Randall Akee, PhD
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.
Amani M. Allen, PhD, MPH
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.
Bita Amani, PhD, MHS
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.
Ndidiamaka Amutah-Onukagha, PhD, MPH
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.
Sharrelle Barber, ScD, MPH
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.
Hiram Beltrán-Sánchez, PhD
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.
Philippe Bourgois, PhD
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.
P. Paul Chandanabhumma, PhD, MPH
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.
Laura C. Chávez-Moreno, PhD
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.
Mekeila Cook, PhD, MPH
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.
Chandra Ford, PHD, MPH, MLIS
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.
Jennifer Garcia, PhD, MPH
LMU Psychology Applied Research Center | jennifer.garcia@lmu.edu
Jennifer García is a public health scholar-activist committed to fighting for health equity. She received her training in Public Health from the University of California, Los Angeles (PhD) and the University of Michigan (MPH), and in Psychology from San Diego State University (BA). Her research and teaching focus on the social determinants and contextual factors that create urban inequality and contribute to health inequities. Specifically, her areas of interest include Critical Race Theory, residential segregation, and access to resources in communities of color. García has taught courses on health behavior theory, multicultural health, interracial dynamics, and Community-Based Participatory Research, and mentored underrepresented students pursuing careers in the health sciences. Currently, García is a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Psychology Applied Research Center at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where she conducts community-based evaluation research aimed at improving the health and well-being of communities of color.
Gilbert Gee, PhD
UCLA Fielding School of Public Health | gilgee@ucla.edu
Gilbert C. Gee is a Professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA. He received his bachelor degree in neuroscience from Oberlin College, his doctorate in Health Policy and Management from the Johns Hopkins University, and post-doctoral training in sociology from Indiana University. His research focuses on the social determinants of health inequities of racial, ethnic, and immigrant minority populations using a multi-level and life course perspective. A primary line of his research focuses on conceptualizing and measuring racism discrimination, and in understanding how discrimination may be related to illness. He has also published more broadly on the topics of stress, neighborhoods, environmental exposures, occupational health, and on Asian American populations. Current projects include: the study of discrimination, racial identity and obesity among emigrants from the Philippines; the relationship between student loans and illness; toxic exposures among Asian American participants in NHANES.
His research has been honored with a group Merit Award from the National Institutes of Health for the development of a multicultural measures of discrimination for health surveys. In addition, he received two Scientific and Technical Achievement Awards from the Environmental Protection Agency for development of the Stress-Exposure-Disease Framework.
Gee was recently appointed to a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine committee on Informing the Selection of Leading Health Indicators for Healthy People 2030.
Nina T. Harawa, PhD, MPH
Charles Drew University College of Medicine | ninaharawa@cdrewu.edu
Nina Harawa is an Associate Professor with the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science and adjunct faculty at UCLA. She received her both her Masters (1995) and PhD (2001) in Epidemiology from UCLA. She has partnered with several local organizations to conduct innovative community-based research in a variety of populations. In an effort to foster methodologically sound and effective approaches to addressing health disparities, Harawa has also written about conceptual issues in the categorization and analysis of racial and ethnic groups in public health research. She regularly shares her knowledge and findings by presenting data to community, policy, and academic groups. In addition, she launched the Breaking the Silence events, a series of one-day conferences and trainings designed to educate and empower women of color and their providers in order to improve sexual health. Harawa was awarded the Center for Health Justice’s Pioneer Award in 2007 and the NAACP’s Unsung Hero Award in 2011.
