About
Dr. Elizabeth “Libby” Salerno Valdez is an assistant professor in the Department of Community Health & Prevention. Her research program fosters ethical and mutually beneficial academic-community partnerships using participatory, social justice-oriented approaches to examine the structural factors that influence health inequities among historically marginalized and racialized adolescents, emerging adults, and pregnant and parenting people.
Dr. Valdez’s current research is focused on developing community-led health equity structural interventions that attempt to change the social, physical, economic or political environments that affect the health of young people from historically marginalized backgrounds. Relatedly, she is also interested in testing participatory action research as an intervention to combat the negative effects of structural violence on health. Central to her work is the use of community-led study findings to initiate local and state policy and systems change in the areas of sexual and reproductive health, housing, transportation, childcare, financial security, and other social services.
Dr. Valdez is currently PI of the study “Needs and Barriers to Access of Medical Cannabis by Parenting Women by Race” and co-PI of the Philly Joy Bank Evaluation, a mixed methods study to understand whether and how receipt of guaranteed income during and after pregnancy impacts parental mental health and prematurity (as well as other intermediate outcomes). She recently completed the four-year study “Using Participatory Methods to Assess Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health (ASRH) Outcomes Among Diverse Youth in Massachusetts” which examined how structural racism, in combination with other systems of oppression, contributes to inequitable adolescent sexual and reproductive health outcomes.
Dr. Valdez received her doctoral degree in Health Behavior Health Promotion from the University of Arizona in 2019 and completed a postdoctoral training fellowship at University of Massachusetts Amherst.