Our faculty affiliates include UCLA faculty, faculty from other UC campuses and institutions, and post-doctoral fellows. Affiliates come from a wide range of disciplines.
UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs | rakee@ucla.edu
Randall Akee is an assistant professor in the Department of Public Policy and American Indian Studies at UCLA. Prior to that, Akee was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Tufts University. Akee completed his doctorate at Harvard University in June 2006. Akee is an applied microeconomist and has worked in the areas of Labor Economics, Economic Development and Migration. He has conducted research on the determinants of migration and human trafficking, the effect of changes in household income on educational attainment and obesity, the effect of political institutions on economic development and the role of property institutions on investment decisions. He has conducted research on several American Indian reservations, Canadian First Nations, and Pacific Island nations in addition to working in various Native Hawaiian communities. Akee also spent several years working for the State of Hawaii Office of Hawaiian Affairs Economic Development Division. He is a research fellow at the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development and the Center for Effective Global Action at UC Berkeley. He also serves on the National Advisory Council on Race, Ethnic, and Other Populations at the US Census Bureau. He is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
UC Berkeley School of Public Health | amaniallen@berkeley.edu
Amani M. Allen (Formerly Nuru-Jeter) is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Community Health Sciences at the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health. Her broad research interest is to integrate social, demographic, and epidemiologic methods to examine racial inequalities in health as they exist across populations, across place, and over the life-course. Allen considers herself to be more "exposure" than "outcomes" focused, which is consistent with her interests in examining social factors such as "race" and "social class" as exposures that serve as the foundation for the creation and preservation of health disparities across a number of outcomes. She is interested in how these social exposures determine life experiences and opportunities differently for different social groups and how those differences become embodied and impact mental and physical health and well being.
Allen is Principal Investigator of the African American Women's Heart and Health Study, which examines the association between racism stress, cardiovascular biomarkers, and biological stress among Black women in the Bay area with particular focus on coping mechanisms; and Co-Principal Investigator of the Bay Area Heart Health Study which examines similar associations among Black men with particular emphasis on coping mechanisms and internalized racism.
CDU Department of Urban Public Health | bitaamani@cdrewu.edu
Bita Amani is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Public Health at Charles Drew University. Her research and practice are focused on (1) the socio-political roots of health and (2) the intersecting relationships between health and politics. Through her pedagogy, she cultivates critical thinking and conversations that complicate ideas of wellness and sickness. In pursuing her work, Amani uses a variety of methods and multi-disciplinary approaches. She infuses history, critical theory, lessons from social movements, and eco-social thinking into her public health and research practice.
Tufts University School of Medicine | Ndidiamaka.amutah_onukagha@tufts.edu
Ndidiamaka Amutah-Onukagha is an Assistant Professor of Public Health and Community Medicine at the Tufts University School of Medicine . Her research interests include health disparities, reproductive health, infant mortality and HIV/AIDS in ethnic minority populations. She a Certified Health Education Specialist and has taught courses such as Health Disparities and Social Justice, Program Planning and Evaluation, and Minority Women’s Health. She has worked as a researcher in community-based research settings in a variety of areas including maternal and child health, health disparities, and HIV/AIDS. Amutah-Onukagha has published and presented in the area of HIV/AIDS and infant mortality in urban communities.
Drexel Univeristy Dornsife School of Public Health | smb483@drexel.edu
Sharrelle Barber received a Doctor of Science (ScD) degree in Social Epidemiology from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a Master of Public Health (MPH) in Health Behavior and Health Education from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health. Her research focuses on the intersection of “place, race, and health” and examines the role of structural racism (i.e. concentrated economic disadvantage and residential segregation) in shaping health and racial/ethnic health inequalities among Blacks with a particular focus on the Southern United States and Brazil. To that end, she has conducted a series of empirical investigations in the Jackson Heart Study based in Jackson, Mississippi and the Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Adult Health (ELSA-Brasil), a multi-site cohort study based in six urban centers across Brazil. Dr. Barber’s research employs multilevel analysis and spatial techniques and draws heavily from theories that take a socio-ecological approach to understanding health and health inequalities. Ultimately, Barber hopes her research will inform the development of multi-level, multi-sector policies that will address the underlying structural determinants of health through economic and social policy initiatives.
