By: Mira Garin
San Diego County’s Health and Human Services Agency honored 12 individuals and organizations during National Public Health Week at their 2024 Live Well San Diego Public Health Champion Awards Ceremony “for their outstanding contributions in the prevention of disease or injury and the promotion of public health for all San Diegans.” Both individual Public Health Services Awardees were SPH faculty, Leticia Cazares and Dr. Charles “Chuck” Matthews.
After completing her BA in Psychology in 1998 at the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, Ms. Cazares found work in HIV at San Ysidro Health. “At the time I was struggling with some mental health issues and alcohol abuse,” she explained, “[but] my first year [at San Ysidro Health] was life-changing. The experience put my life into perspective and got me out of my head and into service for others.” She then decided to pursue an MPH at SDSU. “I fell in love with community health and never looked back.”
Ms. Cazares has had a focus on community engagement throughout her career. Now as the Co-Director of the first community-based Clinical Research Recruitment Center in the Center for Equitable and Diverse Research (CEDR) at the SDSU Research Foundation, she works to help diversify clinical research participation. Using a Community Health Worker (CHW)/Promotora model, she and her team support researchers with various aspects of conducting research, including proposal and protocol development, participant recruitment and retention, and wrap-around support. Ms. Cazares also continues her consulting work to connect communities with researchers through the T3 Strategies Group. “I’ve been doing community outreach and engagement work for over 25 years,” Ms. Cazares expounded. “I love the challenge of finding a way to get folks into care, involved, enrolled, whatever it is!”
After completing his BS in Psychology, MS in Marriage, Family & Child Counseling, and MBA in Health Care Administration, Dr. Matthews bounced across many different roles throughout health and health adjacent fields. “I liked helping people thrive on an individual basis, [but] I wanted to have an impact [on] groups of people, communities, [and] policy.” He was eventually recruited to work for the then new Public Health Officer, Dr. Wilma Wooten, where he directed operations for the public health department. Through this role, Dr. Matthews found his passion for working with communities to improve health outcomes. “Public health approaches problems and issues in a systematic way that I fell in love with,” he explained. “I knew it was time to go back to school and get training,” so he began pursuing a Ph.D. through the UCSD/SDSU Joint Doctoral Program in Global Health.
Dr. Matthews now teaches at both CSU San Marcos and SDSU, and he was recruited to help develop and launch the new DrPH program at SDSU as Interim Director, which will be welcoming its inaugural class this autumn. He also recently started the new company Global Health Fusion, with the goal of bridging the health leader training gap between academia and frontline border health. Truly living and breathing his teaching role, Dr. Matthews explained, “the students are so committed, smart and truly our next generation of public health leaders.”
Both Ms. Cazares and Dr. Matthews expressed appreciation for the recognition of their work. “[I feel] super happy to be recognized by my public health family,” Dr. Matthews said, “especially when I am so grateful for all they have taught me over the years.” Ms. Cazares noted the way in which receiving the award encouraged her to recognize her own work as she reviewed her entire career in detail. “At the age of 50 and all the different roles I’ve had, this is my first professional award.… It was powerful. I can finally say that I believe myself when I say, I am truly proud of my work!”
They both also shared a few pearls of wisdom for graduating students. Dr. Matthews emphasized the importance of teamwork, stating, “Collaboration is one of the greatest paths to success!” Ms. Cazares expanded on this idea by emphasizing the role of emotional intelligence in communication with teammates. People who have developed emotional intelligence are “much more flexible, adaptable, compassionate, empathetic, [and] can communicate with and relate to others effectively and constructively.”
Congratulations to our outstanding faculty!
