Stephen Perez, PhD Student in School of Nursing

My name is Stephen Perez and I'm a second year doctoral student in the School of Nursing here at the University of Pennsylvania. I'm also a Robert Wood Johnson Future of Nursing Scholar at Independence Blue Cross Foundation. I did my undergraduate degree at St. Mary's College in California and I was actually a health science major there. So, I didn't start out with a nursing trajectory in mind. I actually was thinking about becoming a forensic scientist and after that, after I graduated I worked in a lab and decided that I really liked working with people. So, decided to become a second degree nursing student. Went back to school. After that I went to go get my Masters at the University of California, became an adult nurse practitioner, focusing in infectious disease.

During school, I worked in a residential care facility for people with HIV and AIDS as a nurse case manager and really loved it. That's where I really became passionate about working with people living with HIV. During that time, I also started to see a lot of systems issue, policy issues, funding issues, all of these things that were impacting the way that I delivered my care. All of these things that were impacting the patients that I was trying to work with.

So, when I graduated instead of going to work as a nurse practitioner right away, I decided to apply for a little bit more training around policy. So, that led me to a public policy fellowship in Washington, DC with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute where I continued to work on HIV/AIDS issues but at a much larger level, on a bigger scale.

I think being a Latino, being a male in this profession, has really shaped the way that I look at healthcare, how healthcare is delivered and really shaped the way that I look at disparities in healthcare. There are very significant disparities, not just in the Latino community but in the LGBTQ community. Certainly among women's healthcare there's a large disparity in this country.

One of the things that Penn focuses on, particularly in their school of nursing, is working to alleviate some of those healthcare disparities and I think that ... I see that woven in, I've seen that woven in not only through many people's research trajectories here at the school, but in every course that I take. We talk about healthcare disparities, policy implications and how we can use what we're doing to alleviate some of those disparities.