Public health professor honored for work on health survey she helped create

Ninez Ponce, UCLA professor of public health and director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, and the statewide health survey she helped launch were recognized with a Health Services Research Impact Award from AcademyHealth.

Ponce helped create the first California Health Interview Survey in 2001. More than 20,000 people from California’s 58 counties are interviewed for the survey ever year, making it the largest continuous state health survey in the United States. The UCLA Center for Health Policy Research in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health administers the survey and publishes the results so that policymakers, health experts, journalists and members of the public can learn about the health needs of people living in the state. 

As principal investigator of the California Health Interview Survey, Ponce expanded data collection to ensure the survey represented California’s Asian populations and oversaw the adaption of the survey into Cantonese, Korean, Mandarin, Tagalog and Vietnamese.

According to AcademyHealth, the annual award “is intended to identify and promote examples of outstanding research that has been successfully translated into health policy, management, or clinical practice in order to address cost, quality, access, equity and/or patient outcomes and the delivery of care.”