PolicyLab

Luz M. Cumpa Gomez (she/her/hers) is a clinical research coordinator at PolicyLab and Clinical Futures at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). She is working with Dr. Joanne Wood on assessing the efficacy of PriCARE, a six-week positive parenting program that aims to improve behavioral problems in children and strengthen parent-child relationships. She is also assisting with CAPNET, a multi-site data resource to enhance child abuse prevention and screening.

Luz recently received her Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience from Trinity College, where she conducted a study to assess the effect of atypical prenatal exposure to androgens on anxiety-like behavior and problematic drug use, earning honors in her major. At Hartford Hospital, in Hartford, Conn., Luz also conducted health equity research at the Transplant Surgery Department. She studied the sociocultural factors preventing minority patients from accessing kidney transplant evaluations, as well as assessed the efficacy of a video-based animation in increasing health literacy among Spanish-speaking patients. As part of the Undergraduate Clinical Scholars Program (UCSP) at the University of Pennsylvania, Luz was an intern at CHOP during the summer of 2022, where she worked on a retrospective study of patients with very early onset inflammatory bowel disease to examine the association between abnormal dihydrorhodamine (DHR) results and factors such as age at diagnosis, phenotype and disease location. 

In the summer of 2023, as part of the Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP), Luz interned with the HOPE Duerr at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, Wash. She studied the challenges hindering global health research in Latin America and the Caribbean as well as potential solutions to increase equity and address power imbalances in international research partnerships. Luz is very interested in health equity and social determinants of health and hopes to build a career in the medical field.