UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Growing up in Miami’s Cuban American community, Margarita “Maggie” Hernandez said she often felt “like I wasn’t Cuban enough, but also not American enough.”

Today, though, she’s beyond proud of her roots — so much so that she’s made it a hallmark of her research.

Hernandez, a doctoral candidate in Penn State’s Department of Anthropology, recently received a five-year, $327,812 Predoctoral to Postdoctoral Transition Award for a Diverse Genomics Workforce from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) to support her multifaceted research project, "Noventa Millas: Migration history, genomic ancestry, and health disparities among Cuban immigrants and Cuban-Americans in the United States."

Hernandez is using the grant, which includes a three-year postdoctoral position, to examine the genomic history and social determinants of health within a diverse, multigenerational Latinx community. By gaining a better understanding of the genetic and environmental factors associated with adverse health outcomes among Cuban immigrants and Cuban Americans, she hopes to help scientists, public health experts, community members, organizers, and policy makers improve the health and overall well-being of current and future immigrant populations and their descendants.

To carry out her research, Hernandez is using data from NIH’s All of Us Research Hub, as well as examining the social experiences of Cuban Americans found within the existing National Latino and Asian American Study.

Meanwhile, she’s gathering her own data by interviewing Miami residents of Cuban descent to help determine if discrimination factors into Latinx health disparities. In addition, she’s collecting saliva samples from them to get their genomic profile, she explained.

“Family’s always been a big thing for me,” Hernandez said. “Being a child of immigrants, it’s always been hard to figure out my place. I know I’m American, but my experience is different. I’ve always been family oriented, but for a long time I rejected a lot of my identity. But later on in my life, I really reconnected with my roots and with my family, and we began talking more about our family history. Now, I get paid to be a researcher to work with my community. I’m essentially getting paid to explore my heritage.”

Associate Professor of Anthropology and Biology George Perry, who serves as Hernandez’s co-adviser with Associate Professor of Anthropology, Demography, and Asian Studies Mary Shenk, called Hernandez “an amazing student and leader” completely deserving of the award.

"It is a substantial honor and in fact a highlight of my career to be able to work with, learn from, and be inspired by Maggie,” Perry said. “It is rare for any scholar, but especially one at such an early career stage, to integrate approaches from across the biological and social sciences so impressively and effectively, as Maggie is doing. Yet such mixed-methods approaches will play critical roles in understanding and ultimately more comprehensively addressing health-related inequalities, so I am extremely thrilled that the NIH and NHGRI are supporting Maggie's training and research.”

The project started through informal conversations Hernandez had with her parents and other relatives about health issues that had long plagued the family, among them hypertension and diabetes. Over time, she began to think about how a person’s life experiences affect their health outcomes, she said. Through talks with her advisers, she ultimately decided to embark on a study that mixed the hard and social sciences.

Hernandez is especially interested in how social networks influence a person’s ability to thrive in their environment. While her Cuban parents both had family connections when they arrived in the U.S., she said that’s not always the case.

“What I’m finding in my research is that immigrants who didn’t have a support system when they arrived here found it so much more difficult, opposed to someone who already had familial support when they got here,” she said. “That interconnectedness of community — I’ve found that when people had that, they were able to access more things, get on their feet quicker, and lead better lives.”

When back in Miami, Hernandez volunteers with community organizations like Cubanos Pa’lante, which assists new Cuban immigrants gain the resources they need to make their transition as seamless as possible. Those groups, she said, “know these issues have a profound impact on individuals, and are hoping to mitigate that.”

Hernandez’s trips home also give her the opportunity to interview and collect saliva samples from her subjects, which until recently had been put on the backburner due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Through the genomic testing of her participants, Hernandez hopes to get a clearer picture of how differences in the immigration experience can shape ancestral profiles, and perhaps even health.

“The genomic diversity will likely look very different between Cuban Americans and Cubans who live in Cuba now. And that won’t be shaped by DNA, but by immigration, and how it can shape someone’s life,” Hernandez said. “Being able to understand we are complex organisms, we have to engage with that complexity in order to understand a fuller picture of what is going on.”

Hernandez learned to do the genomic testing herself so the data could not be sold to outside parties without her participants' knowledge and consent.

“I refused to use any commercial entity to do the ancestry component, which is something that many scientists have used before. I was very adamant about that,” Hernandez said. “My participants are the owners of the data. Science works well because of its transparency, and those who share their DNA with me, that data will be put up on a repository for non-commercial means, and only for Latinx health. My participants will have maximum agency. And it’ll give scientists who don’t have the same support as me the means to use this data — that way, I’m not the only one looking at it. Anyone hoping to use the data will have to submit a short application to me, which I’ll then review to make sure it coincides with what the participants consented to when they joined the study. So, there is this measure of protection.”

The interviews, meanwhile, have provided Hernandez with deeply illuminating details about her subjects’ personal lives and histories.

“Every time I walk away from an interview, I come away with a completely different experience that I didn’t have before,” she said. “It’s interesting to hear how nuanced everyone’s experiences of immigrating are. Overall, the goal is to show how Latinx people are not some monolith, but a highly diverse population.”

A first-generation college student, Hernandez majored in biology as an undergraduate at the University of Florida. There, a course in biological anthropology inspired her to pursue a career in the field.

Arriving at Penn State in 2017, Hernandez initially focused her research on non-human primates. However, she said, her outlook changed when she attended a conference hosted by the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS), where she met researchers who were finding ways to inject aspects of their personal life into their scholarship.

“On the way back from the conference, I was having a crisis,” she said. “I ended up buying Wi-Fi on the airplane, messaged my adviser and told him I didn’t feel connected to my research work and wanted to find and pivot to a project that explored my background more.”

Since that day, she hasn’t looked back.

“I find so much value in my work because I’m getting to learn about my experience as a Cuban American by looking at the experiences that my family and others like them went through,” Hernandez said. “Now those experiences can help me have a positive impact on their health.”