Dr. Misty Pacheco
Department Chair and Associate Professor, Kinesiology and Exercise Sciences Department
University of Hawaii at Hilo
Research Focus: HIV/AIDS and substance abuse prevention, chlamydia and pelvic inflammatory disease prevention, and other issues affecting Native Hawaiian and Micronesian women
Additional information
Background Accordion Closed
Dr. Misty Pacheco earned her doctorate in Public Health in 2012 from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She earned a master’s in Health Administration from the University of Southern California in 2006, and a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry from California State University in Sacramento in 2003. In 2013, she served as the executive director of the Hawaii Island HIV/AIDS Foundation and as an executive officer for the Asia Pacific Academic Consortium for Public Health in 2010.
Dr. Pacheco received the Sharma Endowment in 2016 as co-principal investigator on “Exploring Chlamydia Knowledge, Attitudes and Behaviors Among Micronesian Women in Urban Hawaii.” In 2017, she was awarded a Nation Institute of Health Indigenous HIV/AIDS Research Training Fellowship as fellow and principal investigator for “Investigation of Native Hawaiians and HI/AIDS.” In 2019, Dr. Pacheco earned a National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities award for “A Pragmatic Trial of An Adaptive eHealth HIV Prevention Program for Diverse Adolescent MSM as principal investigator.
Current projects Accordion Closed
Dr. Pacheco is now working on a project with Dr. Julie A. Baldwin and Dr. Viacheslav “Slava” Fofanov titled, “Defining Microbiological Drivers of Early Childhood Caries in Preschoolers of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Descent.”