Get to Know Jacqueline Perez

Growing up as the daughter of immigrants, Bloomberg Fellow Jacqueline Perez became her parents’ translator shortly after learning English—a role she still plays today. She moved between languages, systems, and expectations, helping her family navigate schools, paperwork, and health care. Through this experience, she learned that information only matters if people can understand it, trust it, and use it. 

Now as a Research Associate at Fors Marsh, an organization that conducts and implements research to solve complex public and private sector challenges, Perez focuses on health communication research with an emphasis on substance use and mental health, particularly for Spanish-speaking audiences. Her work uses both surveys and interviews to answer questions, including: What do people already know about public health interventions? What are they missing? How do they want information delivered? And what messaging leads to behavior change? 

Prior to joining Fors Marsh, Perez worked as a health educator at the Florida Department of Health in Manatee County, helping deliver information on COVID-19, mental health treatments, and opioid overdose prevention. There, she saw firsthand that translating materials into another language was not enough. She realized that messages, particularly health messages, needed context, relevance, and needed to reflect the lived experiences of the people they are intended for. 

That insight pushed her toward research, where she could influence how health education campaigns are designed before they reach communities. Today, her day-to-day work includes drafting research tools, analyzing qualitative and quantitative data, moderating focus groups in English and Spanish, and translating findings to inform specific recommendations for public health campaigns. 

Some of that work has informed nationally recognized efforts, including the Own the Awk sexual health campaign and the CDC’s Stop Overdose Naloxone campaign. Both succeeded, Perez notes, because “they are specific about who they are speaking to and intentional about how.” They use plain language, relatable scenarios, and clear steps people can act on without talking down to their audience. Just as importantly, they are available in Spanish and adapted thoughtfully, and colloquially, not mechanically. 

Perez is careful to distinguish translation from transcreation, the process of linguistically and culturally adapting messages so they carry the same meaning and intent across languages. That difference matters. In focus groups, she has heard participants describe how earlier access to clear, relevant health information could have prompted them to seek out earlier screenings, deeper conversations with family members, or given them a greater understanding of substance use and recovery. 

As a Bloomberg Fellow in the DrPH program, and the first person in her family to graduate from college, Perez is focused on building public health systems that work for everyone. She is strengthening her quantitative skills and deepening her use of communication theory to design addiction and overdose prevention campaigns that are both evidence-based and culturally grounded for the communities they are intended to serve.