Sandy García is country director of the Population Council's Mexico City office and a senior associate with the Council's Reproductive Health program. A social demographer and international health specialist, García has been with the Council since 1999. In 2002 she was named director of reproductive health for Latin America and the Caribbean. García is responsible for developing, coordinating, implementing, and supervising ongoing and new research studies and projects in four priority areas: abortion, family planning/contraception, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and maternal health.

Before joining the Council, García was the field coordinator for the Cancer Consortium of El Paso, Texas, an NIH-funded project focused on increasing Latinas' access to cervical cancer services. She has published over 30 peer-reviewed articles in international journals and is a member of several professional associations. In 2007 García was honored as a recipient of the Guttmacher Institute's Darroch Award for Excellence in Sexual and Reproductive Health Research and was cited for "research documenting abortion-related knowledge, attitudes, and practices in Mexico" that "played an important role in the country's recent decision to legalize first-trimester abortion." Currently, she sits on the World Health Organization's Regional Advisory Panel for the Americas. García received her master's and doctor of science degrees in population and international health from the Harvard School of Public Health. She is a 1990 graduate of Harvard and Radcliffe College.

Currently García is the principal investigator of a broad multi-component project aimed at building the social science evidence base on abortion in Mexico. Other ongoing research projects include: analysis of findings from a recent longitudinal study of the acceptability of female-controlled barrier methods and comprehension of hierarchical STI risk-reduction messages among sex workers in the Dominican Republic; participation in a collaborative study on mainstreaming emergency contraception among vulnerable populations in a US/Mexico border city; a package of public opinion studies in Mexico City regarding the April 2007 reform in abortion legislation; a collaborative study with Guttmacher Institute and the Colegio de México to update national estimates of the incidence of unsafe abortion, including a complementary study on self-use of misoprostol in Mexican pharmacies; and a package of studies on barriers to Mexican physician's uptake of magnesium sulfate for the prevention and treatment of severe pre-eclampsia and eclampsia.

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This page updated 28 July 2008

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