CHS Welcomes New Faculty – Meet Dr. Alfonso Rojas Alvarez
Published October 1, 2024
By Darlene Muguiro
UTEP College of Health Sciences
This fall, the College of Health Sciences (CHS) is welcoming several new faculty members in Public Health and Physical Therapy.
We are pleased to present the next profile featuring Dr. Alfonso Rojas Alvarez, assistant professor of Public Health. Dr. Rojas Alvarez comes to UTEP from UT Austin, where he held an appointment in the LBJ School of Public Policy. He received his PhD in Public Policy from the University of Texas at Austin and was recruited to UTEP as part of the NIH FIRST (Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation) program, which aims to enhance and maintain cultures of inclusive excellence in NIH-funded institutions to foster sustainable institutional culture change.
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Like many first-time visitors to El Paso, Dr. Alfonso Rojas Alvarez was impressed by the city’s small-town feel, despite being part of the largest international border community in the world. Upon beginning his appointment in the College of Health Sciences (CHS), he was delighted to learn that the tight-knit mentality extends to UTEP and within CHS.
“Everyone has been just so friendly and wanting to guide me so that I can experience the best things to do in the city, like the restaurants and hiking,” he said. “I didn’t necessarily have that same experience elsewhere, so it has made a huge difference for me.”
In his appointment as assistant professor, Dr. Rojas Alvarez is teaching a public health administration course for undergraduate students. He says that he was immediately impressed by how engaged the students were in discussions and by their passion for their community, and has taken time to help them identify the best ways to channel it.
“I think that public health students, almost by definition, need to have that itch to do something and change the world,” he said. “That definitely came across to me in the first class, when students started asking me where the best places would be for them to work to make the most difference. Since then, it has been a recurrent theme.”
In addition to his teaching responsibilities, Rojas Alvarez aims to continue his research in health disparities among Hispanics from a policy perspective. He is specifically looking at Medicaid, and how differentiation in implementation of the policies across states create and exacerbate disparities.
“For example, in Texas, we did not expand Medicaid, despite being at the border with New Mexico – a state that did expand Medicaid – and we see differences in outcomes. We’re seeing differences in out-of-pocket expenditures, mobility, and even in diabetes care, as a consequence of that imaginary line,” he said.
In addition to building his own research agenda, Rojas Alvarez will collaborate with five other faculty in UTEP’s FIRST cohort to create an interdisciplinary project focused on health disparities – the disciplines include sociology, anthropology, biology, and policy. He will also receive mentoring by senior faculty at the NIH FIRST administrative level.
“The fact that we were selected to join NIH FIRST – not only for our individual profiles, but by how well we can work together – is one of the main advantages of this program,” he said. “It’s a natural set of people that I can collaborate with. We can help each other through this process, and we will grow together inside of the University.”
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Go Miners!
For more information about the programs in the Department of Public Health, please visit: https://www.utep.edu/chs/phs.
