Meet the MACONDO Research Team

María Paula Jiménez Sáenz, M.S.W., is a Research Associate at the School of Social Work at Boston College where she coordinates and centralizes efforts between partners in Colombia, supervises students in data analysis, and oversees budgets for subrecipients. She has more than 9 years of experience in consultancy, research, community development, project design, coordination, and evaluation in the private sector, nonprofit and humanitarian aid organizations, and academia. She has worked as a Research Associate I at AHP’s Center for Research and Evaluation, and for Health Resources in Action (HRiA) doing research, outreach, and referrals in substance use as a Bilingual Screening Information Specialist with the MA, VT, and IL Helplines. She previously worked for humanitarian aid organizations such as Jesuit Refugee Services (JRS) Kakuma, in an Inclusive Education program, and for Catholic Relief Services (CRS) in Guatemala and Honduras in the Food For Education (FFE) Program funded by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). She has experience conducting business assessments and designing and conducting quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods research and evaluation studies. She has led workshops and focus groups and works with a variety of client populations, including Latino communities, providers, and other individuals and advocates across MA. She is fluent in English and a native Spanish speaker. Ms. Jiménez Sáenz holds an M.S.W. from the Boston College School of Social Work. 

 Diana is from Chicago, IL. She graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, obtaining a B.S. in Molecular and Cellular Biology. Diana is interested in a broad range of topics in Molecular Biology. Specifically, she hopes to get involved in infectious diseases research and/or cancer research. Diana is also interested in mental health research as it relates to communities of color. In her spare time, she enjoys taking walks and playing fetch with her puppy. Earlier in the year, Diana also started to embroider.

Dr. Nancy Jacquelyn Pérez-Flores is from Chicago, IL. She earned her Bachelor of Social Work in 2018 and her Master of Social Work in 2019 from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign School of Social Work. In 2024, she completed her PhD in Social Work at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, MO. During her doctoral training, Dr. Pérez-Flores completed a three-year National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) T32 Predoctoral Fellowship in mental health services research at the Center for Mental Health Services Research. She was also awarded the NIMH Mental Health Research Dissertation Grant to Enhance Workforce Diversity to support her dissertation project. Currently, Dr. Pérez-Flores is a National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute T32 Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Her research focuses on understanding and addressing behavioral health disparities among minoritized racial/ethnic populations, particularly within the Latinx population. She is especially interested in adapting and designing digital tools to create culturally and linguistically tailored, evidence-based interventions that improve access to behavioral health services. Dr. Pérez-Flores enjoys cooking, reading poetry, and spending quality time with her family and friends.