Ninez A. Ponce

Ninez A. Ponce, (BS UC Berkeley; MPP Harvard; PhD UCLA), is Professor in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and Director of its Center for Health Policy Research. She leads the California Health Interview Survey, the nation’s largest state health survey. A health economist, her research areas in health equity focus on developing multicultural survey measures, implementing population-based health surveys in diverse populations, and examining the intersection of social factors and health policy.

She was honored in 2019 by Asian Health Services, a nationally-accoladed community-health center as “the People’s Researcher”, awarded the 2020 UCLA Don T. Nakanishi Award for Outstanding Engaged Scholarship, and received the 2020 inaugural Data Equity award by Asian Pacific Partners for Empowerment, Advocacy and Leadership. In 2019 she received the top prize in her field from AcademyHealth that recognized the impact of her work in population health measurement to inform public policies.

She is an elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance, board member for AcademyHealth, and is a Commissioner for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Commission to Transform Public Health Data Systems. She serves on the editorial boards of Milbank Quarterly and JAMA Health Forum.