CHS Welcomes New Faculty – Meet Dr. Jennifer Salinas

Published October 4, 2023
By Darlene Muguiro
UTEP College of Health Sciences

This fall, the College of Health Sciences (CHS) is welcoming new faculty members across several departments.

We are pleased to present the sixth profile, featuring Dr. Jennifer Salinas, associate professor of Social Work. Salinas received her PhD in sociology and demography from the University of Texas at Austin and her master’s degree in social work from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include health disparities, social determinants of health, healthy eating and active living, and cancer and chronic disease prevention.

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Dr. Jennifer Salinas is no stranger to the Paso del Norte region. For the last nine years, she has dedicated her career to putting El Paso on the map regarding important conversations around health disparities in the border population. While she spent most of her early life in the Northeastern United States, she says that she was first drawn to the Hispanic community and health disparities research while working at the University of Pennsylvania’s teaching hospital as a clinical social worker.

“I was brought in to help patients who only spoke Spanish, because I spoke Spanish. And while the hospital was providing excellent health care, I felt that we were missing the mark when it came to the patients’ experience because of some breakdowns in communication and some cultural barriers,” she said.

Her passion led her to pursue a PhD degree at UT Austin, and eventually led her to a faculty position at the UT School of Public Health in Brownsville, where she first began exploring research focused on border populations.

“My expertise has become the representation of border populations, contrasting border population health and health in non-border cities like Dallas, for example,” she said. “In the last five years or so, I’ve been really focused on adapting interventions that are targeted at Hispanic populations but which have never been tested in our border population.”

Prior to her appointment at UTEP, Salinas was faculty at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso, and was also actively involved with UTEP students and faculty as a committee member for both master’s and doctoral students in the College of Health Sciences. While interviewing for her current position as associate professor, she had the opportunity to visit with Social Work students, who tested her knowledge about the city.

“I felt like they really wanted to make sure I had an understanding of the community – a pulse on the community agencies that do social work in El Paso,” she said. “They wanted to have someone who understood where they live, where they’re from.”

While Salinas is currently focused on her first semester of classes, she is looking forward to continuing her research, and hopes to expand several projects into rural West Texas and establish partnerships with community agencies in those areas. She also hopes that her students will value her passion for the border and reducing health disparities among border populations.

“I really have dedicated all my energy into putting the border on the map and bringing this community to the table,” she said. “This is very personal to me. I feel like I was led to the border area, and that I have an important purpose here.”

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Go Miners!

For more information about the programs in the Department of Social Work, please visit: https://www.utep.edu/chs/sw/.