Rachel Hardeman, PhD, MPH
University of Minnesota School of Public Health | hard0222@umn.edu
Rachel R. Hardeman is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Health Policy & Management, University of Minnesota, School of Public Health. She is a health equity researcher whose research applies the tools of health services research and policy, population health and critical race theory to health equity to examine, understand and intervene on structural racism’s contemporary influence on health at the (1) clinician, (2) health care delivery and (3) sociopolitical levels. Hardeman has a particular interest in eliminating the persistent racial inequities in maternal and infant health outcomes. Published in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine and the American Journal of Public Health, Hardeman’s work towards this end has elicited important conversations on the topics of culturally-focused care, police brutality and structural racism. Her overarching goal is to contribute to a body of knowledge that links structural racism to health in a tangible way, identifies opportunities for intervention, and dismantles the systems, structures, and institutions that allow inequities to persist.
MarySue V. Heilemann, PhD, RN, FAAN
UCLA School of Nursing | mheilema@sonnet.ucla.edu
MarySue V. Heilemann is an associate professor at the UCLA School of Nursing and an Associate Director of the UCLA National Clinician Scholars Program. She is an expert in Grounded Theory methodology informed by Constructivism and Pragmatism; she has mentored and collaborated with graduate students, post doctoral scholars, and young faculty in qualitative research at UCLA and internationally. Fueled by qualitative input from participants, and in collaboration with community partners, Dr. Heilemann integrates issues of motivation, resilience, intergenerational cultural expectations, social justice, and gender issues in her work. Based on her three-fold area of expertise (media-based interventions, methodologically-driven qualitative research, and mental health), Dr. Heilemann is actively refining a new model for nursing science that features transmedia portrayals of nurses as part of powerful and promising interventions with patients, the public, and nursing professionals. Her focus has been on symptom management, motivation to seek help and engage in mental health care, and the enhancement of resilience among Latinas in the U.S.
Heilemann has pioneered the use of transmedia in health interventions related to mental health. Transmedia involves the use of storytelling over multiple digital platforms accessible on smart phones, tablets, or computers via the Internet. Heilemann’s current work involves transmedia interventions to enhance symptom management among Latina adults in the U.S. who are struggling with depression and/or anxiety. Her scholarly work has also focused on improving the accuracy of portrayals of nurses in film and television. She was chosen to give the June 2015 National Institute of Nursing Research Director’s Lecture entitled, “From the Silver Screen to the Web: Media Portrayals of Nursing,” and frequently speaks or consults on the topic.
Recently, Heilemann was an official delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (UN CSW) where she spoke on a panel at an official UN Parallel event “Women/Girls and Media: Power, Storyteling and #Me Too.”
Ian W. Holloway, PhD, LCSW, MPH
UCLA Department of Social Welfare | holloway@luskin.ucla.edu
Ian W. Holloway is a licensed clinical social worker and an associate professor of social welfare in the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. Professor Holloway’s applied behavioral health research examines the contextual factors that contribute to heath disparities among sexual and gender minority populations. He is an expert in social network analysis and is particularly interested in how social media and new technologies can be harnessed for health promotion and disease prevention. Holloway has been a principal investigator on research studies funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the Department of Defense, and the California HIV/AIDS Research Program (CHRP). He currently directs 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/AIDS.
Marjorie Kagawa-Singer, PhD
UCLA Fielding School of Public Health | mkagawa@ucla.edu
Professor Emeritus Kagawa Singer concluded a twenty-five year career of research and teaching Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Island Studies and Public Health at UCLA in July 2015. Shortly afterwards, she was recalled by UCLA to serve as a Research Professor, Director of Equity, Diversity and Inclusions, and Chair of the Dean's Ad Hoc Diversity Committee for the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. In October 2016 she was asked to serve as 2016-17 Interim Director of the Asian American Studies Center.
Kagawa Singer has been a longtime leader of the Asian American Studies Center’s work as a member of its Faculty Advisory Committee. As Senior Editor for the AAPI Nexus Journal from 2007 to 2012, she worked tirelessly to dismantle the barrier separating the academy and larger community and to promote policy and applied research on AANHPIs across the nation. As director of the concurrent degree between Community Health Sciences and Asian American Studies, she nurtured generations of students who have become academic, professional, and community leaders.
