Jairo Pena first joined the Center for Population Sciences and Health Empowerment as a research assistant from 2024 to 2025 and is now a postdoctoral fellow within the center.

Pena earned a Ph.D. and M.S. in statistics from Florida State University, an M.S. in mathematics from the University of the Andes, and bachelor’s degrees in mathematics, economics and statistics from the National University of Colombia.

Research interests include maternal and child health disparities in LGBTQ+ populations, infant feeding, population dynamics and applied quantitative methods.