music Education Kenneth Elpus, who served as Grisé’s faculty advisor, said Grisé used “ingenuity and innovation … to help the profession understand key characteristics about the students who become music teachers and the pathways they take to get there.”  

“It's a monumental piece of scholarship that brings strong evidence and strong interpretation to bear on questions of importance, and I'm so proud to have seen it through from germ of idea to completion,” Elpus said. 

Grisé said this research will also have an impact at the University of Maryland, where he’s working to help transform the ways the School of Music uses data to inform processes and decisions.
 
“I am able to apply many of the insights from my dissertation as we strive to increase equity and diversity in our music programs,” he said.

9/15/20

By Jessica Weiss ’05

College and university leaders who are committed to promoting equity, inclusion and success for underrepresented minority (URM) faculty in their institutions can now access "Equity and Inclusion: Effective Practices and Responsive Strategies," a guidebook co-authored by Distinguished University Professor Ruth Enid Zambrana, professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. 

Released in July 2020, the 30-page guidebook highlights practices that can be incorporated and instituted across research universities to make them more equitable and inclusive; includes a list of 50 essential readings on URM and gender equity; and offers recommendations on hiring and retention practices, mentoring practices, work-family-life balance and pathways to tenure and promotion. It concludes with specific recommendations and strategic actions for senior leadership to ensure institutional accountability. 

“This is a timely and critical resource for all college and university leaders,” Zambrana said. “Equity driven solutions to promote success for URM faculty will mean success for the institution as a whole.”  

The guidebook stems from Zambrana’s 2018 book “Toxic Ivory Towers: The Consequences of Work Stress on the Health of Underrepresented Minority Faculty” and a conference held at the University of Pennsylvania in September 2018, entitled “Changing the National Conversation: Inclusion and Equity,” which was convened in partnership with Swarthmore College and the Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity (CRGE) at Maryland, of which Zambrana is the director. At the conference, more than 100 college and university chancellors, presidents, provosts and other senior colleagues discussed successful strategies and practices for producing, promoting and creating equity and inclusion on campuses with a focus on the recruitment, retention and promotion of traditionally and historically underrepresented minorities. 

Today URM groups constitute about one-third of the U.S. population, but URM faculty (Black, Latino and Native American) represent just 10.2 percent of all faculty in the more than 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S.

“URM faculty augment the excellence and innovative spirit of universities because they bring different life experiences and theoretical and methodological perspectives that shape their teaching, mentoring and research projects,” Zambrana said. “They indeed bring ‘diversity of thought’ that embraces values of equity, inclusion and social equality and provide a more robust, cogent, meaningful and comprehensive educational experience for all students.” 

health guidebook front cover

The guidebook is being made available by the University of Maryland’s Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity and the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, among other institutions; the American Council on Education will also disseminate sections. 

The guidebook’s other authors include Anita AllenEve HigginbothamJoAnn Mitchell and Antonia Villarruel of the University of Pennsylvania and Debra J. Pérez of Simmons University. 

To access the guidebook, click here.

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