Dr. Sara Mijares St. George is a Cuban-American behavioral scientist born and raised in Miami, FL, who is passionate about reducing health disparities among Hispanics. She has built a program of research that aims to promote health, prevent chronic disease, and foster positive relationships among Hispanic families through developing, evaluating, and disseminating evidence-based multigenerational digital lifestyle interventions that address obesity, physical inactivity, and poor diet — key modifiable risk factors for the leading causes of death in the US, cardiovascular disease and cancer. Her team recently published a comprehensive, rigorous systematic review and meta-analysis of more than 100 pediatric obesity prevention and treatment interventions among US Hispanic youth and found that obesity-related interventions are having only small effects on the weight status and lifestyle behaviors of Hispanic youth. Notably, less than 5% of these interventions leveraged technology for intervention delivery, making technology-based interventions highly underutilized in this population. These findings underscored the need for more impactful and scalable obesity-related interventions for Hispanic youth.

With funding from the National Heart, Lung, & Blood Institute (K01 HL133521), Dr. St. George's team developed and piloted a web-based application known as Healthy Juntos (Healthy Together), with iterative feedback from Hispanic parents and adolescents. The next step, funded by the National Cancer Institute (R01CA289519), is to evaluate the efficacy of Healthy Juntos with families in South Florida. Specifically, the goals of the grant are to examine the efficacy of the intervention in promoting a healthy weight trajectory in Hispanic adolescents compared to those provided with a "digital health referral" – a list of publicly available lifestyle websites and apps – and to examine parent weight status and lifestyle changes, family functioning, and health-related positive parenting practices as potential mediators of adolescent outcomes. This study will be among the first to evaluate a large-scale, family-based digital lifestyle intervention in Hispanic parent-adolescent dyads, specifically targeting improvements in family constructs.