Carlos Rodriguez-Diaz

School News

SPH to Welcome Carlos Rodriguez-Diaz as Chair of Community Health Sciences

Rodriguez-Diaz is currently professor and vice chair of the Department of Prevention and Community Health at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University. He will join SPH on September 1.

Carlos Rodriguez-Diaz recently accepted the role of new chair of the Department of Community Health Sciences at the School of Public Health. He will join the SPH community on September 1.

Rodriguez-Diaz is currently professor and vice chair of the Department of Prevention and Community Health at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University (GWSPH). He is also director of GWSPH’s Gill-Lebovic Center for Community Health in the Caribbean and Latin America.

Born and raised in a small town in Puerto Rico, Rodriguez-Diaz earned his Bachelor of Science and Master of Public Health degrees at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) and worked as a health educator in the Puerto Rican prison system before completing his doctoral training in public health and community health education at Walden University in Minnesota. He returned to the UPR for post-graduate training in HIV and global health research in 2010, and subsequently joined the faculty there, working as an assistant professor at the UPR Graduate School of Public Health for six years before joining GW in 2018.

Rodriguez-Diaz’s professional work focuses on engaging the social determinants of health to address health inequities among populations made vulnerable by factors such as incarceration status, gender identity, sexual orientation, and HIV status. He conducts community-based participatory research in Puerto Rico, the US, and the Caribbean region, and has a number of funded projects aimed at improving HIV prevention services, including interventions to enhance continuity of care for justice-involved people and primary care for Latinx and transgender populations. Rodriguez-Diaz has also conducted pandemic-related research; he is the first author of one of the most cited studies about COVID-19 infection and death risk among the US Latinx population.

In addition to his teaching and research activities, Rodriguez-Diaz co-chairs the Latino/a/x Special Interest Group at the District of Columbia Center for AIDS Research and sits on the Board of Directors of NMAC, a national organization fighting racial disparities in the HIV epidemic response. He also serves as president of Board of Directors of Coai, Inc., a community-based organization providing health services to LGBTQ populations in Puerto Rico, and as president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, an international organization dedicated to the advancement of knowledge about sexuality.

“We are delighted that Professor Rodriguez-Diaz will be joining us as chair of Community Health Sciences,” says Dean Sandro Galea. “His focus on the social determinants of health, health equity, and community-based participatory research approaches put him on the leading edge of scholarship in the field. I am excited to work with him over the coming years as the department grows and thrives.”