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Ponce is an elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and has served on the Board of Scientific Counselors, National Center for Health Statistics. She has participated in committees for the National Academy of Medicine and the National Quality Forum, where her expertise has focused on setting guidance for health systems in the measurement and use of social determinants of health as tools to monitor health equity. She has received numerous awards from community organizations recognizing her work in community-engaged research. In 2019 Dr. Ponce and her team received the AcademyHealth Impact award for their contributions to population health measurement to inform public policies.
Ponce serves on the Data Disaggregation workgroup for the White House Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander Commission. Currently, she is an Associate Editor for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at JAMA Health Forum. Her portfolio includes a mixture of scholarly work and real-time knowledge diffusion studies, with over 140 peer-reviewed publications, over 60 policy reports, and various creative data access tools to democratize health data.
Ponce champions better data, especially for people from marginalized racial and ethnic, sexual orientation and gender identity, and immigrant populations. She firmly believes that equity-centered data will lead to more meaningful program and policy inferences and better care for overlooked groups.
Ponce earned her bachelor’s degree in science at UC Berkeley, her master’s degree in public policy at Harvard University, and her PhD in health services at UCLA.
Health equity cannot be advanced without data collection, analysis, reporting, and dissemination beyond the traditional racial and ethnic categories that have been the norm for the past 25 years. More precise and comprehensive data collecting from the use of these revised criteria may help academics, policymakers, and health care professionals more successfully identify and remedy injustices. As a result, resources and interventions can be directed to where they are needed most, especially to communities facing the greatest health challenges.
The moderator of the roundtable is Tina Kauh, Senior Program Officer in the Research-Evaluation-Learning Unit at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The panelists include Meeta Anand, Senior Director of Census and Data Equity at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and The Leadership Conference Education Fund; Maya Berry, Executive Director of the Arab American Institute; and Ninez Ponce, Director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.