Valeria Gracia Olvera

Valeria Gracia Olvera (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in Health Policy and a Fulbright scholar. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Advancing Health Policy: Environmental and Preventive Health Strategies in Mexico,” aims to support decision-making and concentrates on two main objectives. The first is to assess the health and economic impacts of air pollution mitigation strategies in Mexico City. The second is to identify the most effective cervical cancer screening strategies for the human papillomavirus (HPV)-vaccinated population in Mexico. 

She was inspired to pursue a PhD in Health Policy after joining the Stanford-CIDE COronavirus Simulation Model (SC-COSMO) (https://www.sc-cosmo.org/) consortium, where she contributed to significant projects estimating the health effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions to control the spread of COVID-19 in Mexico. 

Valeria’s latest publication as a member of the Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network (CISNET) explores how different levels of HPV vaccination coverage—whether increased, stable, or decreased—affect cervical cancer incidence and mortality in various states across the United States. 

She holds a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Engineering from the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí (UASLP) in Mexico, a Diplôme d’ingénieur from École Centrale Paris (now known as CentraleSupélec) in France, and a master’s degree in Environmental Economics from the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE) in Mexico. 

Outside of her professional work, Valeria enjoys spending time with her cat, playing volleyball, reading Agatha Christie’s mystery books, and painting.