MD, College of Physicians and Surgeons
Columbia University
MPH, School of Public Health
Columbia University
Dr. Diaz is a distinguished expert in public health with over 35 years of experience specializing in epidemiology, monitoring, evaluation, surveillance and implementation research. She currently serves as the Chief of Epidemiology, Monitoring and Evaluation Unit of the Maternal, Newborn, Child, Adolescent Health and Ageing Department at the World Health Organization (WHO).
She earned joint degrees in Medicine and Public Health (M.D./ M.P.H.) from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Columbia School of Public Health and is Board certified in both Internal and Preventive Medicine. She also completed the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) and Preventive Medicine residency at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). During that time, she worked in the Puerto Rico Health Department and was responsible for infectious disease surveillance. In this capacity she investigated several outbreaks and did special investigations including determining factors for risk for measles death among children in Puerto Rico during a large measles outbreak. In her Preventive Medicine Residency she focused on HIV/AIDS surveillance among the Latino Population of the United States.
She remained at the CDC for 20 years. She was at first responsible for the supplement to HIV/AIDS surveillance project, a project in which persons with HIV/AIDS were interviewed in 12 states in the United States. She wrote numerous articles based on these data that explored access and use of health and social services and continued risk behaviors. As a CDC assignee she served as Deputy Director of the Center for Urban Epidemiological Studies at the New York Academy of Medicine where she developed a community board in East Harlem to participate in research decisions of the Center, performed a study of asthma rates among children in East Harlem schools finding among the highest rates of asthma and conducted epidemiological research among injection users in Harlem and East Harlem to determine factors for HIV and Hepatitis infections. Also, as a CDC assignee to the Pan American Health in Brazil she worked with the Brazilian government to assist in HIV/AIDS activities including an evaluation of Brazil’s Antiretroviral Program, and testing the sensitivity and specificity of a new rapid Syphilis test. She returned to Atlanta to be the team leader for surveillance for the Global AIDS Program where she supervised a team of epidemiologists who provided technical assistance to more than 25 countries in the world on how to do HIV/AIDS Surveillance. She developed new methods for doing HIV surveillance and worked extensively with the World Health Organization and UNAIDS in developing international consensus and guidelines on HIV/AIDS surveillance. She was promoted to Branch Chief of the Epidemiology and Strategic Information Branch where she oversaw a professional staff of approximately 50 people in the areas of surveillance, monitoring and evaluation, informatics, and statistics, managed a budget of close to 10 million and worked closely with Strategic Information unit of the Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) assuring that Congress and country offices have quality data to assess the progress and impact of their programs. She was considered one of the foremost experts HIV/AIDS surveillance in the world.
She then moved on to UNICEF and served as the lead of the Knowledge Management and Implementation Research Unit in the Health Section in New York. She primarily worked on supporting implementation research in various countries such as designing a study to assess the impact of integrated community case management (iCCM) in Indonesia, Uganda and Sierra Leone. She also examined the global uptake of iCCM and child health days, using routine health information data for district level health program planning and wrote several articles on implementation research concepts.
She then joined World Health Organization where she analyzes trends on maternal, newborn, child, adolescent health and ageing (MNCAAH) especially in the areas of coverage of health interventions, policies, quality of care and use of routine health information systems. In her capacity she ensures the availability of data in MNCAAH for the world through a data portal, oversees expert groups in MNCAAH measurement, supports modelling of impact of COVID-19 shut downs on MNCAAH services.
She has over 100 peer reviewed publications, served as guest editor for several supplements in scientific and medical journals and written several WHO Global Reports and Guidance documents.