E.g., 04/18/2024
E.g., 04/18/2024
José Ramón Fernández-Peña
MPI Authors

José Ramón Fernández-Peña

José Ramón Fernández-Peña, MD, MPA, is President of the American Public Health Association. He is also Director of Health Professions Advising at Northwestern University, where he leads the university's efforts to support students interested in pursuing careers in the health sector.

Dr. Fernández-Peña is the Founder and Executive Director of the Welcome Back Initiative, a program to assist immigrant health professionals already living in the United States through the necessary steps to enter the U.S. health workforce. He has also advised the White House Domestic Policy Council on the economic integration of foreign-trained professionals.

Dr. Fernández-Peña earned his medical degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and his master’s degree in public administration from New York University.

Bio Page Tabs

The Integration of Immigrant Health Professionals: Looking beyond the COVID-19 Crisis
Policy Briefs
April 2021
The Integration of Immigrant Health Professionals: Looking beyond the COVID-19 Crisis
By  Jeanne Batalova, Michael Fix and José Ramón Fernández-Peña
HealthCare BrainWaste Commentary CDC
Commentaries
December 2020
The Role of Immigrant Health-Care Professionals in the United States during the Pandemic
By  Michael Fix, Jeanne Batalova and José Ramón Fernández-Peña

Recent Activity

Policy Briefs
April 2021

The Integration of Immigrant Health Professionals: Looking beyond the COVID-19 Crisis

The U.S. health-care workforce came under incredible strain during the COVID-19 pandemic. Longer-term trends—including the aging and increasing diversity of the U.S. population, and health-care worker retirement—are also shaping demand for services and the supply of health workers. This issue brief looks at how the skills and expertise of underutilized immigrant and refugee health professionals in the United States can be better leveraged to meet these challenges.

Commentaries
December 2020

The Role of Immigrant Health-Care Professionals in the United States during the Pandemic

With the U.S. health-care system buckling under the resurgent COVID-19 outbreak, policymakers could undertake efforts to enable skilled, underemployed international health-care professionals to practice. This would both make the health system more resilient and flexible, as well as introduce critical language and cultural skills important during the contact-tracing and vaccine rollout phases of the pandemic response, as this commentary explores.