Andrea Ramirez Varela

Andrea Ramirez Varela, MD, PhD, MPH, is an assistant professor at UTHealth Houston with a dual appointment at the Department of Pediatrics in McGovern Medical School and the Department of Epidemiology in the School of Public Health. 

Dr. Varela is a physician-scientist working at the intersection of public health, physical activity epidemiology, health systems interventions and health policy research. She has focused her career on three main areas:  

1. Studies across the lifespan among underserved populations in Latin America and other low and middle-income country settings to study the prevalence, determinants, and correlates of physical activity and healthy lifestyle in children and adults, and morbidity and mortality in children, childhood obesity and malnutrition;  
2. Studies to establish, strengthen, and sustain global surveillance systems of physical activity levels, research capacity, and physical activity policy, to contribute to effective and equitable global physical activity promotion efforts; and,  
3. Studies using a broad syndemic approach to understand the relation between physical activity promotion, non-communicable disease prevention, and infectious disease crises (e.g., COVID-19 pandemic) and with this, find synergistic solutions to all.  

Dr. Ramirez Varela has a growing focus on implementation science, particularly the design, evaluation, and scale-up of evidence-based interventions within real-world settings. She is committed to advancing health systems interventions that improve access to preventive services such as physical activity counseling, prescription, and referral—especially within primary care and community-based contexts in underserved settings. 

She is especially interested in working with multidisciplinary teams to apply rigorous epidemiological methods and implementation frameworks to enhance the reach, fidelity, and sustainability of programs. Her work also leverages meta-research and capacity-building strategies to improve surveillance, policy, and advocacy systems aimed at reducing the global burden of physical inactivity, NCDs, obesity, and malnutrition. 

Her research interests include epidemiology, public health surveillance, physical activity epidemiology, health policy research, preventive medicine, global public health capacity for disease prevention, and translation research, especially in Latino and underserved populations in the U.S. and Latin America.