Antonia Villarruel, PhD

Antonia M. Villarruel, Ph.D., RN, FAAN is the Margaret Bond Simon Dean of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and Director of the School’s WHO Collaborating Center for Nursing and Midwifery Leadership.

As a bilingual and bicultural nurse researcher, Dr. Villarruel has extensive research and practice experience with diverse Latino and Mexican populations and communities, and health promotion and health disparities research and practice both here and abroad. She incorporates a community-based participatory approach to her research. Specifically, her research focuses on the development and testing of interventions to reduce sexual risk behaviors among Mexican and Latino youth. As part of this program of research, she developed an efficacious program to reduce sexual risk behavior among Latino youth – entitled Cuídate! which was disseminated nationally.

Dr. Villarruel serves in such national leadership roles as chair of the IOM Roundtable on the Promotion of Health Equity and co-chair of the Strategic Advisory Council of the AARP/RWJ Center for Health Policy Future of Nursing Campaign for Action. She is an invited member of the American Board of Internal Medicine and the Aspen Health Strategy Group as well as an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and the National Academy of Medicine. She is the recipient of the President’s Award for Health Behavior Intervention Research from the Friends of the National Institute of Nursing Research; an inducted member of the Sigma Theta Tau International Nurse Researcher Hall of Fame; was named one of NBC’s Latino20; and received the Al Dia News Media’s Hispanic Heritage Award for leadership in Pennsylvania.