Lourdes Baezconde-Garbanati, PhD, MPH, is a tenured professor in preventive medicine 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 co-Director and Project Leader of the Patient Education and Community Outreach Center. She is Director of community outreach and education at the Institute for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Research, is in a Multiple PI structure, a PI of the Office of Community Engagement of the Southern California Clinical Translation Institute (CTSI). She is an internal advisory committee member to the Center for Environmental Health Community Outreach Core, and a founding Director of an international effort, the Center for Health Equity in the Americas, a KSOM program out of the Dean's Office, focused on research and education with the goal of reducing disparities and achieving health equity throughout the Americas. She is Co-Director of the Global Health Leadership Track in the Masters of Public Health Program, and conducts and promotes student and faculty research on a variety of topics among vulnerable population groups. She has a Courtesy Appointment at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Dr. Baezconde-Garbanati has a solid reputation as a widely recognized national and international community engaged scholar in the areas of culture and community health, with an emphasis on Hispanic/Latino health. 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 cultural and lifestyle risk factors for cancer and tobacco control at the community level. She teaches courses on gender and ethnic minority health, health promotion and disease prevention, culture, and on community organizing and mobilization for health locally and globally. She has mentored well over 200 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 in the community as a community/academic broker for culturally and community grounded research.

Dr. Baezconde-Garbanati has been instrumental in developing and testing effective interventions, that utilize innovative communication strategies, outreach activities and community engagement, and partnership development to enhance community health with a focus on tobacco, substance abuse prevention, and cancer control. She is a steering committee member of the National Latino Tobacco Control Network and is on the Board of Directors of the National Alliance for Hispanic Health, and works closely with the Healthy Americas Institute. She researches the feasibility of developing policies to eliminate exposure to secondhand smoke among Hispanic/Latinos and American Indians, and works on a project with tobacco retailers in the Korean, African American, Hispanic/Latino, American Indian and low SES non Hispanic white communities. She has helped communicate the latest science for the development of informed policy and community-based decision-making. She has functioned as a broker between communities and academia, bringing needs and opportunities to the attention of decision-makers and community leaders, populations at large, as well as researchers, and the academy. For these purposes she has developed a two way system for communication between communities and academic settings, based on participatory principles and shared equity, social capital, and partnership resources.

She 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 African-American, Hispanic/Latino and Korean audiences. This work was done in collaboration with the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and the USC School of Cinema, as well as Hollywood Health and Society. Dr. Baezconde-Garbanati is also Project Leader on one of the main R01 in the Tobacco Center for a regulatory Sciences for Vulnerable Populations, work in a Multiple PIship in community based participatory research with Bienestar, and Legacy LA, both community based organizations partnering with USC.

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 video "Tamale Lesson", an 11 minutes educational film on cervical cancer to reduce the cancer burden and cancer-related disparities among Latinas. Another of her signature programs is Es Tiempo, a project to increase cervical cancer screening and assess the use of the HPV vaccine among high-risk Latinas in the East Los Angeles area. Es Tiempo was developed in collaboration with the Art Center College of Design, Designmatters program, and is a key program of the Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Dr. Baezconde-Garbanati holds five academic degrees and speaks multiple languages. She 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 holds a master's degree in medical psychology from the Universite Catholique de Louvain. She conducted her undergraduate studies obtaining a dual degree in clinical and industrial psychology at the Universidad Nacional Pedro H. Urena in Dominican Republic. She can be reached at baezcond@usc.edu.