Dr. Roxana Chicas is an Assistant Professor and the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing at Emory University. Her research focus is on occupational and environmental health disparities, investigating the physiological effects of heat exposures among farmworkers through community-engaged research. In collaboration with the Farmworker Association of Florida, she has led two intervention studies using real-time biomonitoring equipment among farmworkers. Dr. Chicas’s work is shaping the future of climate and occupational health science, two pressing fields of scientific inquiry. Her methodologies are unique and effective due to direct partnership with farmworker communities, who are now bearing the brunt of life-threatening and dehumanizing extreme heat health effects—which more communities will face as climate change worsens. Dr. Chicas’s research is creating solutions that are sustainable and grounded in the realities of labor. Her intervention studies are providing relief to workers, collecting critical health data, and informing prevention/intervention practices in the US and globally. As a bilingual bicultural nurse scientist, she is committed to conducting research that informs policy to advance environmental justice.

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Dr. Chicas earned an ASN from Georgia Perimeter College, her BSN and PhD from Emory University School of Nursing and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Emory University School of Medicine.