Assistant Professor
Community Health and Prevention
lav53@drexel.edu
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Degrees
PhD, Health Behavior and Health Promotion, University of ArizonaMPH, University of ArizonaBA, University of Arizona
Bio
"Luis “Yaotenehuac” Valdez, PhD, MPH - is the son of Maria Virginia Diaz Rodriguez of Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, and Luis Arturo Valdez Arias of Querobabi, Sonora, Mexico. Raised and trained in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Dr. Valdez earned his PhD in Health Behavior & Health Promotion, with a minor in Epidemiology, from the University of Arizona in 2017.
Dr. Valdez is a community-engaged public health researcher whose scholarship examines how gender, stress, social connection, identity, and structural conditions shape health and wellbeing, particularly among Latine communities and other populations experiencing social and economic marginalization. A central focus of his work is understanding how expectations around masculinity and gender are learned, negotiated, resisted, and transformed across families, communities, and social institutions, and how these processes influence stress, coping, relationships, sleep, substance use, and chronic disease risk.
His research spans work with Latino men as well as queer and gender-diverse Latine people assigned male at birth. Across these populations, he is interested not only in documenting the health consequences of chronic and intersecting pressures, but also in understanding the sources of joy, connection, resilience, belonging, and wellbeing that communities draw upon to thrive. This strengths- and desire-based orientation increasingly shapes his research program, including work examining how Latino men define and pursue a “good life” beyond conventional deficit-focused models of health.
Dr. Valdez is the founder and principal investigator of the ¡GANAS! Health Initiative, a community-engaged research and intervention program co-developed to strengthen social connection, support healthier responses to stress, improve sleep and wellbeing, and create space for critical reflection on masculinity and health. His current NIH-funded research is testing and scaling GANAS as a group-based intervention addressing sleep and stress-related health risks among men in living low-resource communities.
His broader program of research includes studies of joy and wellbeing among Latino men; chronic stress and health among queer and gender-diverse Latine communities; substance use and medical cannabis; and the development of community-designed interventions for men in low-resource communities. Across these projects, he uses mixed-methods, participatory, and intervention-focused approaches that center lived experience and community knowledge.
Dr. Valdez’s scholarship is grounded in intersectional, strengths-based, and desire-based perspectives and in a commitment to collaborative and ethical research partnerships. Rather than viewing communities primarily through risk or deficit, his work seeks to understand both the structural forces that shape health and the relationships, practices, cultural knowledge, and collective capacities that communities use to create healthier lives.
Dr. Valdez's lab website is ganashealth.org.
Research Interests
- Participatory Action Research
- Health Intervention Development and Implementation
- Men's Health
- Latine Health Disparities
- Gender-Role Strain and Stress
- Chronic Stress
- Substance and Alcohol Use
Publications
Valdez, L. A., Mullany, A., & Smith, S. (in press). Reframing masculinity and health: Conceptual foundations of the GANAS gender-transformative intervention for Latino men. International Journal of Men’s Social and Community Health.
Arauz, N. R., Sabo, R. T., Valdez, L. A., Taylor, E. A., & García, D. T. (in press). Racial disparities in HPV vaccine uptake among adult Black and White Hispanic/Latino men in the United States: Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 2014–2022. International Journal of Men’s Social and Community Health.</p>
Valdez, L. A., Kidd, C. L., & Simpson, T. (2026). Chronic stress and health equity among queer and gender diverse Latine assigned male at birth communities in the USA - intersecting pressures. Culture, Health & Sexuality, forthcoming, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2026.2707324. PMID: 42560782.
Valdez, L. A., Kidd, C. L., & Zhou, E. (2026). Masculinity and health equity: Gender-responsive and -transformative interventions for men of colour in the USA. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2026.2636215.
Valdez, L. A., Markham, J., Jr., Scott, L., Person, S., Meyer, J. S., Robinson, D. E., & Buchanan, D. R. (2025). MOCHA Moving Forward: Findings and lessons learned from implementing a community-based chronic disease prevention study with middle-aged Black men. Ethnicity & Health, 30(6), 732-750. https://doi.org/10.1080/13557858.2025.2526752. PMCID: PMC12376729.
Meyer, J. S., Markham, J., Jr., Scott, L., Valdez, L. A., Robinson, D. E., & Buchanan, D. R. (2025). Men of Color Health Awareness intervention: Changes in adrenocortical activity assessed using fingernail cortisol. Frontiers in Public Health, 13, 1526636. PMCID: PMC12292214.
Barbieri M, Mercado E, Gubrium AC, Valdez LA. Social connectedness and surviving at the margins: Findings from interviews with low-income Latino men in the U.S. Northeast. Cultur Divers Ethnic Minor Psychol. 2025 Jan;31(1):97-109. doi: 10.1037/cdp0000604. Epub 2023 Jul 10. PMID: 37428756; PMCID: PMC10776818.
Valdez, E. S., Valdez, L., Gorry, E., Chan, J., Dixon, S., Fisher, T., ... & Gubrium, A. (2023). Mind the gaps: The need for inclusion of male-identified voices in adolescent sexual and reproductive health. American Journal of Men's Health, 17(3), 15579883231181570.
Valdez, L. A., Jaeger, E. C., Garcia, D. O., & Griffith, D. M. (2023). Breaking Down Machismo: Shifting definitions and embodiments of Latino manhood in middle-aged Latino men. American Journal of Men's Health, 17(5), 15579883231195118. PMCID: PMC10496479.
Mullany A, Barbieri M, Smith S, Gubrium A, Valdez LA. "Who is our real enemy?" internalized racism in the Puerto Rican diaspora and the role of political education within community health intervention. Soc Sci Med. 2022 Oct;311:115334. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115334. Epub 2022 Aug 31. PMID: 36108561.
Garcia, D. O., Valdez, L. A., Aceves, B., Bell, M. L., Rabe, B. A., Villavicencio, E. A., Marrero, D. G., Melton, F., & Hooker, S. P. (2022). mHealth-supported gender- and culturally-sensitive weight loss intervention for Hispanic men with overweight and obesity: Single-arm pilot study. JMIR Formative Research, 6(9), e37637. PMCID: PMC9536522.
Valdez, L. A., Mullany, A., Barbieri, M., & Gubrium, A. C. (2022). Uncovering historical legacies to contextualize health inequities in Puerto Rican men: An expansion of the minority stress model. Frontiers in Sociology, 7, 830184. PMCID: PMC8948470.
See Dr. Valdez's complete list of publications on Google Scholar