Esperanza Diaz is a medical doctor educated in Spain (1995) and a specialist in general medicine in Norway since 2003. In addition to her positions as head of the Pandemic Center since 2020 and professor at the Department of Global Public Health and Primary Care at UiB, she also works as a senior researcher (20 %) at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. Diaz has researched migrant health since 2008, written over 150 peer-reviewed articles on the subject and published the book Migrant Health: A Primary Care Perspective. Esperanza Diaz has extensive experience in collaborating across faculties, institutions and groups in the population. Diaz has developed and led the Pandemic Center since 2020. The Pandemic center is administratively anchored at IGS but is an interdisciplinary center with representatives from all seven faculties at UiB.
Working across disciplines and with non-academic environments, as well as the inclusion of social inequality in health in a pandemic perspective, have been keywords in Diaz’s research in recent years. In 2023, she leads the NFR-funded project Integration for health (in Norwegian), which follows the project Changes in health and health needs among Syrian refugees on their way to Norway (in Norwegian). She is also involved as a partner in other NFR projects such as EQUALPART – Western Norway University of Applied Sciences) and from 2024 will also be a partner in the EU-financed the UniHealth project.
Diaz has taught several topics related to general medicine, including clinical consultation, ENT in general practice, pregnancy control in general practice, clinical meetings with patients from other cultures, narrative medicine, and unfortunate events, as part of the position at UiB. In recent years, she has mainly taught migration and health and pandemic-related topics. In both subjects, she has developed her own PhD/subject courses (Migration and Health | Universitetet i Bergen (uib.no) and Learning from the COVID-19 pandemic: an interdisciplinary approach | Universitetet i Bergen (uib.no)) Speaker at several courses for medical students, nursing students and doctors in Spain and Norway since 1999.