Promoting nursing, Latinas in STEM careers
Mary Lou de Leon Siantz yearns to make a difference for Mexican immigrant families. So much so that she left a tenured faculty and associate dean positions at a top-ranked nursing school to join a fledgling faculty team at the new Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing at UC Davis in 2011, just one year after the school opened its graduate programs.
“My professional goals align with the school’s mission and vision of transformative leadership to advance health,” de Leon Siantz says. “Plus, the school’s California location provided the access to the population I am most interested in studying — immigrant families.”
The daughter of Mexican immigrants, de Leon Siantz’s current research focuses on the well-being of Hispanic immigrant adolescents and identifying what education will inform better outcomes and produce healthy people. Her vision, though, goes beyond improving health. She also seeks to inspire other Latinas to pursue research and science careers.
“In order to raise up the next generation of leaders who will continue these efforts to transform health care, we must commit to mentoring young Latina students,” de Leon Siantz explains.
She accepted the role of founding director of the Center for Advancing Multicultural Perspectives on Science (CAMPOS) to increase the participation of women, especially Latinas, in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers. She also hopes to elevate nursing’s value as a science.
While the new UC Davis position demanded a significant investment from the nursing professor — who was teaching doctoral courses as well as growing her research on the well-being of Hispanic immigrant adolescents — she says the work was gratifying as she saw the number of Latinas pursuing doctoral degrees and postdoctoral fellowships at UC Davis increase. The efforts resulted in Forbes magazine naming UC Davis the 2016 Best Value College for Women in STEM.
“These are the things that are important to me,” she explains. “I was inspired by many diverse nurse leaders who served as my mentors over the years. Now I am able to make that commitment to make a difference.”
Currently, de Leon Siantz works with Lisceth Brazil-Cruz, a postdoctoral scholar at UC Davis seeking to understand the factors that promote women of color in STEM fields. Together, Brazil-Cruz and de Leon Siantz are studying the effects of immigration on Mexican-origin teens in a unique, bi-national project that compares the risk for depression, pregnancy and access to care between those who migrate to Central California and a group of teen girls who remain in Jalisco, Mexico.
Brazil-Cruz says her personal experience as a Mexican teen immigrant provides her with some connection to the study participants.
“We are building trust among immigrant families,” she explains. “These partnerships and relationships are important to grow opportunities for families.”
She adds that the work not only allows the team to gather much needed data, but also share information with the families about access to higher education and other resources.
“Many of the families we work with are not aware of the resources available to them,” Brazil-Cruz says. “It’s very rewarding to see families, especially the parents, realize there are many more educational choices available to them than they may have known about.”
For de Leon Siantz, the collaborations are the beginning of creating real improvement for the well-being of immigrant families.
“More research is needed, from so many perspectives,” she says. “I’m honored to mentor students on the value of their scholarship toward the advancement of the health of rural, migrant and immigrant families, locally, nationally and globally.”