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Professor
University of Illinois Chicago
Dr. Suarez-Balcazar is a Professor in the Department of Occupational Therapy, and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Disability and Human Development and Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research expands across several interrelated areas of race, culture, disability, and health. She focuses on the study of social determinants of health impacting Latinx families of children with disabilities and designing culturally tailored health promotion interventions in collaboration with the community. Trained as a community psychologist, Dr. Suarez-Balcazar embraces a community-engaged and community-based participatory research approach. She is currently a CO-PI on a NIDILRR funded research grant (PODER [Promoting Obesity prevention among children with Developmental disabilities and their families through Engaged Research), and a CO-PI and Co-Investigator on several other projects designed to promote the integration of health literacy strategies into healthcare. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and Fellow of the Society for Community Research and Action (SCRA). Dr. Suarez-Balcazar was the recipient of the 2021 Distinguished Alumna Award, University of Kansas, department of Applied Behavioral Sciences, and named University of Illinois Scholar in 2022.