Luis Arturo Valdez

Luis Arturo Valdez, PhD, MPH, is an assistant professor in the Department of Community Health & Prevention. Valdez joined the Dornsife School of Public Health as part of the Drexel FIRST (Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation) program.

Dr. Valdez is a first-generation Mexican immigrant of Yaqui and Opata lineage raised and trained in the US-Mexico borderlands. They earned their PhD in Health Behavior & Health Promotion with a minor in Epidemiology at the University of Arizona in 2017

Dr. Valdez uses community-led mixed-methods approaches to understand and address the impact of systemic processes (i.e., racism & patriarchy) that perpetuate health inequities in historically marginalized populations. The work that they facilitate is community-centered and works from a foundational aim to build mutually-beneficial and ethical research collaborations with communities that foster critical consciousness, capacity building, and collective advocacy.

Currently, Dr. Valdez is interested in understanding how individual-level characteristics interact with macro-level factors to influence the health-related behaviors of Latino men. Broadly, his research examines a range of behaviors related to alcohol and substance misuse, chronic stress, healthy food choice, and physical activity, with an emphasis on developing and testing scalable, multilevel, culturally-, regionally-, and gender-responsive interventions that intentionally consider the heterogeneity that exists in distinct Latinx communities in the U.S. Dr. Valdez approaches their work with an intersectional gender-transformative framework that disentangles the complex roots of inequity in aim of reshaping unequal power relations toward health equity.