Her research expands the traditional behavioral research paradigm to include cultural differences in the incidence and experience of cancer and other chronic diseases and to build the capacity of communities to reduce the unnecessary burden of disease in their communities through direct services and policy advocacy.
Jonathan Kahn, JD, PhD
Mitchell Hamline School of Law | jonathan.kahn@mitchellhamline.edu
Jonathan Kahn writes on issues in history, politics, and law and specializes in biotechnology’s implications for our ideas of identity, rights, and citizenship, with a particular focus on race and justice. He teaches in areas of constitutional law, torts, health law, and bioethics.
Professor Kahn received two grants from the National Human Genome Research Institute’s (NHGRI) Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) Research Program to support projects exploring the ethical and legal ramifications of the increasing use of racial and ethnic categories in the context of gene patenting and drug development. Professor Kahn is an internationally recognized expert on this topic.
Most recently, he received a three year grant from the National Library of Medicine to support the writing of his newest book, Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age (Columbia University Press, 2013), which was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2013 Best Book Award, by the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.
Cleopatra Abdou Kamperveen, PhD
USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work | cabdou@usc.edu
Kamperveen investigates the interplay of sociocultural and psychobiological determinants of health and well-being. Her interdisciplinary research highlights cultural and psychosocial resources that promote flourishing and buffer stress. She examines how these effects are reflected in the body and behavior to improve mental and physical health during critical lifespan developmental phases, including pregnancy, early childhood, and later life, thereby reducing ethnic and socioeconomic health disparities.
Dr. Kamperveen coined the term healthcare stereotype threat (HCST) and was the first to causally link healthcare stereotype threat to adverse healthcare outcomes among women, including healthcare-related anxiety. Dr. Kamperveen has also shown that, across genders and ethnic groups, healthcare stereotype threat is related to poorer mental and physical health, distrust of physicians, lower preventive care use, and lower ratings of healthcare received.
Terence Keel, PhD
UCLA Department of African Studies & UCLA Institute for Society & Genetics | tdkeel@ucla.edu
Terence Keel is an author and professor interested in transformative pedagogy and social justice. He is a trained historian of science and scholar of religion who earned a PhD from Harvard University. Keel has written widely about the history of racism and its connections to science, religion, law, and public health. Keel's first book Divine Variations, published by Stanford University Press, draws out the connections between Christian intellectual history and the modern scientific study of human bio-diversity in Europe and America. Keel has come to UCLA as an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, and the Department of African American Studies. He previously taught at UC Santa Barbara where he served a Vice Chair to the Department of History and was the first Black Studies Professor to receive the Harold J. Plous Award- the highest honor given to a junior faculty member in recognition for his scholarship and teaching. Dr. Keel is also a senior advisor to the Goldin Institute: a Chicago based non-profit organization that advocates globally for grassroots leadership, conflict resolution, poverty alleviation and environmental sustainability.
Kara Keeling, PhD
University of Chicago Department of Cinema and Media Studies | kkeeling@uchicago.edu
Kara Keeling is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Keeling's research has focused on African American film, theories of race, sexuality, and gender in cinema, critical theory, and cultural studies. Current research involves issues of temporality, media and black and queer cultural politics; digital media, globalization, and difference; and Gilles Deleuze and liberation theory. Keeling's book, The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007), explores the role of cinematic images in the construction and maintenance of hegemonic conceptions of the world and interrogates the complex relationships between cinematic visibility, minority politics, and the labor required to create and maintain alternative organizations of social life. She is co-editor (with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) of a selection of writings by the late James A. Snead entitled European Pedigrees/ African Contagions: Racist Traces and Other Writing and author of several articles that have appeared in the journals Qui Parle, The Black Scholar, Women and Performance, and elsewhere. Prior to joining the faculty at UChicago, Keeling was Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California, an assistant professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), an adjunct assistant Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University, and a visiting assistant professor of Art and Africana Studies at Williams College. At UNC, she was a Spray-Randleigh Fellow and a Fellow at the Institute for Arts and Humanities. She also held a Carolina Postdoctoral Fellowship for two years after graduating with a PhD in Critical and Cultural Studies from the University of Pittsburgh's Film Studies Program in the Department of English. In the summer of 2005, Keeling participated in the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on African Cinema in Dakar, Senegal. Keeling currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies and is the Editor of the Moving Image Review section of Gay and Lesbian Quarterly (GLQ).
