Debra Joy Pérez, Ph.D., M.P.A., M.A., is a senior program officer in Research and Evaluation where she is responsible for the Foundation’s work on public health and management of programs that focus on increasing the diverse perspectives that inform the Foundation’s grantmaking. As national program director for New Connections: Increasing Diversity of RWJF Programming, Pérez also works with historically underrepresented investigators and identifies opportunities to link this new talent to the Foundation’s work across health and health care research areas. She is also the chair of the RWJF Diversity Committee working within the Foundation and with other foundations to enhance the quality and impact of philanthropy by incorporating diverse perspectives. In addition, Pérez is also the senior program officer responsible for managing the National Urban Fellows program at RWJF which supports underrepresented midcareers in a nine-month mentorship. As the former program officer for the Disparities Team, she was responsible for developing major initiatives designed to find interventions that work to reduce racial/ethnic disparities in health care called Finding Answers: Disparities Research for Change and establish a learning network of providers implementing strategies to serve the limited English proficient patient populations called Speaking Together: National Language Services Network.

Since joining the Foundation in October 2004, Pérez also has been responsible for program development in research and evaluation in the areas of racial/ethnic disparities, fellows and scholars programs in evaluation and research, research in Latino and minority health and health care issues and public health research. Much of her work in public health focuses on building the field of public health services systems research which supports building the evidence of how the organization, structure, governance, financing and performance impact the performance of the public health system.

She began her career in philanthropy in 1998, when she became deputy director for New Jersey Health Initiatives, a program office of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Her current research focuses on racial/ethnic disparities in health and health care. She has a particular focus on discrimination and how sociocultural factors such as acculturation impact immigrant and nonimmigrant health and health care experiences.

Pérez completed her interfaculty doctoral program at Harvard University in 2005, and received a Ph.D. in health policy. While at Harvard, she chaired the first and second universitywide symposium on racial and ethnic disparities in health/health care. She was awarded a five-year fellowship in health policy and research from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. She received an M.A. in social science and women’s studies from the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, in 1993. She received the National Urban and Rural Fellows award leading to her M.P.A. from Baruch College, City University of New York, where she graduated with honors. Pérez graduated from Douglass College with a B.A. in communications.

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