Amanda M. Gutierrez, MPH

Welcome! I'm a public health researcher focused on access to health care, attitudes toward medical care and services, and political determinants of health. I use a variety of quantitative and qualitative research methods to understand public opinion toward and patients' experiences with health care, programs, and policies, specializing in vaccines, genomics, cancer, and underserved populations.

In my doctoral dissertation, I aim to discern how trust in public health actors manifested across political identities to impact individuals’ vaccination decisions during and after the COVID-19 pandemic utilizing U.S.-nationally-representative public opinion survey data. For this project, I used psychometric survey methods to develop and evaluate a novel scale to measure trust in U.S. public health actors for vaccine information (Paper 1); qualitative content analysis to generate and compare themes in COVID vaccination decision-making rationale among partisans (Paper 2); and latent variable structural equation modeling to examine the relationships between trust in U.S. public health actors, political partisanship, and COVID vaccination over time (Paper 3).

I have 12 years of experience conducting academic research in health care and medicine. My other ongoing mixed methods research projects focus on language access in health care as well as the ethical, legal, and social implications of genomic technologies. I also have previous field experience working in global health and education in Spain, Peru, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and South Africa. 

I'm a Master of Public Health graduate from the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Global Health and Maternal and Child Health; graduate of Rice University in Global Health Technologies; Fulbright Scholar (Spain 2013-14); and co-inventor of the DoseRight® Syringe Clip, a patented device that helps prevent overdosing when using an oral syringe to administer liquid medication.