Mary Diaz Santana, Ph.D.

The main goal of Dr. Díaz Santana’s research group is to improve risk assessment techniques for precision prevention, to lessen the burden of cancer and chronic diseases like diabetes in racial and ethnic minority women, especially Hispanic women. Compared to their non-Hispanic white counterparts, Hispanics in the US face higher risk of obesity, diabetes, and cancer. In Hispanic women, breast cancer is both a major cause of morbidity and the leading cause of cancer death. Additionally, socioeconomic inequalities render Hispanic women vulnerable to cancer disparities.

Breast cancer risk prediction models are ideally used as a tool in precision prevention for risk stratification, allowing for identification of high-risk women who would benefit the most from more frequent screening and targeted interventions. However, widely-used breast cancer risk prediction tools have not performed well in Hispanic women.

Current research focus:
To develop a risk prediction tool, specific to individual Hispanic subgroups of women, that includes social and environmental determinants of health, and multi-ethnic polygenic risk scores to improve risk prediction specifically for Hispanic women.

Mary Díaz Santana, Ph.D. is an epidemiologist with a primary focus on risk prediction modeling and broad experience in studying modifiable risk factors for chronic diseases, specifically breast cancer and diabetes. Dr. Díaz Santana received her Ph.D. in Epidemiology from the School of Public Health and Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst under the direction of Dr. Katherine Reeves. She joined the Biostatistics and Computational Biology Branch at NIEHS in 2018 as an IRTA postdoctoral fellow, where she gained further experience in improving methods for data analysis of epidemiological studies under the supervision of Dr. Clarice Weinberg. While completing her postdoctoral fellowship, she applied for and was awarded a position in the NIEHS Independent Research Scholar Program. Dr. Díaz Santana holds a secondary appointment in the NIEHS Epidemiology Branch.