Lucrecia Mena-Melendez
School of Public Health
Expert Bio
Lucrecia Mena-Melendez is a post-doctoral research associate in the Indiana University School of Public Health-Bloomington Department of Applied Health Science. Her research combines theoretical insights from sociology and demography with advanced quantitative methods for causal inference, demography and cross-sectional data analysis in the global setting.
She works for the Developing Measures for Social Surveys project, composed of an interdisciplinary group of researchers from Indiana University and the University of Arkansas. The individual research interests of DAMMS encompass a broad variety of topics, such as public opinion, abortion, sexual and reproductive health, methodology, acculturation, and translation, and they work collaboratively toward common goals.
She earned her Ph.D. degree in sociology at UCLA. For her dissertation, she conducted quantitative research on the heterogeneity in the association of female education, rural-urban residence, and ethnoracial identity on fertility, sexual and reproductive health, and child and maternal health outcomes in Latin America and the Caribbean.
She is also the alliances and fundraising specialist for the Business Foundation for Educational Development based in El Salvador.
Areas of Expertise
Abortion, social demography, race and ethnicity, sociology of health, fertility, sexual and reproductive health, maternal and child health, mental and physical health, Latinx, Latin America, USA.