Director of Research & training
Pronouns: she/her/ella
Timezone: Eastern
Alane Celeste-Villalvir is the director of research and training at The Praxis Project, where she leads the organization’s research agenda alongside external funders and efforts to translate research into training to benefit community-based organizations, academic and institutional partners, government agencies, and philanthropic organizations. Alane has more than 10 years of experience in the nonprofit sector, where she has managed programs addressing health inequities such as homelessness, food insecurity and related chronic disease, harm reduction, substance use, and infectious disease. Born in New York City and raised between New York City and the Dominican Republic, Alane is an Afro-Caribbean scholar-activist whose professional and research interests are anchored in her lived experience, which include housing insecurity, homelessness, and food insecurity.
Alane’s community-engaged research focuses on identifying and addressing the health inequities and disproportionate disease burden faced by individuals experiencing homelessness, people experiencing food insecurity, people engaged in substance use, people who are undocumented, individuals living with disabilities, and individuals at risk of (or living with) infectious diseases such as hepatitis C and HIV. Alane is a mixed methods and qualitative researcher, conducting research that aims to provide context and in-depth understanding of health inequities, whilst uplifting the voices of marginalized individuals and their lived experiences.
Alane earned a master’s of public administration with an advanced certificate in nonprofit management from Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus in 2012. In 2021, she also earned a Doctor of Public Health from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Public Health in the Texas Medical Center in Houston, Texas.
Following her doctoral studies, Alane completed a 2-year term as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she worked with ProMeSA, an NIH-funded multisectoral intervention providing urban gardening and nutrition counseling for people living with HIV (PLHIV) and experiencing food insecurity in the Dominican Republic.