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In directing a pioneering program that delivers high-quality care to more than 12,000 of New York City’s most vulnerable young people, Dr. Diaz has become widely recognized as one of the nation’s most influential advocates for adolescent health.

Dr. Diaz’s passion for adolescents, particularly those whose circumstances deprive them of the care they need, stems from her own experience as a young immigrant from the Dominican Republic. Indeed, she herself was once a patient of the center she now leads, and it was the compassion and care she received that put her on a path to her life’s work.

“When I was a young child, my family was very poor and had no access to health care,” she says. “So my own life informs my understanding of the need for early intervention and for our center to be a place without barriers.”

Dr. Diaz earned her medical degree from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1981. She completed post-doctoral training at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and also earned a Master of Public Health from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in epidemiology from Columbia University. In 1989, Dr. Diaz was named the director of the very center that helped turn her life around when she was a teenager in distress.

Dr. Diaz has long been a leading figure in public health advocacy in New York as well as nationally and internationally, advancing policies that break down the economic and social barriers to high-quality health and wellness care for young people.

On the national level, Dr. Diaz was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies in 2008 (now the National Academy of Medicine), and to its governing council in 2017. She was also appointed in 2013 to the chairmanship of its board on children, youth and families. Dr. Diaz has been a White House Fellow and a member of the Food and Drug Administration Pediatric Advisory Committee. She and her team at the Center have been awarded several major research grants by the National Institutes of Health, including a long-term study of vaccination for HPV, the most common sexually transmitted infection among young people.

In New York, Dr. Diaz has been a board member of the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and is a past president and board chairman of the Children’s Aid Society. Long an advocate for all adolescents, especially those who feel marginalized or alone, Dr. Diaz was appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2009 to the New York City Commission for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning (LGBTQ) Runaway and Homeless Youth.

Dr. Diaz is the Dean of Global Health, Social Justice, and Human Rights; Jean C. and James W. Crystal Professor in Adolescent Health in the Departments of Pediatrics, and Environmental Medicine and Public Health; and Professor in the Department of Global Health And Health Systems Design at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.