UCLA Fielding School of Public Health Department of Community Health Sciences & UCLA Center for California Population Research | beltrans@ucla.edu
HIram Beltrán-Sánchez’s research focuses on the demography of health and aging. He has written on health patterns and trends in low- and middle-income countries; on aging in high-income countries including issues about compression of morbidity; on the links between early life experiences and late life outcomes; as well as on biomarker data from Mexico to study physiological patterns of health and their link with sociodemographic factors. He co-founded the Latin American Mortality Database, the largest data repository of mortality from 19 countries in Latin America (including data from around 1850). He has collaborated with researchers and institutions in México, Brazil, Germany, and Sweden.
Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA in 2015, Beltrán-Sánchez was Research Associate at the Center for Demography of Health & Aging at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was a David E. Bell Fellow at the Center for Population and Development Studies at Harvard University from 2011 to 2013 and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California from 2009-2011.
Beltrán-Sánchez’s publications have appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; Health Affairs; the American Journal of Public Health; the Journal of the American College of Cardiology; Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health; Demography; Salud Pública de México; the Journals of Gerontology (both, Social and Medical sciences); the Journal of Aging and Health; Theoretical Population Biology; among others.
UCLA Center for Social Medicine | pbourgois@gmail.com
Philippe was Professor and Chair of Anthropology at San Francisco State University in the 1990s and founding Chair of Social Medicine at UCSF from 1998 to 2005. He moved to the University of Pennsylvania as the Richard Perry University Professor of Anthropology and Community Medicine. He started the MSTP MD/PhD tracks in Anthropology at both UCSF and the University of Pennsylvania. Philippe is currently working with Joel Braslow, the Director of UCLA's MSTP track in the Social Sciences and the Coordinator of the Social Medicine and Humanities initiative in the David Geffen School of Medicine, to grow the increasingly vibrant intellectual community of Clinician-Social Scientists on campus. We are building an exciting consortium with the Social Science tracks of the MD/PhD programs at other UC campuses which we hope to eventually extend to other institutions across the country.
University of Michigan Department of Family Medicine | pchandan@med.umich.edu
P. Paul Chandanabhumma is a Research Fellow with the University of Michigan Mixed Methods Program. He recently completed his PhD in Community Health Sciences at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. His research interests lie at the intersection of health inequities, race, culture, community engagement, and the social production of medical and public health practice. His mixed methods dissertation research examined the influences of group diversity on the processes and achievements of community-based participatory research (CBPR) partnerships. He is participating in and supporting mixed methods research projects through the University of Michigan Department of Family Medicine.
UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies | chavezmoreno@ucla.edu
Laura C. Chávez-Moreno is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Her research agenda seeks to (1) understand how Latinxs are impacted by cultural, historical, economic, and sociopolitical factors that maintain, exacerbate and/or challenge inequities in education, and (2) demonstrate evidence-based possibilities and successes in policies, practices, and pedagogies that focus on providing Latinxs an equitable education. Her work has been published in the Handbook of Research on Teaching (5th edition), Peabody Journal of Education, Pennsylvania Language Forum, and Journal of Teacher Education.
Meharry Medical College | mcook@mmc.edu
Mekeila Cook has a PhD in Public Health and a Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology. Her previous research focused on the impact of sexual violence on HIV risk behaviors and health disparities associated with HIV risk. Mekeila is currently an Assistant Professor at Meharry Medical College in the Master’s of Public Health program. She is a former Post-doctoral Scholar at UCLA Integrated Substance Abuse Programs. She is currently working in the area of human trafficking, specifically commercial sexually exploited children within the juvenile justice system and their access to healthcare services.
UCLA Fielding School of Public Health | clford@ucla.edu
Chandra L. Ford is Associate Professor of Community Health Sciences and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice and Health in the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). She earned her doctorate in Health Behavior from the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina. Prior to joining UCLA, she completed postdoctoral training in Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina and in Epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, where she was a W. K. Kellogg Foundation Kellogg Health Scholar.
Most of Ford’s research falls into two broad categories: (1) empirical studies examining the relationship between specific forms of racism, health inequities and healthcare inequities; and, (2) the development and advancement of conceptual and methodological tools to help researchers who study racism as a public health issue. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Public Health, the Annals of Epidemiology, Social Science & Medicine, the Wisconsin Law Review, and other peer-reviewed journals.
