Lisa Cacari Stone, PhD is a nationally recognized scholar, policy leader, and equity strategist with over three decades of experience spanning mental health practice, public health research, state health administration, and legislative policy. An Emerita Professor in the College of Population Health at the University of New Mexico and founding Director of the Equity in Policy Institute, she has devoted her career to advancing health equity through community-engaged research, policy translation, and systems transformation.

Drawing on her early career as a licensed marriage and family therapist and health administrator for the State of New Mexico, Commissioner Cacari Stone bridges the worlds of practice, research, and public policy. She earned her doctorate in social policy from Brandeis University and completed postdoctoral training at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and is currently enrolled in the Harvard Kennedy School- Executive Leadership program. She served as a Health Policy Fellow to the late U.S. Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and has advised the NM state legislature, federal agencies, philanthropic and non-profit organizations on immigrant health, health care reform, and behavioral health equity.

She was the founding Executive Director and Principal Investigator of the National Institutes of Health-funded Transdisciplinary Research, Equity and Engagement Center for Advancing Behavioral Health Equity. She co-lead the National Community Engagement Alliance funded project (Wide Engagement for Assessing Vaccine Equity in New Mexico), which employs community-based participatory research methods with Indigenous, Latinx, Black, Asian and LGBTQI and rural and urban communities. Under her leadership, she has garnered over $30 million in funding and mentored hundreds of underrepresented students and scholars in public health and policy.

She also served as the Assistant Director and Senior Fellow of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy and has received multiple honors, including the Latin@ Trailblazer Award, the National Latino Behavioral Health Research Award, and appointment to the National Advisory Council of the NIH’s Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. Her scholarship has been published in leading journals such as the American Journal of Public Health, Health Affairs, and Health Promotion Practice, and her policy expertise has been featured in national media, including USA Today and NPR.

Dr. Cacari Stone’s work is grounded in her lived experience as a Purépecha/Mestiza from rural and working-class roots.  She and her partner/wife are one of the "NM Sandoval 64" couples married in 2013.  Her life’s mission is to promote evidence-informed policy that reflects the voices and wisdom of communities most impacted by inequities—ensuring that governance is truly for and by the people.