Mentorship & Training

As the Director of Research and Evaluation in the Bureau of Children, Youth and Families with the NYC Health Department, Marivel is responsible for the oversight of surveillance, research and evaluation activities centered on the mental health of NYC children and adolescents. During her time with the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District, Marivel was responsible for evaluation activities in the Maternal and Child Health Division which included leading a multidisciplinary team in building a foundation for the provision of mental health services. She has been involved in health-related research activities on a number of projects. As the Polling Supervisor for the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, she was a member of the team that studied the impact of the Voting Rights Act on city councils in Texas. Marivel also spent four years conducting marketing research activities among Latino consumers throughout the United States and Latin America. She holds a doctoral degree in Health Promotion and Behavioral Sciences and MPH from the University of Texas School of Public Health, and a BA degree in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin. 

Francesca Gany, M.D., M.S.  was the founder and Director of the Center for Immigrant Health, NYU School of Medicine, of the NYU Cancer Institute CORE Center (Cancer Outreach, Outcomes and Research for Equity), and of the Health Promotion, Disease Prevention, and Human Migration concentration in the NYU Global Masters of Public Health program. She is now the founding Chief of the Immigrant Health and Cancer Disparities Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She has served as the Principal Investigator on a number of pioneering immigrant health studies and programs in the areas of cardiovascular disease, cancer treatment adherence and quality of life, language access and cultural responsiveness, technology and immigrant health, and health care access. She has led several studies in underserved communities that have followed thousands of participants. Her work has led to the development of long-term policy and programmatic changes.  Dr. Gany received her B.S. from Yale University, her M.D. from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, did her residency training in Primary Care Internal Medicine at New York University Medical Center/Bellevue Hospital, and received her Master’s of Science in Health Policy from New York University.

Dr. Mary Huynh has directed the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Office of Vital Statistics since February 2015. She previously worked for the Bureau of Epidemiology Services and the World Trade Center Health Registry.  Dr. Huynh was also an assistant professor at CUNY Lehman College and the CUNY School of Public Health. She received her PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Pittsburgh in 2003. She was awarded the Joel Kleinman Perinatal Epidemiology Fellowship at the National Center for Health Statistics, where she analyzed national birth data as a post-doctoral fellow. Her research interests include the impact of structural racism on birth outcomes and maternal health.

Dr. Lisa M. Bates is Vice Chair for Education and Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Dr. Bates is a social epidemiologist currently engaged in research programs focused on the social determinants of health in both the U.S. and South Asian contexts. In the U.S., her research draws on secondary data sources to interrogate structural drivers of socially patterned health outcomes in terms of gender, race, class, and immigration status, and mechanisms by which features of the social environment impact health, with a particular emphasis on common mental disorders. Her research portfolio in South Asia involves extensive primary data collection efforts in both Bangladesh and Pakistan and consists of quantitative and qualitative inquiry into the nexus of poverty, women’s empowerment, intimate partner violence, and mental health and child developmental outcomes. Recent projects have yielded rich multi-level explorations of critical social dynamics and health outcomes as a function of novel methodologies and interdisciplinary collaborations. Much of this current work is also focused on understanding early life developmental trajectories of children born to mothers diagnosed with perinatal depression, and the potential for low-dose, scalable community-based interventions to mitigate risk.