Ford is privileged to have received several notable honors and she serves the profession broadly. In 2016, she was appointed to the National Academy of Medicine Committee on Community-based Solutions to Promote Health Equity in the United States of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and named co-chair of the Committee on Science of the American Public Health Association’s newly formed Anti-Racism Collaborative. She serves on the Board of the Yancey Edgeley Fellowship, which was developed to further Antronette “Toni” Yancey’s legacy of promoting physical activity in diverse communities through “instant recess”, and she previously served as president of the Society for the Analysis of African American Public Health Issues. She serves as a mentor in UCLA’s Center for Healthy Aging in Minority Elders (CHIME) program. In addition to her academic roles, she has been involved with the Black Radical Congress and has partnered with the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders.
UCLA Departments of Psychology and Health Policy and Management | maysv@nicco.sscnet.ucla.edu
Dr. Mays’ research is shaped by underlying themes reflecting her interests in furthering empirically based research on underserved populations, particularly ethnic minority communities and women: 1) explicating factors related to threats to physical and mental health among underserved populations, 2) guiding policy development pertinent to these issues, and 3} developing new methodologies to advance the development of science that is responsive to the health and mental health care needs of underserved populations.
Currently the research group is focused in three areas with ethnic minority and vulnerable populations. Da. Mays’ research team examines mental health disorders using large- scale datasets to determine prevalence of types of disorders that are found in racial/ethnic group with a particular attention to gender. In sexual minorities, she and her team again try and extend the thinking on how social status and contextual issues function in mental and physical health to understand psychiatric disorders, risk for HIV infection, physical diseases (cancer, CVD, diabetes) and help-seeking for mental and physical health care. We are interested in how all of this translates into better practices for providers and public policies that can enhance the overall physical and mental well-being of vulnerable populations.
In addition, Dr. Mays is the Director of the UCLA Center for Research, Education, Training and Strategic Communications on Minority Health Disparities. This NIH funded center has approximately 100 faculty, staff and community participants in a series of cores with the goal of the reduction or elimination of physical and mental health disparities in racial/ethnic minority populations. The Center has a lecture series, supports graduate and undergraduate students and works with faculty from across the entire campus and providers and community based organizations throughout California.
UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs | amochoa@luskin.ucla.edu
Ayako Miyashita Ochoa is an Assistant Adjunct Professor at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, Department of Social Welfare. She serves as Associate Director of the Southern California HIV/AIDS Policy Research Center which brings the most relevant and timely evidence to bear on California’s efforts to develop and maintain efficient, cost-effective, and accessible programs and services to people living with or at risk for HIV. Professor Miyashita’s interests focus on HIV-related health disparities at the intersection of race/ethnicity, sexual and gender identity, and migrant status.
Prior to joining the faculty, Professor Miyashita directed the Los Angeles HIV Law and Policy Project, a legal services collaborative dedicated to addressing the unmet legal needs of primarily low-income people living with HIV (“PLWH”) in Los Angeles County. As a Director in the Clinical and Experiential Learning Department at UCLA School of Law, Professor Miyashita taught courses on the attorney-client relationship, client interviewing and counseling, and HIV law and policy.
Currently, Professor Miyashita serves as Co-Principal Investigator on a study to develop a mobile application to improve treatment adherence among HIV-positive African American young men who have sex with men. During her time at the Williams Institute, her research included research on the unmet legal needs of low-income people living with HIV and impact on health in addition to HIV criminalization and issues related to privacy and confidentiality for people living with HIV.
Michelle Morse, MD, MPH is an Associate Physician in the Division of Global Health Equity and Assistant Program Director for the Internal Medicine Residency Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She works as a Hospitalist in the Department of General Internal Medicine. Morse is also an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an affiliate of the school’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine.
In 2011, Morse co-founded EqualHealth, an NGO that aims to inspire and support the development of Haiti's next generation of healthcare leaders through improving medical and nursing education and creating opportunities for growth amongst health professionals. As Founding Co-Director, she works to strengthen medical education globally, to expand the teaching of social medicine in the US and abroad, and to support health systems strengthening through EqualHealth. In 2015, Morse engaged several global partners to found the Social Medicine Consortium, a global coalition that advocates, educates, and conducts research using the lens of social medicine so that health professional education can more honestly align with the root causes of illness.
Morse served as Deputy Chief Medical Officer for Partners in Health from 2012 to 2016. She has also served as the Director of Medical Education and the Advisor to the Medical Director of Mirebalais Hospital, a public academic medical center established through a partnership between the government of Haiti and Partners in Health. In this capacity, she created and launched Mirebalais’ first three residency programs.
