Dr. Manuela Orjuela-Grimm is a pediatric oncologist, molecular epidemiologist and nutrition epidemiologist. She specifically focuses on disease development and diet related exposures that can cause biological change which are also related to living conditions. In her work as a pediatric oncologist, she takes care of children with cancer and works with parents to help them understand the difficult time they’re going through.  

She was born in New York City and received her medical degree from Yale University School of Medicine in the class of 1989 and has been in practice for more than 20 years. She currently practices at Columbia University Medical Center Pediatrics and is affiliated with NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center.  

“I think being Latina hasn’t kept me back in anything. I think it’s given [me] a lot of opportunities.” 

– Dr. Manuela Orjuela-Grimm, 2021

Dr. Orjuela is also involved in multiple studies evaluating dietary intake in Mexico and in Mexican immigrant women, specifically. She also studies the effects of acculturation and early life migration on nutrient and diet exposures in U.S. Latinos. She is fluent in Spanish, French, German, and Italian. 

Dr. Orjuela is an advocate for following your dreams and what you want to do most in life. She believes that reading about things that interest you and lead to connections with different types of people is important and beneficial for anyone. 

“It’s just a great opportunity to learn sometimes about things you think have nothing to do with you but, you never know when later on that it may have been, it may lead to some opportunities to making connections that you wouldn’t have predicted.”

– Dr. Manuela Orjuela-Grimm, 2021

Her research teams are bilingual, bicultural and multinational, with team members in Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Denmark, and more. She leads big research teams and is great at getting grants to ensure that her research teams are able to stay employed while they pursue their degrees. She also collaborates widely with Latin American colleagues.

One of her many publications is “Relative Severity of Food Insecurity During Overland Migration in Transit Through Mexico” in the Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, which describes validation of a novel method for retrospectively estimating nutrient intake during pregnancy using a semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaire, and  expression predicts survival in pediatric post-transplant lymphoproliferative disease (PTLD) following solid organ transplantation.

Works Cited

Mailman School of Public Health , Columbia. “Manuela Orjuela-Grimm.” Manuela Orjuela-Grimm| Columbia Public Health , Columbia University Irving Medical Center, 2019, www.publichealth.columbia.edu/people/our-faculty/mao5.

Inc., Doximity. “Dr. Manuela Orjuela, MD – New York, NY: Pediatric Hematology & Oncology on Doximity.” Doximity, 2021, www.doximity.com/pub/manuela-orjuela-md.

Gama, Alondra Coral Aragón, et al. “Relative Severity of Food Insecurity During Overland Migration in Transit Through Mexico.” Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, Springer US, 4 Aug. 2020, link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10903-020-01063-w.

Prepared by Leah Llano