Leticia Márquez-Magaña, PhD is a Professor of Biology and the Elder Director of the Health Equity Research Laboratory at San Francisco State University. Born in Sacramento, California she is the first-born daughter of Mexican immigrants and began her education in the U.S. speaking only Spanish. Professor Márquez-Magaña attended Stanford University as the first member of her extended U.S. family to complete high school, and went on to earn a PhD in Biochemistry at UC Berkeley. She joined the faculty at SF State in 1994 targeting her personal and professional efforts to “giving back” to the communities she came from, and who supported her educational attainment. In honor of these communities, Professor Márquez-Magaña leads a successful research program that addresses health disparities, and which has led to the training of significant numbers of Latino students for careers in the biomedical sciences. In recognition of these training efforts and her research, she was awarded a Mentor Award by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2001, a Bay Area Jefferson Award for service in science in 2013, and was named an honorary AAAS Fellow for her significant contributions to health equity research in 2024.

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