Morse is a graduate of the Doris and Howard Hiatt Residency in Global Health Equity and Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. As a resident, Dr. Morse worked primarily in Haiti where she helped to coordinate Partners In Health’s earthquake relief efforts, served as a first-responder for the subsequent cholera epidemic, and worked on women's health and quality improvement projects.
UCLA Geffen School of Medicine | Kimberly.CauleyNarain@gmail.com
Dr. Narain’s primary research focus involves investigating the implications of social, economic and health policies for health equity among women, individuals with low socioeconomic status and racial/ethnic minorities. During her Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar fellowship, she conducted the first study to examine the perspectives of single mothers who lost access to welfare cash transfer benefits as a consequence of exceeding time limits or failure to meet work requirements regarding their experiences with health and health care. Her dissertation work produced the first study to find a positive relationship between more stringent eligibility requirements for the receipt of welfare cash transfer benefits and worse self-reported health and disability among single mothers with a high school diploma or less and the first study to directly link time limits for welfare cash transfer benefits with decreased access to health care in this same population. Her post-doctoral work yielded the first studies to document the prevalence of food insufficiency (inadequate food intake due to lack of money or resources) among Women Veterans and the association of food insufficiency with worse self-reported access to health care and health outcomes among this population. As a faculty member, she led one of the few studies to examine the impact of state-level minimum wage increases on access to health care, health behavior and health outcomes, across racial/ethnic and gender groups. She has also collaborated with the Center for Health Advancement in the Fielding School of Public Health to investigate the scientific evidence needs of public health organizations desiring to advance health equity.
Dr. Narain received dual B.S. degrees in Microbiology and African-American studies from UCLA and an M.D. from Morehouse School of Medicine. She completed her residency in Primary Care Internal Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Following residency, she completed a California Endowment Minority Health Policy Fellowship at Harvard Medical School. After leaving Harvard, she completed a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar Fellowship at UCLA. Upon completion of this fellowship, Dr. Narain stayed on at UCLA as a Specialty Training Advanced Research Fellow in the Department of General Internal Medicine & Health Services Research and earned a Ph.D. in Health Services from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Prior to joining the faculty in the Department of General Internal Medicine & Health Services Research at UCLA, Dr. Narain was a post-doctoral fellow in the West Los Angeles VA Center for the Study of Healthcare Innovation, Implementation & Policy.
UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine | knorris@ucla.edu
Keith C. Norris is an internationally recognized clinician-scientist and health policy leader who has been instrumental in shaping national health policy and clinical practice guidelines in the area of kidney disease. He has been one of most highly funded National Institutes of Health (NIH) investigators in the nation, and one of the most highly cited scientists in the world in the area of chronic kidney disease and health disparities. He has been a powerful advocate for minority institutions and served for 7 years as the president of the Research Centers in Minority Institutions Program Association.
His research interests focus on hypertension and chronic kidney disease in disadvantaged populations. Other research areas include the role of Vitamin D and oxidative stress in health disparities, and enhancing community-academic partnerships. He was the 1 of 19 Principal Investigators for the multi-site NIH funded African American Study of Kidney Disease and Hypertension (AASK) and the AASK Cohort Study, the largest comparative drug intervention trial focusing on renal outcomes conducted in African Americans.
UC Berkeley School of Public Health | obasogie@berkeley.edu
Osagie K. Obasogie is the Haas Distinguished Chair and Professor of Bioethics in the Joint Medical Program and School of Public Health. He began his career at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law as an Associate and then full Professor of Law, teaching courses on Constitutional Law, race, and law and the health sciences. He joined Berkeley in 2016.
Obasogie chairs the Diversity and Health Disparities Cluster at the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society. His research and writing is on bioethics, with a focus on the social, ethical, and legal implications of new reproductive and genetic technologies. Obasogie’s research also looks at the past and present roles of science in both constructing racial meanings and explaining racial disparities. He has a particular interest in developing legal mechanisms that can create the conditions for eliminating health disparities.
An additional thread of Obasogie’s research uses novel theoretical and empirical interventions to explore the hidden ways in which racial thinking is central to law, medicine, and science.
UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics | apanofsky@ucla.edu
Aaron Panofsky is Associate Professor in the Institute for Society and Genetics and Departments of Public Policy and Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on the sociology of science and knowledge, public participation in science, and the scientific construction of race and ethnicity. His award winning book Misbehaving Science (Chicago University Press 2014) is about how controversies have successively reshaped the field of behavior genetics socially and intellectually. He is currently writing a book about the simultaneous impact of genetics on knowledge of race and racial worldviews on knowledge of genetics. This is based on an undergraduate course he has taught for many years at the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics called “What is Race?” Another project considers how white nationalists seek to appropriate genomics knowledge to define their community and advance their politics. A paper from this project “When Genetics Challenges a Racist’s Identity” has received national media attention. Other projects look at the ambiguous ways race, ethnicity, and other population categories are combined in contemporary genetics research and how provocative, even taboo, ideas about purportedly genetically determined racial differences can be used by biobehavioral researchers to build their scientific authority.
UCLA National Clinician Scholars Program | kiajeffers@ucla.edu
Skrine Jeffers received her undergraduate degree in Broadcast Journalism from North Carolina A&T State University. She obtained her Master's and doctoral degrees in nursing from UCLA. Dr. Skrine Jeffers is a public health nurse who examines the impact of structural racism, health policy, and access to quality health services on type 2 diabetes outcomes for African American and Latino older adults. Drawing upon her work as a performer and writer, she also uses media and the arts as nontraditional tools for chronic disease interventions and research dissemination.
University of Minnesota Division of Epidemiology and Community Health | jslaught@umn.edu
Slaughter-Acey is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Epidemiology and Community Health at the University of Minnesota. As an epidemiologist and health service researcher she has been investigating the biological, social, and behavioral aspects of women’s and children’s health, and how these aspects affect their quality of life. Her research interests focus on the access and utilization of perinatal health services such as prenatal case management (PCM) and prenatal care; adverse perinatal health outcomes fetal growth, preterm birth, and cerebral palsy; and the interaction of social, psychosocial, behavioral, and biological determinants of racial/ethnic health disparities in perinatal health.
Dr. Slaughter-Acey received her Master of Public Health in Maternal and Child Health from Tulane University in 2002 and her Doctorate of Philosophy in Maternal and Child Health Epidemiology from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2010. Her dissertation research showed a measure of dosage is key when evaluating the relationship between PCM and adverse birth outcomes. Additionally, Dr. Slaughter-Acey completed a T32 NIH post-doctoral fellowship in perinatal epidemiology in 2013 at Michigan State University. As a postdoctoral fellow her work focused on etiology of cerebral palsy, the interaction of racial discrimination and depression on preterm birth, the examination of racial discrimination and coping mechanism on entry into prenatal care, and the influence of socioeconomic mobility on fetal growth. Her current work examines racial disparities in cerebral palsy, the influence of stress at neighborhood and individual on fetal growth and preterm birth from a life-course perspective, and access and utilization of prenatal case management.
UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and UCLA Departments of Chicana and Chicano Studies and Women's Studies | solorzano@gseis.ucla.edu
Solorzano is the Director of UC All Campus Consortium On Research for Diversity (UC/ACCORD) and a professor of social science and comparative education in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of Califorina, Los Angeles. He is also a professor in the Chicana and Chicano Studies department and Women’s Studies.
UCLA School of Nursing | mruiz@sonnet.ucla.edu
Dr. Ruiz has over 30 years of experience in clinical, teaching, research, and community health. Her work is focused on integrating primary care with community/public health needs with a focus on increasing culturally competent care and decreasing health disparities. She has experience includes providing primary health care to multigenerational-limited English speaking families, prenatal care to uninsured women, incarcerated teens, seniors, children, victims of domestic violence, and migrant seasonal farmworkers.
Her expertise includes expanding lenses for viewing language/culture and structural racism, aging and reframing familistic caregiving perspectives, inequities in the US health care system and the maldistribution of health care providers in urban and rural regions.
At UCLA, her work focuses on integrating primary care and public health; moving from local to international arenas. As founder and coordinator for the Mexico and Cuba immersion student programs, the transformative experiences provide opportunities for students to “think out of the box” for re-envisioning the US health care system, policy development and leadership. She is also the founding faculty sponsor and advisor for the SON Latino/a Nursing Students Association (LANSA), providing mentorship, support, and a safe zone underrepresented nursing students.
Areas of expertise and research:
Dr. Ruiz’s research integrates a background in nursing, gerontology, and medical sociology, with a special focus on intergenerational family caregiving, diabetes, gendered experiences/homelessness, domestic violence, and migrant seasonal farmworkers.
