Ninez A. Ponce

Ninez A. Ponce is Professor of Health Policy and Management at UCLA's Fielding School of Public Health, where she serves as Associate Center Director at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and Principal Investigator of the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS). She also directs the UCLA Center for Global and Immigrant Health and serves as Associate Director of UCLA's Asian American Studies Center.

Her educational background includes a Bachelor of Science from UC Berkeley, Master of Public Policy from Harvard University, and PhD in Health Services from UCLA. Her research focuses on immigrant and global health, survey methodology, and health disparities, with particular emphasis on Asian American and Pacific Islander communities.

Ponce pioneered multicultural survey research techniques including racial/ethnic identity measures, acculturation scales, and cultural adaptations of surveys in multiple Asian languages. Her work has received major funding from the National Institute on Aging, National Cancer Institute, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She has advised international organizations including the World Bank and Catholic Relief Services, and previously served as Deputy Director of the Asian and Pacific Islander American Health Forum.

As a leader in health equity research, Ponce has contributed to national committees including the Institute of Medicine's Subcommittee on Standardized Race/Ethnicity Data Collection and served as founding chair of the Disparities Interest Group for AcademyHealth. Her current research examines how macroeconomic changes affect health outcomes in developing countries and among racial/ethnic groups in the U.S.

Her advising work encompasses community-based organizations including Oakland's La Clinica de la Raza and Asian Health Services. She has developed methodological approaches for expanding survey sampling frames to better represent California's diverse immigrant populations and has led efforts to implement Asian ethnic oversamples in statewide health surveys.