Professor Leticia Marquez-Magaña – Biology at San Francisco State University

Professional Summary

Leticia Márquez-Magaña is a Professor of Biology specializing in Cell and Molecular Biology at San Francisco State University, where she has been on the faculty since 1994. She earned a co-terminal BS/MS in Biological Sciences from Stanford University, a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and completed a Post-doctoral Fellowship in Molecular Pharmacology at Stanford Medical Center. As Director of the Health Equity Research (HER) Laboratory, she leads community-engaged, transdisciplinary research that links basic science to community health. Her work examines how social injustices, including racism and discrimination, manifest biologically to cause or worsen disease, informing advocacy for health equity policies and practices. Márquez-Magaña has been affiliated with the Health Equity Institute since 2007 and serves as the Lead Principal Investigator and Institutional Development Core Leader for the SF BUILD project since 2014.

Her contributions span bacterial gene expression and health equity research. Key publications include "Racial discrimination, the superwoman schema, and allostatic load: exploring an integrative stress-coping model among African American women" (2019, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 317 citations), "Systemic racism in higher education" (2020, Science, 227 citations), "Cloning, sequencing, and disruption of the Bacillus subtilis sigma 28 gene" (1988, Journal of Bacteriology, 198 citations), "Gut microbiota composition is related to cardiorespiratory fitness in healthy young adults" (2019, International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, 178 citations), and "Studies of sigma D-dependent functions in Bacillus subtilis" (1990, Journal of Bacteriology, 178 citations). Additional works cover near-peer STEM mentoring benefits (2015), environmental regulation of gene expression (2000), and geospatial distributions of lead levels (2022). In 2023, she was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for her scientifically and socially distinguished achievements in bacterial gene expression and health equity, recognizing her influence in integrating social relevance into scientific inquiry and supporting underrepresented groups in STEM.