Ninez Ponce, CHIS principal investigator and professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, became Center Director July 1. In a brief interview, Ponce discusses the path that led her to the Center, the roots of health inequality, and more.
Q: How did you begin your career and end up at the Center?
I was a volunteer for the Berkeley Free Clinic. The Berkeley Free Clinic experience made me think about the importance of health care as a right and not a privilege. I was also very interested in public health policy, because … I thought that fixing the health care system and health populations required multiple sectors and not just the medical sector.
I worked in Thailand with a relief organization looking at development and child nutrition. When I came back to the United States and graduated, I started working on immigrant health, a transnational link between domestic and international health. I got very passionate about data disaggregation particularly for the Asian American and the Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander community and then began advocacy work in that I was very moved by making a difference in public health.
One day, I got a note from Dr. E Richard Brown. It felt like that was a big pivot in my career that planted the seed in wanting to be an academic, do better data collection, better evidence for public health, and that was the beginning of my career in public health that was based here at the Center.
Q: What do you see as the emerging public health trend in the future?
I think it’s happening now. There is recognition that the population’s health problems as well as the inequities that occur in health are not produced solely by the health care system. Some of these problems are beyond the clinical walls and that they may have been generated in not just what the individual has been exposed to in their lifetime but it could have been generational disadvantages ― this notion of institutional racism and structural disadvantages.
I think what’s emerging is that trying to come up with a wider system of care that collaborates in addressing needs for patients with complex clinical problems and complex social problems.
Q: What would you be doing if you could go back and pick another line of work to go into?
I would be an architect, because I like structure and how design influences how people gather, live, and get together. I would want to design homes that are efficient and aesthetically pleasing that can solve our homelessness problem here. There is also a part of me, the data part of me, which wishes I were a computer scientist. I want to gather all the freely available data that is out there and come up with much humanized stories and public health insights.