HispanicBusiness

Isaac Cohen is president and CEO of Inverway LLC, a Washington, D.C., company dedicated to business development in the Western Hemisphere. He is the former director of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, where he served for 24 years.

Mr. Cohen holds a doctorate in political science from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and is a visiting lecturer at American University, Georgetown University, and George Washington University. He also lectures at the U.S. State Department Foreign Service Institute, National Defense University, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and various institutes in Latin America and South America. He is a weekly commentator on economic affairs for CNN-TV en Espanol and Global Economic Media GEM Radio. As a specialist in international trade, international capital flows, and country risks, he is a frequent contributor to trade and finance journals and is often cited in Latin American newspapers and other media.

Adela de la Torre, an agricultural economist, is the director of the Mexican American Studies & Research Center at the University of Arizona. She also is a professor at the Arizona Prevention Center and directs the Border Academy, a summer institute that explores the unique characteristics of the U.S.-Mexico border. Her publications and research focus primarily on health-care access and finance issues that affect the Latino community.

She received her Ph.D.in Agricultural and Resource Economics in 1982 from the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to the UA in 1996, Ms. de la Torre was chairperson of the Chicano and Latino Studies Department at Long Beach. She also was a Los Angeles Times syndicated columnist. In 1998 she was the principal investigator for a research project on Hispanic women and cancer, funded by the Cancer Federation. She is co-author of Mexican Americans and Health: ¡Sana! ¡Sana! (UA Press, 2001) and author of Moving from the Margins: A Chicana’s View of Public Policy (forthcoming). She is co-editor of Building With Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Scholarship (UC Berkeley Press, 1993). In 1993 she was appointed by President Clinton to the White House Fellows Commission, following an earlier four-year appointment to the National Deafness and Communication Disorder Advisory Council of the NIH. She is also a member of the National Advisory Council for the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention.

Jorge del Pinal is Assistant Division Chief for Special Population Statistics at the U.S. Bureau of the Census. He is the senior statistician at the Bureau responsible for collection and dissemination of data on special populations, such as racial and ethnic groups, in federal surveys including the 2000 Census of Population and Housing, the Current Population Survey, and the American Community Survey. He has pioneered the use of new information technology at the Bureau. An expert on population statistics, particularly in ethnic data, he oversees many of the Bureau’s publications and has written numerous articles for scholarly journals.