- [email protected]
- Amherst, Massachusetts, USA
- Contact Us
For Prospective Students & Research Assistants
If you are a current Masters or Doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and examine research questions related to intersectionality and health equity, you are welcome to assist the biweekly lab meetings. Generally, student members of LIHER are Dr. Martínez’s primary, secondary or tertiary advisees — meaning she chairs or is a committee member on their thesis, dissertation prospectus, or dissertation committee. Dr. Martínez is currently not accepting new doctoral students to mentor in the Health Policy & Management Doctoral Program.
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Research assistant roles are generally paid roles. However, my undergraduate course assistants for PUBHLTH 129 receive one to three course credits.
The PI of LIHER is Airín D. Martínez. You can learn about her background here.
For Potential Community Partners
Community partners engage with LIHER by contacting Dr. Martínez and her research team. They also learn about LIHER through academic and community referrals. Dr. Martínez has also reached out to potential partners. Community partners serve as content experts in public health topics, special and hard-to-reach populations, and cultural practices of a specific cultural group. Cultural groups are not limited to racial/ethnic, class, or gendered backgrounds, but also veteran and military status, occupation, immigration status, behaviors, among other categories of collectivities. Community partners are paid equitably, share governance on a project, share publications and remuneration. Dr. Martínez strongly encourages community partners to lead grants as the PI or lead a team on a federally- or state-funded grant.
The LIHER team works with diverse communities representing African and Latin American immigrants, African Americans, English- and Spanish-speaking Hispanic/Latinx communities, active military and veterans, men of working age, men in occupations with high prevalence of suicide and the residents of Western Massachusetts.
Dr. Martínez is currently seeking community partners to continue research and interventions in suicide prevention among the Hispanic/Latinx community, including im/migrants, active military and veterans, men of working age, men in occupations with high prevalence of suicide, and the residents of Western Massachusetts. She would like to examine the psychological and physiological effects of discrimination on youth and is searching for a Western Massachusetts and Hartford-based community partner that serves youth and young adults.
Privacy and patient confidentiality are of great importance to our lab and its members. Throughout a research project, we constantly consult with community partners to find ways to maximize research participants’ privacy. We also obtain IRB approval prior to recruitment and data collection. We practice the highest level of data confidentiality, using Barracuda encrypted messaging and execute data use agreements between community and clinical partners and our team.
For Researchers & Collaborators
Every member of LIHER integrates an intersectionality- or intersectionality-based policy analysis to address health equity topics. We use any methodology to address complex research questions respectfully and meaningfully. Some of us are strictly quantitative researchers, but most of us are mixed methods researchers. For the quantitative methods, some of us specialize in large language models, biobehavioral approaches, and generalized parametric and non-parametric statistics. For those of us who use qualitative methods, we specialize in grounded theory and phenomenological approaches.
ABSOLUTELY!
You can find our published articles and working papers under Publications.
For Journalists & the Public
Intersectionality is a theoretical, methodological and political framework. The term was originally coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, that recognizes how different aspects of a person’s structural positions — such as race, gender, class, sexuality, immigration status, and disability — do not operate independently of one another. However, sociologists like Patricia Hill Collins, wrote extensively about interlocking systems of oppression. More importantly, Crenshaw reminds us that these different structural positions, whether privileged or marginalized, result from laws, policies, judicial decisions and institutional practices. Moreover, diverse structural positions overlap and interact to shape unique experiences of privilege and oppression. For example, the experiences of a Black woman cannot be fully understood by looking at race alone or gender alone; it is the intersection of those identities — and the systems of power that act on them — that produces her specific social position and life outcomes.
In health research, intersectionality matters for several reasons:
- It exposes hidden disparities. Analyses that treat race, gender, or income as separate variables can mask health inequities that only become visible at the intersection of multiple identities. A treatment that appears equitable across racial groups, for instance, may still disadvantage low-income women of color.
- It shifts focus from individuals to systems. Rather than asking why certain groups have worse health outcomes, intersectional research asks what structural and institutional conditions — policies, discrimination, resource distribution — produce those outcomes in the first place.
- It resists oversimplification. Communities are not monolithic. Intersectionality pushes researchers to account for diversity within groups, not just between them, leading to more nuanced and actionable findings.
- It centers historically marginalized voices. By foregrounding the lived experiences of people who occupy multiple marginalized identities, intersectional research produces knowledge that is more representative and more relevant to those who bear the greatest burden of health inequity.
At LIHER, intersectionality is not just a buzzword — it is a core methodological and analytical commitment that shapes how we design studies, collect data, interpret findings, partner with communities and translate research findings into social change.
–Empathic Communication
–Problem Gambling
–Diabetes
–Psychological Distress
–Cardiovascular disease
–Suicide and suicide prevention
–Self-reported and physiological stress
–Healthy food access (access, quality, cost)
–Food Insecurity
Visit the liher.org website regularly and look under the Events and Announcements pages.
General / Administrative
The members of LIHER are affiliated with UMASS Amherst, but our research will continue regardless of academic affiliations.
Please fill out the Contact Us form or send an email to [email protected] or [email protected]. If you seek to contact an individual LIHER member about their research, please find their email under Research Team.