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David Gimeno Ruiz de Porras, Ph.D., M.Sc., LPsy

Chair, Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences

Professor

David Gimeno Ruiz de Porras, PhD, is Professor and Chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at UT School of Public Health San Antonio. Dr. Gimeno is a trained psychologist and social and occupational epidemiologist with a Master’s in Occupational Hazards Prevention and a PhD in Public Health. Before joining the UT School of Public Health San Antonio, he was Professor at the UTHealth Houston School of Public Health within the Department of Epidemiology, Human Genetics, and Environmental Sciences and the Director of the Southwest Center for Occupational and Environmental Health, the NIOSH Education and Research Center at UTHealth Houston, where he had led doctoral training programs in occupational epidemiology and Total Worker Health©. Prior to that, Dr. Gimeno was a Senior Research Fellow on the Whitehall II study in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London Medical School, where he further developed his research expertise in the social and cultural determinants of occupational injuries and illnesses.

Dr. Gimeno’s research focus is to develop a comprehensive picture of the impact of adult life exposures, especially those in the occupational setting, through corresponding psychosocial, behavioral, and biological pathways on disease and functional decline. His research interests include the impact of work on a range of physical and mental health outcomes, work-related lost productivity, return-to-work, and cross-national survey studies of working and employment conditions and health, working with large, longitudinal data, and a focus on vulnerable workers.

Most recently Dr. Gimeno has been involved in research on occupational exposures and asthma-related outcomes among healthcare workers, physiological workloads related to musculoskeletal injuries among agricultural workers, the Central American Surveys of Working Conditions and Health of workers in the formal and informal economies, a study of 9000 workers in each of the six Spanish-speaking countries in Central America, and the characterization of individual, occupational, and neighborhood-level factors influencing personal air pollution exposure among Hispanic/Latina women working as domestic cleaners in San Antonio, TX. 

Dr. Gimeno’s teaching experience includes courses in research methods in environmental and occupational health and capstone courses for students in epidemiology and environmental and occupational health sciences.