Dr. María Fernández is Vice President of Population Health and Implementation Science at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and the founding Co-Director of the UTHealth Houston Institute for Implementation Science. Dr. Fernández has spent her career conducting participatory community-engaged research and practice to develop, evaluate, implement, and disseminate interventions to improve health. Her research focuses on cancer and chronic disease prevention and control among underserved populations. Dr. Fernández is an expert in dissemination and implementation (D&I) research, having served as a member of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) D&I Research in Health Study Section and as faculty for several national and international D&I training programs. Dr. Fernández has over 235 peer-reviewed publications and co-authored several books, including the 4th edition of Planning Health Promotion Programs: An Intervention Mapping Approach (2016) and the Handbook of Community-Based Participatory Research (2017).