Rate My Professor Gabriel Frietze

Gabriel Frietze serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Texas at El Paso School of Pharmacy, where he is also affiliated with the Border Biomedical Research Center and the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences PhD program. A graduate of UTEP, he obtained his PhD in General Psychology in 2018, MA in Experimental Psychology in 2016, and BA in Psychology in 2009. Frietze directs the Health Communication and Risk Perception (HCRP) Laboratory, focusing his research on health communication strategies, risk perceptions and behaviors, and identification of trusted sources of health information within underserved Hispanic communities along the U.S.-Mexico border. His investigations employ the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities Research Framework, the Social Determinants of Health model, and the Health Belief Model to inform the development and testing of data-driven, multi-modal digital health behavioral interventions targeting areas such as vaccine acceptance and uptake, diabetes prevention, early detection and management, cancer prevention, infectious diseases, drug use, and risky driving behaviors.

As principal investigator, Frietze has obtained major grants including an NIH U54 grant for a bilingual digital health intervention to improve diabetes self-management ($22,248,211; 2025–2029), a RADx Underserved Populations award for a bilingual COVID-19 rapid test digital health intervention ($307,619; 2022–2024), and Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) funding for digital health interventions preventing HPV-associated cancers ($238,619; 2021–2024) and a pilot project ($79,533). His scholarly output includes over 30 peer-reviewed publications, such as "Bilingual digital health intervention to improve COVID-19 self-testing intentions among Hispanic adults" (Frontiers in Public Health, 2025), "Trusted Voices: Assessing Trusted Sources of Human Papillomavirus Vaccine Information Among a Sample of Hispanic Parents" (Vaccines, 2025), "Exploring Socio-Behavioral Correlates of Metabolic and Inflammatory Risk in a University Sample Residing Along the U.S./Mexico Border" (International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2025), "Human Papillomavirus Vaccine Acceptance (HPV-VA) and Vaccine Uptake (HPV-VU): Assessing the Impact of Theory, Culture, and Trusted Sources of Information in a Hispanic Community" (BMC Public Health, 2023), and "Perceptions of COVID-19 vaccines in a predominantly Hispanic patient population from the Texas-Mexico Border" (Journal of the American Pharmacists Association, 2022). Frietze chairs the El Paso Vaccine Promotion Community Advisory Board and teaches courses including Applied Biostatistics, Biostatistics & Epidemiology, and Health Messaging. His lab's community efforts have included distributing over 4,500 COVID-19 rapid tests and creating bilingual instructional videos.