Dr. Valera is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Health and also an Affiliated Faculty in the School of Social Work at Rutgers University. She earned her PhD in Social Work from the University of South Carolina, College of Social Work. Dr. Valera completed a three-year postdoctoral research fellowship in human immunodeficiency virus prevention and human sexuality from Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and a one-year clinical fellowship in cancer health disparities from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She has sustained several years of NIH-funded research in cancer health disparities among men with criminal justice histories at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, and Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. In addition, Dr. Valera is a certified tobacco treatment specialist and the co-chair/co-founder of the Bronx Reentry Working Group, a coalition of returning citizens, friends, and family members supporting each other through community reintegration.

Research Interests
Dr. Valera鈥檚 research uses a public health and social work lens to explore health behaviors and health promotion strategies to reduce the detrimental effects of incarceration, cancer burden, (particularly cigarette smoking/tobacco use) and HIV in men. Specifically, she engages in scholarship that explores how situational and contextual factors influence the health of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated men. Moreover, the theoretical foundation that frames her research is rooted in public health and social work. Dr. Valera鈥檚 research falls into three broad topic areas: 1) Cancer-health disparities and incarcerated populations: Much of her scholarship in this area focuses on tobacco smoke and smoking cessation among formerly incarcerated and incarcerated men. These studies point to the urgent need to provide prison-based smoking cessation programs in criminal justice settings to reduce the detrimental effects of cigarette smoking.