Faculty & Staff

Suad Ghaddar is currently the Associate Director of the South Texas Border Health Disparities Center at UTPA. She holds a Ph.D. in International Business from the University of Texas-Pan American. She received her B.B.A. and M.B.A. degrees from the American University of Beirut. Previous appointments include a research position at the Center for Border Economic Studies at UTPA, and adjunct faculty appointments at the University of Texas-Brownsville, the University of Texas-Pan American and the American University of Beirut. Her publications have appeared in the Latin American Business Review and the Journal of Accounting and Finance Research. Dr. Ghaddar has also presented at several academic conferences. Her research interests include the U.S.-Mexico border economy, health economics, and emerging markets.

Liza Talavera-Garza is a Research Associate at the South Texas Border Health Disparities Center at UTPA. She received her Ph.D. in Community Psychology from The University of Texas at Austin in December 2010. She was Project Manager for the Health Literacy in the Manufacturing Workplace needs assessment study conducted by the Center in the Summer of 2010 and part of the team that developed and pilot-tested the curriculum for the health promotion program, Trabajando Juntos/Working Together for use in the manufacturing workplace. She is currently working on a project on the use of preventive health services among older adults in the Rio Grande Valley, which is in the data collection phase. In addition to health disparities, her research interests center on the relationship between physical and mental health in the progression of chronic illness, and the promotion of clinical preventive services, including depression screening, among older adults.

José A. Pagán is Research Professor of Economics at UTPA and Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Management and Policy at the University of North Texas Health Science Center. He is also Senior Fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and Research Associate of the Population Studies Center (and the Population Aging Research Center) at the University of Pennsylvania. He received B.S. and M.A. degrees in mathematics and economics from The Ohio State University, and a Ph.D. in economics from The University of New Mexico. His research focuses on the population health consequences and community effects of uninsurance, and the impact of health status on employment and productivity. His research interests also include the economics of immigration and immigrant health. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Mexico, a consultant for the World Bank and the Inter American Conference on Social Security, Director of the UTPA Center for Border Economic Studies, and a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania (Cohort 1, 2003-2005). In 2007 he and Dominick Frosch (UCLA School of Medicine) received a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research to study the effects of direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs on health behaviors.

Dr. Benham is an Associate Professor in Psychology at the University of Texas-Pan American. Dr. Benham received his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2000. His research interests focus on the interplay of stress, sleep, personality, and health. Using both survey-based methodology and lab- based experiments, he has studied the impact of psychological stress on immune function, cortisol, skin healing, and self-reported health. More recently, his research has demonstrated the importance of insufficient sleep in stress-health models and he has a developing line of research examining the impact of emotion suppression on physical health. Dr. Benham teaches classes on Physiological Psychology, Research Methods, Health Psychology, Mind-Body Interactions, and Stress. He has served as UTPA’s Institutional Review Board Chair and Co-Chair on UTPA’s Campus Wellness Taskforce.

Damian S. Damianov is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Texas—Pan American. He received a PhD in Economics from University of Heidelberg in 2006. His research is in the areas of Game Theory, Auctions, Experimental Economics, Health Economics, and Economics of Education. His policy-oriented research focuses on the design of economic institutions and social arrangements in the areas of public finance and the health care sector. He currently participates in research projects funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the Faculty Research Council at the University of Texas—Pan American.

Glenn Martinez (PhD, MPH) is professor of Spanish linguistics and director of the Medical Spanish for Heritage Learners program at the University of Texas Pan American. His current research interests focus on issues of language access policy in health care and the sociolinguistics of language barriers and limited English proficiency within the context public health and health service delivery. Dr. Martinez has published 19 articles in professional journals such as Hispania, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Spanish in Context, and Language Policy.Dr. Martinez is also author of 9 book chapters, co-editor of Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Linguistic Heritage published by Arte Público Press in 2008, and Mexican Americans and Language: Del dicho al hecho published by the University of Arizona Press in 2006. Dr. Martinez serves on the national advisory boards of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project and the Epilepsy Foundation's National Center for Project Access. He also serves as Vice President of the Board of Directors of the Edinburg Economic Development Corporation and as a member of the City of Edinburg's Cultural Activities Board.