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16 A FTER
FIERCELY
ADVOCATING FOR HARD - TO REACH RACIAL AND ETHNIC GROUPS TO BE BETTER REPRESENTED IN POPULATION - BASED HEALTH SURVEYS , SHE HELPED TO DEVELOP THE GROUNDBREAKING
C ALIFORNIA H EALTH I NTERVIEW S URVEY,
WHICH
SHE NOW HEADS .
Ninez Ponce:
Making California’s Diverse Populations Count For Dr. Ninez Ponce,
the opportunity to participate in developing a
groundbreaking state health survey shortly after earning her Ph.D. in 1998 was “a dream come true.” More than a decade later, Ponce, an associate professor in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and associate director of UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center, is the new principal investigator of the same California Health Interview Survey (CHIS), now the nation’s largest state health survey and widely admired for the detailed picture it provides of the health and health care needs of California’s diverse population (for more
UCLAPUBLIC HEALTH
on CHIS, see the article on page 11). Ponce’s path to the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health faculty – and specifically the school’s Center for Health Policy Research, where CHIS is based – can be traced to the frustrations she experienced with health surveys when she was starting her career as an advocate. After earning a Master of Public Policy degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 1988, Ponce spent three years as deputy director of the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum, a nonprofit advocacy and policy research organization aiming to advance the health of Asian and Pacific Islanders in the United States. In that role, she became a strong proponent for population-based health surveys that would collect data better representing the diversity of Asian American/Pacific Islanders and other populations.