
PhD Student, Nutrition, UNC-CH
Born and raised in Sterling, Virginia, Ivonne grew up in a Spanish and English bilingual home which instilled in her a lifelong passion for finding ways to serve Spanish-speaking communities, particularly in Latin America. She holds investigative interests in promoting optimal infant and young child feeding practices through behavior change interventions that are grounded in theory and co-designed in collaboration with parents, caregivers, and community stakeholders. She possesses robust professional and academic perspectives in the areas of nutrition and food science, lactation physiology, qualitative research methods, nutrition and lactation education, health promotion, and community development. In addition to having a MPH degree, she is a Registered Dietitian (RD) who is skilled in working within interdisciplinary teams and in Spanish interpretation and translation. Ivonne has experience in project management; stakeholder engagement; semi-structured interviewing; focus-group facilitation; transcript coding; family planning; adolescent health; and program implementing, monitoring, and evaluation.
After serving as a Peace Corps Community Health Volunteer in Manabí, Ecuador from 2018-2020, she returned to Ecuador in 2022 to complete a 3-month dietetics practicum at Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ). Ivonne continues to build upon the collaborative relationships she developed with colleagues at USFQ as she conducts her research in Galapagos. In the Galapagos Islands, Ivonne is working with her mentor, Dr. Heather Wasser, to promote exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) as a key prevention and treatment strategy for cardiometabolic health throughout the life cycle. Her doctoral research has three aims: (1) use formative research methods to identify locally relevant barriers and facilitators of EBF practices among women living in Galapagos; (2) adapt and validate a self-efficacy scale for EBF among Spanish-speaking communities, and (3) informed by Aims 1 and 2, test the feasibility of a co-designed EBF intervention on the metrics of recruitment, enrollment, retention, and data collection (survey and biological samples) as compared to a matched controlled community.
Ivonne’s research with the Center for Galapagos Studies will strengthen the body of evidence around improving maternal and infant cardiometabolic health through EBF interventions in Latin America and island communities, as well as among Latino populations in the U.S. She is currently funded through the Department of Nutrition’s National Institutes of Health, Global Cardiometabolic Disease Training (GCMD T-32) Pre-doctoral Fellowship.