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Marcella Nunez-Smith, MD, MHS

Associate Dean for Health Equity Research and C.N.H. Long Professor of Internal Medicine (General Medicine), of Epidemiology (Chronic Disease) and of Public Health (Social And Behavioral Sciences) & Professor of Internal Medicine (General Medicine)
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Additional Titles

Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health

Founding Director, Equity Research and Innovation Center (ERIC), Yale School of Medicine

Director, Center for Research Engagement (CRE)

Director, Center for Community Engagement and Health Equity

Deputy Director for Health Equity Research and Workforce Development, Yale Center for Clinical Investigation (YCCI)

Director, Pozen-Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in Health Equity Leadership

About

Titles

Associate Dean for Health Equity Research and C.N.H. Long Professor of Internal Medicine (General Medicine), of Epidemiology (Chronic Disease) and of Public Health (Social And Behavioral Sciences) & Professor of Internal Medicine (General Medicine)

Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health; Founding Director, Equity Research and Innovation Center (ERIC), Yale School of Medicine; Director, Center for Research Engagement (CRE); Director, Center for Community Engagement and Health Equity; Deputy Director for Health Equity Research and Workforce Development, Yale Center for Clinical Investigation (YCCI); Director, Pozen-Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in Health Equity Leadership

Biography

Dr. Nunez-Smith is Inaugural Associate Dean for Health Equity Research; C.N.H Long Professor of Internal Medicine, Public Health, and Management; Founding Director of the Equity Research and Innovation Center (ERIC); Director of the Center for Research Engagement (CRE); Associate Cancer Center Director for Community Outreach and Engagement at Yale Cancer Center; Chief Health Equity Officer at Smilow Cancer Hospital; Deputy Director for Health Equity Research and Workforce Development at the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation; Core Faculty in the National Clinician Scholars Program; Research Faculty in the Global Health Leadership Initiative; Director of the Pozen-Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in Health Equity Leadership; and Co-Director of the Doris Duke Clinical Research Fellowship.

Dr. Nunez-Smith’s research focuses on promoting health and healthcare equity for structurally marginalized populations with an emphasis on centering community engagement, supporting healthcare workforce diversity and development, developing patient reported measurements of healthcare quality, and identifying regional strategies to reduce the global burden of non-communicable diseases. Dr. Nunez-Smith has extensive expertise in examining the effects of social and structural determinants of health, systemic influences contributing to health disparities, health equity improvement, and community-academic partnered scholarship. In addition to primary data collection, management, and analysis, ERIC has institutional expertise in qualitative and mixed methods, population health, and medical informatics.

Dr. Nunez-Smith is the principal investigator on many NIH and foundation-funded research projects, including an NIH-funded project to develop a tool to assess patient reported experiences of discrimination in healthcare. She has conducted an investigation of the promotion and retention of diversity in academic medical school faculty and has published numerous articles on the experiences of minority students and faculty. Funded by NIH/NIMHD, she established the Eastern Caribbean Health Outcomes Research Network (ECHORN), a research collaborative across four Eastern Caribbean islands, supporting several chronic disease research projects and enhancing health outcomes research and leadership capacity in the region; the flagship ECHORN Cohort Study recruited and is following a community-dwelling adult cohort (n=3000) to examine novel chronic disease risk and protective factors. She received NIH/NHLBI funding to build upon this work by recruiting children into an expanded intergenerational ECHORN cohort, inclusive of a biorepository. She is also PI on one of five NIH/NIMHD-funded Transdisciplinary Collaborative Centers on Health Disparities focused on Precision Medicine which leverages the ECHORN infrastructure to conduct collaborative research on hypertension and diabetes.

Most recently, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shed national attention on the health and healthcare disparities of marginalized populations, she received NIH funding to leverage ECHORN to improve the COVID-19 testing cascade in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. Further, she was called upon to chair the Governor’s ReOpen CT Advisory Group Community Committee and was subsequently named co-chair of the Biden-Harris Transition COVID-19 Advisory Board. She served as Senior Advisor to the White House COVID-19 Response and Chair of the Presidential COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Dr. Nunez-Smith has mentored dozens of trainees since completing fellowship and has received numerous awards for teaching and mentoring. An elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, Dr. Nunez-Smith is board certified in internal medicine, having completed residency training at Harvard University’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and fellowship at the Yale Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program, where she also received a Masters in Health Sciences.

Originally from the US Virgin Islands, she attended Jefferson Medical College, where she was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society, and she earned a BA in Biological Anthropology and Psychology at Swarthmore College.

Appointments

Education & Training

MHS
Yale University
Post-doctoral Fellow
Yale University School of Medicine
Resident
Brigham & Women's Hospital
Chief Resident
Veteran Affairs Medical Center, West Roxbury
Intern
Brigham & Women’s Hospital
MD
Jefferson Medical College
BA
Swarthmore College

Research

Overview

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)

Caribbean Region; Chronic Disease; Community-Based Participatory Research; COVID-19; Global Burden of Disease; Global Health; Health Services Research; Healthcare Disparities; Internal Medicine; Minority Health; Patient Reported Outcome Measures; Population Health; Social Determinants of Health; Social Discrimination; Social Justice; Socioeconomic Factors; Vulnerable Populations; Women's Health

Research at a Glance

Yale Co-Authors

Frequent collaborators of Marcella Nunez-Smith's published research.

Publications

2024

2023

Clinical Trials

Current Trials

Academic Achievements & Community Involvement

  • honor

    Elected Member to the National Academy of Medicine

Clinical Care

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