Rae Anne Martinez is currently a Population Health postdoctoral fellow at the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. As an interdisciplinary health scholar, she aims to integrate expertise in biological and social disciplines to understand how social-structural determinants are embodied – i.e., “get under the skin” – during critical periods of development and may result in later-life health inequities of chronic conditions. Her research focuses on exploring (1) accelerated biological aging as a mechanism of embodiment and (2) characterizing biological aging at midlife as a key point in the life course for intervention to increase health span. A cross-cutting theme throughout her research is the exploration of how historical and contemporary conceptualizations of race and ethnicity impact epidemiologic methods, scientific communication, and our ability as population health scholars to form a rigorous evidence base.

Martinez was a Flinn Foundation Scholar at the University of Arizona, where she received her B.S. in Molecular and Cellular Biology and a B.A. in Sociology in 2014. Prior to beginning her graduate studies at UNC Chapel Hill, Martinez worked as a Research Associate at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) in Phoenix, Arizona. Martinez received her MSPH and PhD in epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2019 and 2023, respectively.