Dennis Pérez Chacón, M. Sc., Ph.D.

Sociologist. Postdoctoral researcher at the Institute Public Health Research Institute of the University of Montreal (IRSPUM), within the chair REALISME.

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Dennis Pérez is a sociologist (Havana University, 1997); with postgraduate training on popular education, participatory action research, disease control (Master degree, ITM, 2004) and social development (Master degree, Havana University, 2007), among others. She holds a PhD in Sociology (Havana University, 2011) and in Health Sciences (Gent University, 2015).

Since 1997 she has worked as researcher at the Epidemiology Division of Pedro Kourí Institute of Tropical Medicine (IPK), Havana, Cuba. She has been working for nearly 10 years on building evidence on empowerment strategies for dengue prevention and control in the Cuban context. Her main focus has been the dynamics of empowerment processes at small scale and the factors that could influence these processes when moving from micro to macro implementation. Based on her empirical, mainly qualitative, research and on her sociological background, and together with her colleagues, she has brought theoretical developments on the concept of participation and on some implementation issues.

Her areas of interest are community participation in disease control; acceptability, implementation fidelity and diffusion of complex health innovations.