Selena E. Ortiz, PhD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Administration at The Pennsylvania State University. Her scholarship focuses on addressing health disparities and ensuring health equity. Dr. Ortiz’ work does this in two ways: first, by examining health and social policy formation and, second, by examining access to health services and outcomes. One main area of her research uses mixed-methods approaches to examine how cognitive frames and values influence policy agenda setting, public deliberation, public opinion, health disparities, and health care decision-making. Topics of interest include the social determinants of health, particularly housing affordability, and chronic disease.
Dr. Ortiz is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Health Care and Policy Research (CHCPR), the Population Research Institute (PRI), and the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State. She also holds a courtesy appointment with the School of Public Policy. Dr. Ortiz is a research fellow at the FrameWorks Institute in Washington, D.C., and is an active member of AcademyHealth, the Interdisciplinary Association of Population Health Science (IAPHS), and the American Public Health Association (APHA). Currently, Dr. Ortiz serves as the chair of APHA’s Ethics Section. Dr. Ortiz’s scholarship has been published in Public Health Reports, Preventive Medicine, the American Journal of Public Health, Medical Care, Social Science & Medicine, and JAMA, among others. Prior to her appointment at Penn State, Dr. Ortiz was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar (Cohort 11) at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies and a non-resident fellow at the ASH Center for Democracy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Dr. Ortiz received her PhD in health policy and health services from the UCLA Jonathan & Karin Fielding School of Public Health in 2013. She is a member of the Alpha Nu Chapter of Delta Omega, the National Public Health Honor Society.