Ysabel Duron is a pioneering, award-winning Latina journalist, a cancer survivor, and for the last 20 years, one of the nation’s leading authorities in Latinx/Hispanic cancer education and advocacy. Her encore career as a patient advocate and non-profit agency builder commenced when she was diagnosed with cancer in 1999. Her agencies developed programs for low income, Spanish speaking and immigrant communities to address gaps along the cancer continuum including cancer awareness education, navigation into screening, psychosocial support groups and a lay community navigator program to support and guide low income, Spanish-speaking cancer patients in the public health care system in San Jose, California.

In 2016, Ms. Duron founded The Latino Cancer Institute (TLCI), a nationwide network dedicated to developing and sharing best practice programs to enhance the work of Latino community service agencies, to provide collaboration with the global cancer research community, and drive policy to solve the issues and diminish the burden of Latino cancer

Duron serves on the IRB of the All of Us Research Program at the NIH. She is a member of the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine Advisory Board, which advises the Governor on the direction of PM in the state. Most recently, as a new Board member of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, a stem cell research program, she successfully drove a motion that requires research proposals to include a plan on recruiting a proportionate number of racial and ethnic minorities into newly funded COVID Clinical Trials. The motion has since been incorporated into the other RFP’s funded by the Institute, and driven DEI frameworks for organization internal organizational operations.

As a member of the National Rapid Research Coalition, for the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, Duron advised on the community’s role in an equitable and effective Covid vaccination rollout (titled CommuniVax), supported the research site team in California (one of five sites around the country), consulted on and assisted in editing of three CommuniVax national reports. The third and final report was released in November of 2021 and can be found at the following site, https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/publications/a-waypoint-on-the-path-to-health-equity-covid-19-vaccination-at-month-11, a document that will proved invaluable in pandemic and parity health planning going forward to address disparities