Portraits of Health Equity: Yamilé Molina, PhD

Portraits of Health Equity videos spotlight some of the clinicians, researchers, educators and community-based practitioners who are pursuing health equity through their work at UI Health. Their mission is to passionately promote health equity for vulnerable populations and marginalized communities across Chicago and beyond.

Me llamo (my name is) Yamilé Molina. I am a community scientist and a scholar activist for Cancer Health Equity.

Resilient Communities

Hurricane Katrina was one of the scariest moments of my life and felt very similar to the stories I heard from my family from Cuba and had continuously told me about the refugee experiences, and it felt like a first-hand experience for what it means to have everything taken from you and everything to be just completely inaccessible for so many spaces.

I first got to know Chicago as an evacuee and a time when Chicago really represented for me one of the most compassionate environments that I could ever go into, and a compassionate community. As a child of immigrants and belonging to a family of immigrants, my background directly feeds into understanding that our marginalized communities are also among our most resilient, our most powerful, and that recognizing that is incredibly valuable.

I have a number of family members who have been rejected in the context of healthcare systems, educational access, and the like, and they have been able to navigate through different community resources and networks to address and overcome any barriers they might have had. And that directly feeds the type of science that I do in terms of recognizing our participants as our next interventionists.

Social Determinants of Health

It’s interesting because social determinants of health are often treated currently as a negative or as adverse or risk factors, but there are proactive and health protective social determinants of health. Resilience is an example of that, wherein our tight community networks determine our health and our well-being determine our mental health, determine our access.

And so the work that I do and the research that I do around social determinants of health is really highlighting and identifying these naturally occurring community level processes like resilience, like networks, and really thinking through ways in which we can formally recognize them and formally invest in them as a society.

Genuine Mission of Equity

The University of Illinois Chicago has been my favorite place to work, and it’s not been my only place to work as a scholar, because the mission is equity and it’s real, it’s genuine, it’s in practice. I have been surrounded by a community of individuals who are invested in equity, and they do so with community, not on community. I think one of the things that really distinguishes us in terms of being a Cancer Center, in terms of being a minority serving institution, is the focus on embedding community in every type of science, in every type of learning process. Communities can understand what we’re doing in the lab. They can understand technically hard information and concepts, and they can help us, they can improve upon it.

Legacy of Centering Community

I really want to be known as a person who unapologetically is invested in the elevation of community and students, who unapologetically provides spaces for them to become leaders, who unapologetically ensures that their voices are not only heard but amplified to have the most impact.