Phone: (405) 271-2229, x48087
Office: Hudson College of Public Health
801 Northeast 13th Street, Room 354
Post Office Box 26901
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73104
Email: Sydney-Martinez@ouhsc.edu
Dr. Sydney Martinez is an Assistant Professor in Epidemiology at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center (OUHSC) and a Cherokee Nation Citizen. She has over 14 years of public health experience, beginning her public health career as a project coordinator and later Epidemiologist at the Oklahoma City Area Inter-Tribal Health Board’s Tribal Epidemiology Center where she served as program evaluator for over 20 different tribal public health programs throughout Oklahoma and Kansas. She then became a research project coordinator at OUHSC in 2011 where she evaluated tobacco-related health disparities programs across the state. She completed her PhD in 2016 in which her dissertation examined socioeconomic inequities in tobacco. Her early research focused on describing the epidemiological patterns of tobacco use and cancer among American Indian populations and individuals with low socioeconomic status. After discovering the complex relationship between smoking and diabetes and realizing the significant gap in knowledge around how this complexity affects smoking cessation outcomes, she works towards advancing the science related to the intersection of tobacco and diabetes. Through collaborative and practice-based research, she works towards improving the implementation and delivery of smoking cessation support to American Indians with diabetes and American Indian cancer survivors at Cherokee Nation. She also conducts smart-phone based studies test financial incentives for improving smoking cessation outcomes and uses biomarkers to examine the association between smoking behaviors and glycemic control.
In addition to conducting tobacco-related research, Dr. Martinez works towards building capacity for tribes to engage in practice-based research and to recruit and train the next generation of scientists engaged in social justice in health research. She has developed a Data Into Action for Tribes online curriculum and delivered ten Data Into Action workshops across the nation. She is the OUHSC co-director of the Cherokee Nation Native American Research Center for Health Student Development Program and is developing a Cancer Research Immersion Summer Program in partnership with Cherokee Nation. These programs work towards exposing undergraduates, graduates, and medical students to social justice in health research by linking them to existing research projects conducted at Cherokee Nation
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