Community Health Sciences

‘Make Yourself Available and Visible Within the Community’

Carlos Rodriguez-Diaz, new chair of Community Health Sciences, discusses his approach to researching vulnerable populations.

As the new chair of the Department of Community Health Sciences (CHS), Carlos Rodriguez-Diaz is intimately aware of the subtle yet important difference between working in a community, and working for a community.

It’s the latter distinction that has propelled Rodriguez-Diaz in his research and advocacy addressing health inequities in vulnerable populations, and part of what has driven him to use the term “academic activist” to describe both his worldview and his approach to academic life. How we understand and experience “being part of a community” is changing, he says.

“I know the privilege that it takes to be in academia, to be a scholar,” says Rodriguez-Diaz, who was born and raised in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico, a small town in the mountains just south of San Juan, where many of the resources of larger cities and towns begin to dry up.

“My way of engaging with communities is not only an academic approach, but as a person who believes in social justice and who understands that we need to advocate for those changes with the resources and opportunities that we have,” Rodriguez-Diaz says. “That’s why I think I live in that intersection of being an activist and an advocate for what we need to do to achieve health equity, but also being a scholar who is doing what needs to be done at the academic level so we can contribute our research to the goals of health equity.”

After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), he worked as a health educator in the prison system in Puerto Rico while completing a PhD in public health and community health education from Walden University. After postdoctoral training in HIV and global health research at UPR, with extensive fieldwork in Vietnam, he transitioned to a faculty role at UPR specializing in research of the social determinants of health.

In 2018, he left Puerto Rico to join the faculty of the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University in Washington D.C., where he eventually became an associate professor and vice chair of the Department of Prevention and Community Health. He took on additional academic and administrative tasks as director of the Gill-Lebovic Center for Community Health in the Caribbean and Latin America, and also served as director of the PhD program in social and behavioral sciences, before joining SPH in September. Now settled into his role, Rodriguez-Diaz spoke about his vision to build community within and beyond CHS. 

You’re very new to the role as chair, but where do you see the CHS department evolving in the next five years?

I envision a CHS department where socio-bio-behavioral leaders engage in community-centered work for health equity. We will have community-academic partnerships to share our expertise in public health research and practice with the communities that have been historically and socially underserved.

I think part of my job here is to make our department visible, and to make sure that the communities and different partners understand that we are not only doing research or only inviting them in because we take some benefit from that, but that we are partners in supporting whatever they think is a priority and that we have the expertise or the experience to support. I think the traditional relationship of academia with community partners has been more beneficial to academia than to the community partners. And I want to change that narrative and that experience.

And what I’m sharing [with colleagues in CHS] is to make yourself available and visible within the community. Don’t approach your first meeting thinking that you know the research or the collaboration that the community needs. Be humble and approach the community with the intention of understanding and knowing the community.

If there is an area, topic, a population that you’re interested in, look for what’s going on in the community. None of us is going to do something for the first time at the community level. Something is going on. Search the history of the efforts around that issue or population, be a volunteer in different activities that they have. Share who you are and what you know that could be helpful for the community. Talk to people. And it takes time.

If you want to do this in the best way possible, [CHS] will build a system that works for you based on the work that you do so you can excel in academia. The way academia is built is not for that kind of research, but that’s why we are here. We also need to change the system.

Are there any ideas, policies, or programs that you hope to launch or expand at SPH?

I want to create and support initiatives to diversify the public health field. We must provide more capacity-building opportunities to people from the communities we want to work with. I want to support community-led initiatives in which we can serve as academic partners. I want to be part of the “good trouble” for social justice.

From my area of work in implementation science, we want to take those practices that are working and make sure they benefit all the organizations, all the communities, all the people who could benefit from those efforts. And we can use research that is centered on the community to make that happen.

Do you anticipate any additional research opportunities or collaborations in your research area now that you’re in Boston?

