Margarita (Maggie) Hernandez
Margarita (Maggie) Hernandez is a National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the Dartmouth College. Maggie’s research seeks to understand the connection between genetics, lived experiences, how those lived experiences are embodied, and if/how they influence health trajectories within Latiné populations living in the United States. Additionally, Maggie’s work seeks to dispel the myth that all Latiné people are the same by investigating the richness of our individual ancestries, lived experiences, and cultures.
For her dissertation work, Maggie investigated if ancestry, histories of immigration, experiences of discrimination, and sociopolitics are associated with adverse health outcomes within individuals of Cuban descent. For her postdoctoral project, Maggie is working with recently-arrived Latiné immigrants to investigate the embodiment of immigration-related stress and social support and their associations with mental health outcomes and biological aging. Maggie is a first generation Cuban-American, born to Cuban immigrant parents and grandparents. Working within communities in South Florida and the Northeastern United States, Maggie hopes to use her research in service of immigrant communities to advocate and fight for social changes that benefit all historically oppressed and disenfranchised groups.