Titles

Associate Professor of Practice, Sciences, and Health Outcomes Research

School Affiliation

School of Pharmacy

Specialties

• Patient-Reported Outcomes
• Social Epidemiology
• Health Inequities

About

(410) 706-4930 ester.villalonga@rx.umaryland.edu

Dr. Villalonga-Olives is a social epidemiologist with a PhD in biomedicine, specializing in epidemiology and public health. She obtained her BsC and MsC in sociology and health from the University of Barcelona, with an international stint at the Università degli Study di Trieste in Italy. Her PhD, with International Doctor Distinction, was from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and she completed stays at the London School of Economics in the UK and the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany. During her PhD, she conducted public health interventions for non-governmental organizations in India and Cuba. Currently an adjunct professor at New York University, she has also been a teaching and research fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, guest lecturer at Yale School of Public Health and the University of Tarapacá, Chile, and a research scientist at the University Medical Center of the Georg-August-University of Goettingen in Germany. Dr. Villalonga-Olives is a member of the University of Maryland Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center and the International Expert Group on Operationalizing Social Capital Interventions in Forced Displacement Situations led by the United Nations. She was part of the Early Investigators Advancement Program of the NIH, received a GLOBALtimore teaching fellowship, served on the board of the International Epidemiology Association for 10 years, and received an award from the Spanish Society of Epidemiology to train at the European Epidemiology Program in Florence (Italy). Her research focuses on the social determinants of health, emphasizing social capital, health inequalities, structural racism, and health intervention design. She has a background in psychometrics and works with patient-reported outcomes, particularly health-related quality of life, and developed a measure for assessing bridging social capital. She leads various projects, including an NIH R01 grant creating a measure of structural racism. In her research she is exploring social capital's link to health outcomes in underserved populations, adapting cancer knowledge tools for Hispanics/Latinos, studying racial Differential Item Functioning in social indicators, and implementing social capital interventions to boost cancer screening among Hispanic/Latino immigrants. She co-investigates two NIH R01 projects on social connectedness's impact on mental health in Black adults and creating a shared decision-making measure in maternity care. Her research methodologies encompass mixed methods, structural equation modeling, multilevel modeling, and Rasch analysis. Dr. Villalonga-Olives has received awards for multiple conference presentations, published in prestigious journals like the American Journal of Epidemiology, Social Science and Medicine, and the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. She serves on the editorial board of Frontiers in Public Health and actively contributes to scientific committees at international events.

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Tagged: Global Health   Ensuring Access and Equity in Health Care   Caring for the Human Condition  

This information was last updated January 9, 2025.