She is a recognized Latina health leader and received various awards, including several focused on her Spanish/culture language programs, community advocacy, research, and most recently with the Latin America Public Health Alliance (the only nurse member).
UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior & UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies | fsaleem@mednet.ucla.edu
Farzana Saleem is a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Los Angeles California with a joint appointment in the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. She completed her doctorate in the Clinical-Community Psychology program at the George Washington University and completed a Child/ Adolescent Clinical Internship, with a specialization in trauma, at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles / University of Southern California.
Farzana’s research examines the impact of racial stress and trauma on the mental health of Black and Brown children and adolescents. She uses a strengths-based lens to understand protective factors against racial discrimination, at the family and community levels, including ethnic-racial socialization. In particular, Farzana is interested in conducting research, creating programs, and developing resources focused on reducing racial stress and trauma, eradicating racial disparities in mental health, and promoting the health and well-being of marginalized and racially diverse youth, families, and communities.
UCLA Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice, & Health
Mienah Sharif takes a social justice and intersectional approach towards examining the nature and determinants of health and social inequities among racial and ethnic minority groups across the lifecourse. She is especially interested in addressing questions about the influence of structural factors, differential exposure to adverse social conditions and psychosocial factors on indicators of health and wellbeing across various life stages. She is currently extending her work on racism and discrimination to examine religious identity as a form of structural inequality via the racialization of religion. As a mixed-methods researcher, she prioritizes work that takes a translational approach including community-engaged research that aims to guide health and social policies addressing inequities.
USC Price School of Public Policy | lmtakaha@usc.edu
Lois M. Takahashi is Professor in the Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California, Director of the USC Price Sacramento Center, and President of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP). She was Interim Dean of the Luskin School at UCLA, former Associate Dean for Research at the Luskin School, former Chair of the UCLA Department of Urban Planning, and former Director of the University of California Asian American and Pacific Islander Policy Multicampus Research Program (UC AAPI Policy MRP). She received her PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Southern California in 1992, a dual MS in Public Policy and Architecture from Carnegie Mellon University in 1987, and an AB in Architecture from UC Berkeley in 1985.
Her research interests include HIV prevention for immigrant populations, access to social services for populations in need (homelessness and HIV/AIDS), the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) syndrome, and community participation and environmental governance in Southeast Asian cities. She was Principal Investigator (with John Chin, Hunter College) on a National Institutes of Health NICHD funded grant examining the massage parlor industry in Los Angeles and New York City.
The UC AAPI Policy MRP is a University of California systemwide program on Asian American and Pacific Islander policy. As past Director, Dr. Takahashi led or participated on applied research teams investigating the state of health, education, incarceration and victimization, concerning California’s Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander populations. These research teams partnered with state legislators, especially the California API Legislative Caucus, and community organizations to develop relevant and easy to understand analyses using publicly available data (e.g., US Census, American Community Survey, California Health Interview Survey – CHIS).
UCLA Fielding School of Public Health | courtneysthomas@ucla.edu
Courtney S. Thomas Tobin is an Assistant Professor of Community Health Sciences in the Fielding School of Public Health and Faculty Associate in the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. Dr. Thomas Tobin earned a PhD in Sociology from Vanderbilt University in 2015 and was a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA prior to joining the faculty in 2016. Her primary areas of interest include the psychobiology of stress and coping, racial health disparities, aging and the life course, and social stratification. Drawing on her training in medical sociology, Dr. Thomas Tobin uses mixed-method, transdisciplinary approaches to identify sources of psychosocial risk and resilience that contribute to gender and socioeconomic health disparities among African Americans. In recent research, she applies a new framework, “The Racial Self-Awareness (RSA) Framework of Race-Based Stress, Coping, and Health” to conceptualize and evaluate the ways racial minority status transforms stress and coping processes to produce distinct patterns of psychological and physiological health for African Americans.
UCLA Williams Institute | wilsonb@law.ucla.edu
Bianca D.M. Wilson is a Rabbi Barbara Zacky Senior Scholar of Public Policy of the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law. She is also an Affiliate Faculty member of the California Center for Population research at UCLA. She was previously Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at California State University, Long Beach. Her research focuses on the relationships between culture, oppression, and health, with an emphasis on racial, sexual and gender minorities. Her current empirical work examines LGBT economic instabilities and the experiences of LGBT foster youth, homeless youth, and youth in juvenile custody, with a focus on sampling, data collection, and assessing disproportionality in these systems.
