About Leticia Marquez-Magana

Leticia Márquez-Magaña, PhD is Professor of Biology and the Director of the Health Equity Research (HER) Laboratory at San Francisco State University. She is the first-born daughter of Mexican immigrants and began her education in the U.S. as a monolingual Spanish speaker. Professor Márquez-Magaña attended Stanford University as the first member of her extended U.S. family to complete high school. She earned a co-terminal BS/MS degree in Biological Sciences at Stanford, and went on to earn a PhD in Biochemistry at UC Berkeley. She joined the faculty at SF State in 1994 targeting her professional efforts to “giving back.” Currently these efforts are primarily dedicted to achieving the overall mission of the HER lab to "Link Basic Science to Community Health." Towards this end projects in the lab are aimed at using biomedical tools to study how social injustice gets under the skin to cause or worsen disease. This information can then contribute to advocacy efforts to change policies and practices for health equity.