Lourdes Baezconde-Garbanati, PhD, MPH, is Distinguished professor in Population and Public Health Sciences (DPHHS) and Senior Associate Dean for Commmunity and Workforce Developoment Initiatives at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. Dr. Baezconde-Garbanati is also a Member of the Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center where she is Associate Director for Community Outreach and Engagement (COE). She is in a Multiple PI structure in the Office of Community Engagement of the Southern California Clinical Translation Institute (CTSI), and oversees community efforts in the DPPHS. She oversees the Center for Health Enhancement (CenHealth) which has provided health information especially in times of crisis to the public, such as during the Wildfires in Los Angeles in 2025. She has a Courtesy Appointment at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Her work is known for its creativity, and transdisciplinary nature, where academic disciplines and community talent converge with ingenuity to produce unique programs of research that advance science while fulfilling community needs. She develops and tests innovative interventions that help modify risk factors and reduce the burden of cancer and other chronic diseases in the population. She teaches courses in health promotion and disease prevention and on community engagement for health. She has mentored some 300 students in research from undergraduates to doctoral and postdoctoral fellows and is widely sought out as a mentor among Junior Faculty. She is strongly engaged in community participatory and population-based research and serves as a community/academic broker for community grounded research. For these purposes she has developed a bidirectional system of communication between communities and academic settings, based on participatory principles and shared resources with communities through community advisory boards. Dr. Baezconde-Garbanati has a strong record of extramural funding from the National Institutes of Health, including the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. She received a prestigious transformative RO1 from the NCI to look at the role of narrative in the delivery of cancer messages to community audiences. Her work on narrative has been done with a team from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and the USC School of Cinema. Dr. Baezconde-Garbanati has received multiple awards and recognition for her work, and is well published in a variety of relevant topics. She received the NIH 10 Year Common Fund Award and the American Public Health Association Health Education and Health Promotion Award for her educational film on cervical cancer to reduce the cancer burden. Another of her signature programs is It's Time, a project to increase cervical cancer screening in the East Los Angeles. It's Time was developed in collaboration with the Art Center College of Design, Designmatters program, and is a key signature program of the Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center. In addition to these films and programs, she has worked on 6 other films including Granny's Birthday, Of Reasons and Rumors, Team Player, and has supported the production of another three educational films with the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

Dr. Baezconde-Garbanati earned an MPH and a PhD in public health with an emphasis in Community Health Sciences from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She can be reached at baezcond@usc.edu.