Marizaida Sánchez-Cesáreo, PhD, is the Executive President of Grupo Nexos, where she drives innovative strategies to address public health inequities. She is a recognized public health professional with more than three decades of experience, whose leadership has focused on promoting structural change through collaboration among implementers, social investors, and scientific partners.
Her career is characterized by the development and evaluation of programs, capacity building, technical assistance, and community-based research, all grounded in evidence-based interventions. Her leadership has resulted in the mobilization of over $65 million in external funding and the development of more than 50 projects under the Collective Impact framework. In the field of public policy, she serves as Chair of the Puerto Rico State Advisory Board for Juvenile Justice Prevention (PR-SAG), which advances programs to prevent and reduce risk factors through initiatives led by community-based organizations and local governments.
In the area of public health innovation, she played a key role in the development and dissemination of Parenting Fundamentals, an evidence-based parenting education initiative that has reached more than 8,000 individuals in Puerto Rico and Illinois. The program promotes child development, non-violent discipline, positive parenting practices, and the prevention of child abuse. She also spearheaded the creation of the Puerto Rico Evidence-Based Board, which developed the first digital database of prevention programs in Spanish.
At the international level, in 2018, she was designated as Puerto Rico’s first delegate to the International Union of Psychological Science. Her professional excellence has been recognized with distinctions from the Puerto Rico Psychology Association, which named her Psychologist of the Year (2011) and awarded her the Contributions to Public Policy recognition (2016).