Associate Professor,Yale School of Medicine and Yale School of Public Health
Dr. Nunez-Smith is Associate Professor at the Yale Schools of Medicine and Public Health, Deputy Director for Health Equity Research and Workforce Development for the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation, Core Faculty in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program, and Research Faculty at Yale’s Global Health Leadership Institute. Dr. Nunez-Smith is Founding Director of the Equity Research and Innovation Center (ERIC) at Yale University, with the dual goals of developing and disseminating evidence-based models to narrow health and healthcare inequity gaps and providing research support infrastructure for Yale faculty and affiliated community-based organizations. Dr. Nunez-Smith’s research focuses on promoting healthcare equity for vulnerable populations with an emphasis on healthcare workforce development, patient assessment of healthcare experiences, and healthcare system strengthening to address chronic disease in low and middle resource settings. She is the principal investigator on several NIH and foundation-funded research projects, including an NIH-funded project to develop a tool to assess patient reported experiences of discrimination in healthcare. In 2011 she received NIH funding to establish the Eastern Caribbean Health Outcomes and Research Network (ECHORN), a research collaborative across four Eastern Caribbean islands that will recruit and follow a community-dwelling adult cohort to examine chronic disease burden and to enhance health outcomes research and leadership capacity in the region. Dr. Nunez-Smith has received numerous awards including the Association of American Medical College’s Herbert W. Nicken’s Faculty Fellowship in 2008 in recognition of her contributions to healthcare workforce diversity and healthcare equity research, a 2011 American Medical Student Association’s Women Leaders in Medicine award, a 2012 Joan F. Giambalvo Memorial Scholarship from the American Medical Association, and most recently the 2013 SGIM New England Regional Award for Excellence as a Clinician-Investigator in General Internal Medicine. She is strongly committed to serving as a mentor to students interested in careers in healthcare. Dr. Nunez-Smith has a BA from Swarthmore College, an MD from Jefferson Medical College, and an MHS from Yale University.