Martha Daviglus

Martha Daviglus

Martha Daviglus, a bilingual and bicultural physician/epidemiologist of Hispanic origin, is the Edmund Foley Professor of Medicine, executive director of the Institute for Minority Health Research and associate vice chancellor for research at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research is focused on the epidemiology of cardiovascular diseases and related chronic conditions, minority health, and health disparities.

She is the principal investigator or co-principal investigator on many NIH-sponsored longitudinal cohort studies, including the Chicago Field Center for the Hispanic Community Health Study/ Study of Latinos — the largest, most in-depth longitudinal cohort study of this fast-growing minority population — and the Illinois Precision Medicine Consortium, an enrollment site for the national All of Us Research Program.

The HCHS/SOL study, now in its third phase, has collected extensive health data on more than 16,000 Hispanic/Latino people in the U.S., including 4,000 Hispanic/Latino men and women from Chicago. Baseline and follow-up examinations from the first two phases generated comprehensive data on the burden of cardiovascular and chronic disease risk factors in diverse Hispanic/Latino adults. The study revealed that about 80% and 71% of Hispanic/Latino men and women, respectively, had adverse levels of at least one major cardiovascular risk factor at baseline. Moreover, 29% of men and 27% of women had an increase in number of adverse risk factors after six years.

Daviglus can offer expertise in the following areas:

• Epidemiology of chronic diseases
• Epidemiology of cardiovascular disease
• Chronic disease in the Chicago Hispanic/Latino community
• Cardiovascular risk in the Chicago Hispanic/Latino community