Congratulations to Lucia Canul for being selected as a Sadler Scholar! Lucia is a third year student in the Joint Doctoral Program studying Global Health. Sadler Scholars are doctoral students who come from underrepresented ethnic and racial communities focusing their research on bioethics. As a Sadler Scholar, Lucia has career building opportunities and receives feedback and edits from the Sadler community on work-in- progress talks, and access to participate in workshops and speaking opportunities. Later this year Lucia will be speaking at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine discussing her doctoral research.
Lucia is focusing her research on Indigenous and Latinx communities in the US and Mexico. Specifically, she is focused on strengthening those communities with collaborative nutrition initiatives. Through her research Lucia has a “goal to co-develop culturally inclusive dietary interventions that are guided by community knowledge and traditions.” She’s been working on this research for the past two summers out of the SDSU Oaxaca Center for Mesoamerican Studies in Oaxaca, Mexico with other students. With her cultural background of being a second generation Mexican-American, she plans to continue pursuing her passion of doing research for her culture through nutrition.
Lucia grew interested in public health from her experience as a registered dietitian and through work she has done in Oaxaca, Mexico. Through her experiences doing research in Oaxaca and as a registered dietitian, she saw “diverse and marginalized communities facing significant health disparities, food insecurity, and barriers to health equity. Through my work with many patients from Southern Mexico, I felt a deep responsibility to address these systemic issues.” This experience ultimately inspired her to focus on nutrition justice. Lucia is proud of her culture as a second-generation Mexican American and she said, “My connection to the region fuels my dedication to health justice and my pursuit of culturally appropriate strategies to address health disparities.”
Lucia is excited about being a Sadler Scholar and to be able to do research in areas she’s passionate about. Lucia has career goals “that combines my clinical background with a focus on cultural insights to improve nutrition strategies and health outcomes in communities.” She also stated that a career goal is “to inspire future healthcare professionals and advance health equity for underrepresented populations.”
