Samantha Sabo
Board Chair, DrPH
Samantha Sabo DrPH, MPH is an Associate Professor in Health Sciences and a researcher with the Center for Health Equity Research. For more than a decade, she has focused on the role and impact of Community Health Worker (CHW) workforce interventions and advocacy to improve the social determinants of chronic disease and maternal and child health. She has completed several CHW workforce studies to support building and sustaining the CHW workforce in Arizona and nationally.
Dr. Sabo is a member of the Arizona Department of Health Community Health Worker Leadership Council, a member of the Arizona Community Health Worker Association board of directors and is a founding member of the Arizona Community Health Representative Coalition.
Nationally, she serves in leadership positions with several CHW workforce and policy efforts, including the American Public health Association – CHW Section and the CHW Common Indicators Initiative. Dr. Sabo enjoys teaching and mentoring students within the newly established Master of Public Health Program at NAU and is a primary faculty member within the Health Promotion Concentration and Indigenous Health Track, as well as the Interdisciplinary PhD program at NAU.
In both her research and public health practice, Dr. Sabo is a multi-disciplinary, community-engaged scholar and uses community-based participatory research, mixed, quantitative and qualitative methods and service-learning to identify community informed approaches to advance health equity. Through her trusted community and institutional collaborations, Dr. Sabo has served as MPI and Co-Investigator to several National Institute of Health, state and foundation funded research and practice initiatives, and currently co-leads the Community Engagement Core for the Southwest Health Equity Research Collaborative funded through the NIH Research Centers in Minority Institutions (RCMI) program.