Manisha Salinas, PhD ’17, is a trailblazer. Having earned her doctorate from the Texas A&M University School of Public Health, Salinas has become a role model for her family. Now, as she transitions into her new role as a faculty member with the prestigious Mayo Clinic, Salinas has the opportunity to identify new ways to help women with cancer find the support they need.
Salinas credits her family’s commitment to education for creating the foundation for her professional journey. “It was drilled into me my whole life that education is something we need to succeed, especially having immigrant parents,” she said. “I actually became the first woman in my family to pursue a doctoral degree. Many of my male relatives and extended family have a lot of education but the women don’t have as much. I wanted to pave that pathway and be the first woman. Now there are other women in my family who are pursuing that pathway—and that’s what is motivating me to stick to it.”
Salinas dreamed of being a medical doctor when she was young. Her family moved to the United States from Nepal shortly after she was born so her father could complete his studies at the University of Texas at Dallas.
The family moved several times after her father finished his degree. One of those places was Tennessee, where Salinas attended high school in Nashville and then went on to study at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Salinas initially majored in biology, but determined it was not a good fit, so she shifted to sociology. “I was really interested in studying society and how things work,” she said. “When I started studying sociology, at some point it also tapped into the side of me that always was interested in health care.”
Following her passion, she moved to Hawaii after graduation to pursue a master’s degree in medical sociology at the University of Hawaii (UH). Her advisor, the late Bill Wood, PhD, had a strong background in public health. “He introduced me to public health and as I learned more about it, I fell in love with it,” she explained. “Public health seemed like a good compromise of studying health and studying people, while helping society in a different kind of way.”
Her interest in public health also was sparked by seeing the health care issues affecting the Hawaiian population. “There is so much diversity in the population there. I was looking into the disparities that existed in the native Hawaiian community and I started really getting into that research,” she said. “My master’s thesis was looking at native Hawaiian health and the historical impression and discrimination, and how it affects health for them today. There’s still a lot of disparities in indigenous and native communities and that really opened my eyes because in Hawaii, you’re right in the middle of it.”
She started seeing public health as an avenue to make a larger impact in health care. “My time in Hawaii was where it clicked in my head that public health is an area that really makes me excited,” Salinas said. “It finds ways to improve health in communities that don’t get the same type of access as others or have a history of disparities that we still need to work on today.”
She also completed a summer internship at the Viswanath Lab, which is at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “I learned about community based participatory methods and community-engaged research strategies,” she said. “It helped with bridging social and behavioral sciences with public health practice.”
By the time she graduated from UH, Salinas was engaged to be married. The couple moved to Bryan-College Station when her husband received a Vision 2020 scholarship to attend Texas A&M in the Department of Sociology. Salinas began considering her options for additional study and found the School of Public Health, which aligned with what she wanted to explore next.
Salinas was accepted into the Master of Public Health program, which gave her a foundational understanding of the discipline so she could transition from sociology to public health. As she neared the end of her MPH coursework, her advisor and mentor, James Burdine, DrPH, suggested she consider earning a doctorate in public health, which would open doors to academia and research. Salinas agreed and set out on her coursework, including a health promotion and community health sciences concentration.
“That’s where I started getting into health disparities, health inequity, and health prevention in underserved communities. That became more the focus of my work,” she said, adding that through the program, she started researching promotores (community health workers) and the health disparities that exist on the Texas-Mexico border.
Salinas’s dissertation focused on navigating health and health care systems from the perspective of a refugee community. She also analyzed the impact of their resettlement and their life experiences on how they view and practice health. As she did her research, the scholar drew upon her own family’s experience.
“When we moved here, my dad was a student and making a couple $100s a month and not really having a lot,” Salinas said. “As he moved up in his education, we moved up in our social standing. We went through every community that you can imagine until he finally levelled out and got the job as professor.”
She also used her own first-hand experience as a minority woman. “There continues to be existing gender inequity and various forms of discrimination that minority women face in academia and the workplace, and that serves as part of my motivating factor in helping others, and setting a positive example,” she said.
She also considered the experiences of Nepali refugees who had lived in Bhutan and moved to refugee camps in Nepal before coming to the United States. “I spoke the language that they did, and I had a general understanding of the culture, but I didn’t have the experience of being a refugee here,” she said. “In some ways, we have so much in common and in some ways, we come from different worlds. And following that research experience, what I wanted to know more broadly was how we can help others who may come from the same, or very different backgrounds than us, get improved access to health.”
After completing her doctorate, Salinas and her family moved to California. She joined Sonoma State University as a lecturer, and then transitioned to University of California Berkley as School of Public Health internship coordinator.
Two years later, Salinas and her husband decided to move closer to her family, who live in Jacksonville, FL. After working as a lecturer and health promotion coordinator for area companies, Salinas was hired as a postdoctoral research fellow by the Mayo Clinic in early 2020.
She moved among different Mayo departments but found a mentor, Folakemi Odedina, PhD, who helped her identify a niche and postdoctoral research project in 2022 that improved her experience and credentials. She’s continued on that path, which involves looking at health disparities in relation to cancer prevention.
Now Salinas is transitioning into a faculty position at Mayo Clinic, although she will continue to be a research scientist for the short-term. She currently leads program evaluation efforts for community outreach and engagement activities across the Cancer Center. In that role, she works with the Center for Health Equity and Engagement Research, which is focused on improving equity and reducing disparities in marginalized populations.
When she fully transitions into the faculty role, Salinas will integrate her own research on improving existing disparities of underserved areas, such as getting access to education, information and resources for cancer care.
“It is such an interesting field, and you can make so much impact in this area, especially with disparities,” she said. “What we learned in public health is that there are small changes that can be made to prevent negative health outcomes. We see worse in many marginalized communities, who face barriers to getting health care which makes these populations more susceptible to cancer. My passion is helping in that area and improving these gaps in prevention, treatment and care through a public health lens.”
As she continues to advance in Mayo Clinic’s ranks, Salinas credits the Texas A&M School of Public Health for helping her succeed professionally. “I’m always channeling my inner Dr. (Kenneth) McLeroy when I do my work these days,” she said, laughing. “When we were in school, we did the socio-ecological model a lot. Now when I’m writing papers or when I’m giving talks or presentations, I’m always trying to present it based on the social determinants of health that we look at and the levels that affect different people in societies.”
