Barbara Baquero, a Kellogg Health Scholar at the UNC Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention from 2010 to 2012, is continuing her work in community-based participatory research (CBPR) at the University of Iowa’s College of Public Health.
Baquero is an assistant professor of community and behavioral health and an investigator with the Prevention Research Center for Rural Health (PRCRH). Through her work with the PRCRH, she has developed a partnership with the city of Ottumwa, Iowa to create a community wide quality of life survey.
The Kellogg Health Scholars program was a two-year postdoctoral training experience with sites across the United States. Scholars at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill worked with HPDP and were matched with academic and community mentors to conduct a CBPR project. Baquero was in the last graduating class for the Kellogg Health Scholars program, and worked with NC Latino communities for her research. Since arriving in Iowa, she has been working to build an academic-community partnership to address Latino issues in the state.
“Our goal is to establish an advisory committee of Latino representatives to develop health promotion and prevention programs to address access to healthy foods, active lifestyles and community engagement for better health among Latino families and the community as a whole,” Baquero said. “Ultimately, we are working with our board to develop interventions that can address or prevent health disparities related to obesity and other chronic disease in the area while also building evidence for how these issues can be addressed in other similar rural communities in the Midwest.”
Baquero said that her post-doctoral fellowship at the UNC Office of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention has helped guide her current work.
“Receiving training in CBPR, with Dr. Geni Eng and Dr. Laura Linnan, which included developing partnerships with Latino serving social service agencies and the community which further expanded my understanding of the differences in the social, cultural, environmental and political factors associated with health among Latinos and the importance of considering these factors on the implementation of community and behavioral health program,” Bacquero said.
To read more about Dr. Baquero’s work, go to: http://www.public-health.uiowa.edu/pubs/index.php/healthy-communities/