Aracelis Z. Torres

Born and raised in the Bronx in New York City, Aracelis Torres understood early on that all health care is not created equal. This realization fueled her desire to pursue a path to address the issue of health disparities. After completing her undergraduate studies at Yale University, Torres' work in a New York City community health center solidified her decision to apply her skills toward a career in public health. She obtained her MPH from the Yale School of Public Health with a concentration in Chronic Disease Epidemiology. Torres' work there focused primarily on the disparities in utilization of mammography screening within the Hispanic-Latino community. Torres was a doctoral student at the Bloomberg School within the Cancer Epidemiology concentration. There, she has analyzed the effectiveness of patient navigation on improving breast cancer screening among black Medicare beneficiaries from Baltimore City. She has worked toward integrating this information with geographic data to determine whether the success of the patient navigation program varies by how far individuals reside from health services. She also spent time working closely with the Chief of Epidemiologic Services at the Baltimore City Health Department to create a youth violence report for the city's Violent Crime Reduction Enhancement Initiative.