Nina Wallerstein

University of New Mexico

Biographical Abstracts

Nina Wallerstein, Dr.PH., has been developing community-based participatory research and empowerment/Freirian interventions for close to 40 years. Among over 190 publications is her textbook: Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) for Health: Advancing Social and Health Equity, 3rd edition, 2018 (with a fourth edition in process); and Freirian Problem-Posing at Work: A Popular Educator’s Guide, Grassroots Press, Canada. In 2016, she received the inaugural UNM Community Engaged Research Lecture Award. To strengthen the science and advocacy of CBPR and CEnR, she is principal investigator of the PCORI, Engage for Equity (E2) PLUS Award to test an institutional change intervention to enhance institutional trustworthiness and patient/community-led research. This builds on long-term NIH-funded research since 2006, with national partners, which identified best partnering practices associated with health outcomes, validated partnering metrics, and developed a collective reflection/action tool kit, and has held a 25-year-plus partnership with Southwest Tribal partners. She has co-produced with Latin American colleagues a train-the-trainer Participatory Research and Empowerment curriculum with its third iteration, Pesquisa Participativa e Empoderamento (Wallerstein, Mendes, Santana and Parajon), first available in Portuguese (Hucitec Publishers, 2024), with publication coming in English (Wiley Publishers, 2027) and Spanish; and has led the annual UNM CBPR Summer Institute since 2009.

Areas of Expertise

• Community-based participatory research
• Freirian empowerment research
• Culture-centered intervention research
• Structural inequity research
• Community and patient-engaged research