Dr. Sonjia Kenya, assistant professor of Family Medicine and Community Health, directs programs on health disparities at the Jay Weiss Center for Social Medicine and Health Equity. Dr. Kenya completed her undergraduate studies at UCLA, earned two Masters Degrees along with her Doctorate at Columbia University, and her work has been featured in academic journals and lay publications.
From 2002-2004, Dr. Kenya completed a clinical postdoctoral fellowship focused on complications of HIV infection at St. Luke’s Roosevelt in New York City, a teaching hospital for Columbia University’s College for Physicians and Surgeons. As a health disparities scholar for the National Institutes of Health from 2002-2006, Dr. Kenya implemented multidisciplinary studies addressing HIV-infection, diabetes and obesity. In 2006, she was recognized as an HIV and Poverty Scholar by Development Gateway Communities, an international health advocacy organization on a mission to reduce poverty and enable change in developing nations. During the same year, Dr. Kenya was also recognized by Human Rights Journalism societies for on her interviews with Caribbean HIV positive women that were published in international newspapers.
Dr. Kenya has been a medical professor in the Caribbean and at major universities throughout the U.S. She is most interested in developing behavioral interventions for minorities that have the potential to reduce health disparities. She is on the scientific review committee for Health Education Research and the Journal of the Poor and Underserved. The Jay Weiss Center for Social Medicine and Health Equity recruited Dr. Kenya in September 2007 and she is currently focused on two major studies investigating the impact of the community health worker model on HIV, Diabetes, and Cardiovascular Disease among minority populations in Miami.