I want to build new collaborations, but I do not have a specific agenda and would like to develop one with community partners. I want to engage with policymakers and other stakeholders responsible for systemic changes needed to facilitate the health of people from minoritized and disenfranchised groups. I can’t wait to engage with my comunidad Latina en Boston, and work with others such as justice-involved individuals and sexual and gender-expansive populations.

For example, I’m planning to meet with a couple of primary federally qualified healthcare centers, commonly known as FQHCs, because this is a structure that already exists within our communities that are primarily run by communities. In these centers, 50 percent of their executive board has to come from people in the community.

That’s a way of engaging with the community in structures that are already existing. And my intention is to meet with them and understand the work that they’ve been doing and what are the opportunities to support good practices. I am not only looking to what is missed, I’m also looking at what is working so we can do more of that.

I think that we need to look at opportunities to become academic partners. And with that, I mean that perhaps it will help with research—but maybe we can contribute by bringing the expertise of people in our department to provide services or improve services that the community needs, while building opportunities for our students. We have many courses that are offered from our department that are practice-oriented, and often we are working with communities as the students are building skills and competencies. When I approach meetings with community partners, I’m thinking about all these areas, not only for the benefit of research, because sometimes the best way we can contribute with the community is not doing more research, but actually translating the scientific knowledge into the practice.

What initially drew you to Community Health Sciences?

The Department of Community Health Sciences resonated with my interest in innovating in community health sciences and public health practice. I am a disruptor of systems of oppression, and I believe I have found a home. I understand and engage in mentorship, and we have opportunities to nurture the next generation of public health professionals and early career scientists. My favorite part of this job is supporting colleagues in coming up with new ideas and wanting to innovate. Further, I come in as a cisgender able-bodied Latino gay queer man from Puerto Rico. All those identities intersect to inform who I am and what I do. There are not too many people like me in leadership positions in academia. For example, less than 3 percent of full professors in schools of public health are Latinxs. CHS has welcomed me as I am and is providing me a platform to serve as an example of what is possible.

In your “Disrupting the Systems” article in the 2021 AIDS and Behavior supplement, you and your coauthors called for replacing historically oppressive systems based in colonialism with collaborative models that center communities. Has that strong endorsement of community-based participatory research (CBPR) been adopted by many of your peers, or are there still hurdles?

Many public health researchers have tried to incorporate a CBPR approach in their work. If we want to change the systems perpetuating inequities, we must embrace the ancestral knowledge and lived experiences of communities made socially vulnerable. Communities should lead the work, and we can serve as their partners in developing new knowledge and evidence to achieve common goals.

It’s been phenomenal to learn more about the community engaged work that my colleagues are doing in the department. I think that there are some partnerships that we can nurture to continue to do relevant work for the geographical community where we are. Our departments certainly have great partnerships to work with people who have problematic use of drugs. That’s a serious issue in Boston.

And we have very knowledgeable faculty members who have a research project, but also service projects, meaning that they are working in organizations that are providing either harm reduction services or other basic social services like housing and food. I think that because it’s the community that we live in, we will continue to be engaged. The problematic use of drugs is also related to homelessness, and we are building better collaborations with community partners who are serving the unsheltered populations. We are also developing a course to cover that as part of the public health training that we are giving to our MPH students. We hope to have an upcoming class on homelessness.

Wait, is that a new offering?

Yes, it is very new. It is still being reviewed by the Academic Committee, but it’s part of the intention in the department to support that. We also have new faculty who have expertise in families, adolescents and young adults that are joining efforts with faculty that have been in the department for a longer period who have expertise working with adolescents. I can see partnerships to expand the work that we are doing with adolescents, including partnership with community-based organizations that are supporting leadership among youth in our communities here in Boston and nearby cities. And I have also seen opportunities to collaborate with other schools.

I think it is common to see collaborations between the School of Public Health and the School of Medicine, and there’s a natural connection, but I can see a strong collaboration with the School of Social Work, considering that our areas of work overlap. We are working in communities, and social work tends to also be inclusive of work at the community-level. I can see good collaborations to strengthen the training that we are providing to dual degree students, but also for the work that we are doing with our communities, including research that is relevant to the needs of our communities.