Ninez A. Ponce, Ph.D., M.P.P., is Director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and Professor and Fred W. & Pamela K. Wasserman Endowed Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Her research and scholarship focus on racial and ethnic health disparities, health care access, and immigrant health. As Principal Investigator of the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS), Dr. Ponce has taken Dr. Wilensky’s blueprint of “you can’t fix a problem if you can’t measure it” and refined it through a lens of data equity. She champions data disaggregation to demonstrate how population averages too often mask the needs of underrepresented populations.
Dr. Ponce is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Social Insurance. She served on the White House AANHPI Commission Data Disaggregation Workgroup, is an Associate Editor at JAMA Health Forum, and serves on the board of the California Health Care Foundation. She earned her Ph.D. in health services at UCLA, her master’s degree in public policy at Harvard University, and her bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley.
- 2019 HSR Impact Award