Jasleen Kohli, JD
UCLA School of Law | kohli@law.ucla.edu
Jasleen Kohli is the Director of the Critical Race Studies Program at UCLA School of Law. Kohli has practiced in the areas of civil rights, labor law, and policy development, and her work revolves around integrating Critical Race Theory principles into practice. Prior to joining UCLA Law, Kohli served as policy analyst for the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), a leading advocacy organization dedicated to promoting sustainable economic development. Prior to her position at LAANE, Kohli was the first in-house counsel at UNITE HERE Local 11, the union representing hotel and food service workers.
Kohli received her J.D. from Harvard Law School and her B.A. from UC Berkeley with Highest Honors in English Literature, with an emphasis in postcolonial theory. While at Harvard Law, she served as a student attorney at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, representing low-income clients in family law matters, and co-directed and produced a highly regarded documentary on issues of race and legal pedagogy entitled Legally Black and Brown and Yellow and Red.
Rachel C. Lee, PhD
UCLA Institute of Society and Genetics | rlee@humnet.ucla.edu
Rachel C. Lee is Professor of English, Gender’s Studies, and the Institute of Society and Genetics at UCLA as well as the Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women (CSW). Founder of the Life (Un)Ltd project at the CSW, she now heads a research project on "Chemical Entanglements: Gender and Toxic Exposures," which maps the way in which women have been enrolled, both as scientists and nonscientists, in chemical experiments since WWII and aims to increase the chemical literacy of scholars in gender/sexuality studies. She is the author of The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality and Posthuman Ecologies (2014) winner of the 2016 Best Book in Culture Studies Award from the Association of Asian American Studies.
Nancy López, PhD
University of New Mexico Department of Sociology | nlopez@unm.edu
López directs and co-founded the Institute for the Study of "Race" and Social Justice, RWJF Center for Health Policy (race.unm.edu) and she is the founding coordinator of the New Mexico Statewide Race, Gender, Class Data Policy Consortium. López's scholarship, teaching, and service are guided by the insights of intersectionality --the importance of examining race, gender, class, ethnicity together--for interrogating inequalities across a variety of social outcomes, including education, health, employment, housing, and developing contextualized solutions that advance social justice. Another project involves examining interdisciplinary ontologies of race via a critical race theory content analysis of official documents of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Census, scholarly associations and the Supreme Court as sites of racial formation; she cautions that current proposals to combine two analytically distinct concepts, Hispanic origin and race, into one question for the 2020 Census may undermine civil rights monitoring and enforcement for vulnerable visible minorities.
Vickie M. Mays, PhD
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.
Ayako Miyashita Ochoa, JD
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
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.
Kimberly Narain, MD, PhD, MPH
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.
Keith C. Norris, MD, PhD, FACP, FASN
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.
Osagie K. Obasogie JD, PhD
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.
Aaron Panofsky, PhD
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.
Maria Elena Ruiz, PhD, RN, FNP-BC
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).
Farzana Saleem, PhD
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.
Mienah Sharif, PhD, MPH
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.
Kia Skrine Jeffers, PhD, RN, PHN
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.
Jaime Slaughter-Acey, PhD, MPH
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.
Daniel Solorzano, PhD
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.
Lois M. Takahashi, PhD
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).
Courtney Thomas Tobin, PhD
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.
Bianca Wilson, PhD
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.
Gail Wyatt, PhD
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.
Kenjus T. Watson, PhD
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.
Maria-Elena De Trinidad Young, PhD, MPH
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, Ph.D., M.P.H.
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.