Maren Coffman is an Associate Professor of Nursing at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She has extensive experience working in the Latino community and is fluent in Spanish. Her research goals include promoting health and facilitating access to health care in Latino immigrants with chronic diseases. She has developed a program of research aimed at promoting health and health care access for Latinos immigrants with chronic diseases. Her research emphasizes the development of health literacy skills to improve the ability to understand and act on health information.
The research she has conducted involves developing partnerships with minority urban communities, academic partners, free health care clinics, churches, and community service agencies. She has expertise developing interventions focused on behavior change and promoting health, conducting randomized controlled trials using community based participatory research (CBPR) methods, and identification and analysis of social determinants of health. She has experience collaborating with researchers from related disciplines and across institutions.
Dr. Coffman is a founding member of the Academy for Population Health and Innovation, an academic health partnership between the UNC Charlotte’s College of Health and Human Services and the Mecklenburg County Health Department. She has led study abroad programs to destinations including Mexico, Costa Rica, and Cuba aimed at understanding health care systems.
