Pietra Check, M.P.H.
Pietra Check began doing community health work at a small nonprofit in an isolated part of Puerto Rico, the island of Culebra. The organization responded to a variety of needs under a paradigm of supporting women to create healthy families and community. This experience inspired Pietra to get formal public health training, which she completed in 2003, obtaining a Master of Public Health degree in Population and Family Health from Columbia University’s Mailman School. Since then, Pietra’s focus has been largely on injury prevention with immigrant populations. Pietra has been working for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the past decade in health communications and interventions to promote health equity for Spanish-speaking immigrant workers across the U.S. She is currently a DrPH Candidate in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. Her dissertation is an exploration of structural vulnerability and intersecting identities in the lived experiences of recently-immigrated Central American low-wage working women in Springfield, MA.