Dr. Wilson earned a Ph.D. in Psychology from the Community and Prevention Research program at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) with a minor in Statistics, Methods, and Measurement, and received postdoctoral training at the UCSF Institute for Health Policy Studies and the UCSF Lesbian Health and Research Center through an Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ) postdoctoral fellowship.
In addition to several peer reviewed publications representing over twenty years of work in HIV prevention among gay and bisexual male youth, her empirical and theoretical work on health issues among marginalized women’s communities have been included in the International Handbook on Sexuality, Health, and Rights (P. Aggleton & R. Parker, Eds., 2010), the Fat Studies Reader(E. Rothblum & S. Solovay, 2009), and the Handbook of Psychology and Sexual Orientation (Patterson & D’Augelli, 2012). Further, she co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies that featured a multidisciplinary collection of work on health and other topics from the perspectives of Black Lesbians in the U.S., Caribbean, and South Africa.
UCLA Departments of Psychiartry and Behavioral Sciences | UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior
Gail Wyatt is a Clinical Psychologist, Sex Therapist and Professor at UCLA, was an NIMH Research Scientist Career Development Awardee for 17 years. Her research examines the consensual and abusive sexual relationships of women and men, the effects of these experiences on their psychological well-being and the cultural context of risks for STIs and HIV. She has conducted national and international research funded by the NIMH, NIDA, State and private funders since 1980. The recipient of numerous awards, Dr. Wyatt has numerous publications in journals and book chapters, and has co-edited or written 5 books. Dr. Wyatt is the Associate Director of the UCLA AIDS Institute and the Director of the NIMH funded, UCLA Center for Culture, Trauma and Mental Health Disparities. She also directs the Phodiso Project that trains South African investigators to conduct research in culture, trauma and mental health. She coordinates a core of behavioral scientists that consult with other researchers to recruit underserved populations, conduct research that effectively incorporates socio-cultural factors in HIV/AIDS research, and identifies the etiology of health disparities. She also directs the HIV/AIDS Translational Training Program to increase the expertise of under represented minorities who will receive funding from NIMH. Finally, she directs the Sexual Health Program at UCLA to offer sexuality education training and research to the campus, local and national communities.
SFSU BUILD Program | kwatson4@sfsu.edu
Kenjus Watson is a postdoctoral fellow with the SF BUILD Program through the National Institute of Health in the Health and Equity Lab at San Francisco State University. His research examines the biopsychosocial impact of racial microaggressions and the potential contributions of critical race pedagogies toward epigenetic healing across the educational pipeline.
UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and UC Chancelllor’s Postdoctoral Fellow | mariaelena@ucla.edu
Maria-Elena De Trinidad Young, PhD, MPH, is a research scientist who focuses on the impact of the U.S. immigration system on the health of immigrant populations. Her research examines the relationship between health inequities and factors such as citizenship and legal status and state and local policies. Her current research seeks to understand the various structural, institutional, and individual mechanisms that link policy with health outcomes.
Young is the project director of the NIH-funded Research on Immigrant Health and State Policy (RIGHTS) Study which seeks to understand the experiences of Latino and Asian immigrants in California in the areas of health care, social services, employment, education, and law enforcement and how these experiences have had an impact on their health and access to health care. She is also the Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Merced where she leads a study to examine how media coverage of immigration policy may influence immigrant well-being.
Young earned her PhD in community health sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, where she was a graduate student researcher at the Center for Health Policy Research and contributed to the Remaining Uninsured Access to Community Health Centers (REACH) Project. She received a master's degree in public health with an emphasis on maternal and child health from UC Berkeley School of Public Health and an undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.
Angie Denisse Otiniano Verissimo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Science at CSUSB. She earned her PhD and MPH at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, and completed her Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCLA funded by the National Institutes of Health. Her research examines (1) how discrimination and other social determinants of health contribute to health disparities, particularly among Latinx and (2) the health and social advantages of engaging community members in research and intervention processes, such as through the Promotor Model. She has published her research in the American Journal of Public Health and coauthored a chapter in “The Cost of Racism for People of Color: Contextualizing Experiences of Discrimination” published through the American Psychological Association. Verissimo has been involved in several community-based programs and projects that bring services directly to community members and acknowledge the expertise of community members. She aims to establish a learning environment for her students that fosters critical consciousness and is one of the co-chairs and founders of Women of Color in Academia at CSUSB.
