Edna Acosta Pérez

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Project Director

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Edna Acosta-Pérez is a community social psychologist and researcher. She is currently a project director at Grupo Nexos, Inc. and an associate professor at the Graduate School of Public Health of the Medical Sciences Campus of the University of Puerto Rico.

She holds a doctorate in Community Social Psychology from UPR-Río Piedras and a postdoctoral master’s degree in Clinical Research from the Medical Sciences Campus. In short, she has spent over two decades immersed—with notebooks, recorders, charts, community meetings, and plenty of coffee—in projects that seek to understand how social conditions affect health and how we can make something useful with that information.

Her work has focused on community research, public health, maternal and child health, mental health, prevention, violence, program implementation, and collaborations between communities, universities, and organizations. She currently participates in initiatives such as PROSa, Comienzo Saludable, PR-INBRE, and the Alliance for Clinical and Translational Research, all projects that combine research, community action, and social change.

Edna does this work because she believes that research shouldn’t be confined to articles, conferences, or computers with long, complicated names, but rather should serve to listen better, make better decisions, and support real-world processes in our communities. She is particularly interested in building bridges between academia and the streets, between data and stories, and between scientific evidence and people’s everyday lives. Outside of academia, she also enjoys spending time with her family, art, cooking, gardening, and bomba music, because even researchers need to breathe, create, and add some spice to life.