Selena E. Ortiz, PhD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Administration & Demography at The Pennsylvania State University. Her scholarship focuses on health equity, health disparities, and health policy formation processes, with the goal of promoting social justice, especially within racial/ethnic and low-income communities. Dr. Ortiz’ research has two primary foci. The first relates to the social determinants of health, health services access, and health outcomes, particularly among racial/ethnic communities. The second examines the determinants of population health policy formation, including problem recognition, the formulation of policy proposals, and politics. In this vein, she uses mixed-methods approaches to examine how communication, cognitive frames, and values influence policy agenda setting, public deliberation, public opinion, health disparities, and individual health care decision-making.

Dr. Ortiz is a faculty affiliate of the Population Research Institute, the Center for Health Care and Policy Research, and the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State. She also holds a courtesy faculty appointment with the School of Public Policy. Dr. Ortiz is an elected board member of the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science (IAPHS), a research fellow at the FrameWorks Institute in Washington, D.C., and an active member of AcademyHealth and the American Public Health Association (APHA). She also serves as the past-Chair of APHA’s Ethics Section.

Dr. Ortiz earned her BA in Sociology from the University of California Berkeley, an MPH in health policy from the Mel & Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona, and her PhD in health policy and health services from the Jonathan & Karin Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA. Prior to her appointment at Penn State, Dr. Ortiz was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar (Cohort 11) at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies and a non-resident fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Her scholarship has been published in Public Health Reports, the American Journal of Public Health, Social Science & Medicine, and JAMA, among others. Dr. Ortiz is a proud member of the Alpha Nu Chapter of Delta Omega, the National Public Health Honor Society.