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Overview

Our Mission

The UC Davis Center for Poverty & Inequality Research mission is to facilitate non-partisan academic research on poverty in the U.S., disseminate this research, and train the next generation of poverty scholars. Our research agenda includes four themed areas of focus: labor markets and poverty, children and intergenerational transmission of poverty, the non-traditional safety net, and immigration.

In the News

Article Erin R. Hamilton

Book Chronicles Life Trapped in Mexico after Returning Home
Article about affiliate Erin Hamilton in the UC Davis Letters & Science Magazine

May 6, 2025
Letters and Science Magazine
By Alex Russell

Rocío’s story of moving back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico isn’t like any you’ve heard before. It began when her daughter, 15 at the time, ran away with a man who took her from Mexico City to the U.S.

Article Amanda Guyer Jonathan London

How Research Funding Solves Real-World Problems
CPIR Affiliates Amanda Guyer and Jonathan London featured in UC Davis article on the importance of federal research investments at UC Davis

UC Davis is a powerhouse for breakthroughs and impact. Our interdisciplinary research plays a vital role in building the region’s economy. Our research contributes to our nation’s global leadership in technology and innovation. Through collaboration between our top-ranked hospital and veterinary school, as well as our science and engineering discoveries, our research directly improves American lives.

Current Research

Article J. Paul Leigh

New Paper from CPIR Affiliate J. Paul Leigh
Review of Economics of the Household
February 14, 2025

Estimating minimum wage effects on alcohol abuse and wages with alternative likely affected samples and models

New Infographic Summarizing Preliminary Results from the UC Davis research team that is evaluating the Yolo County Basic Income
Featuring work by CPIR Affiliates Catherine Brinkley, Daniel Choe and Rose Kagawa

In 2022, Yolo County Health and Human Services Agency(HHSA) launched the Yolo County Basic Income (YOBI)project and engaged the UC Davis Center for Regional Change to evaluate the project via the collection of survey data from YOBI participants. The YOBI project was designed to address the county’s poverty, which is ~25%higher than the California rate reported in the 2021 Census.

Article J. Paul Leigh

New Paper from CPIR Affiliate J. Paul Leigh
American Journal of Public Health
May 2023

COVID-19 May Have Been Job Related for One Fourth of Diagnosed Adults

We catch COVID-19 from each other. The fewer people we encounter,
the safer we will be. Our desire for fewer encounters was especially apparent in employment arrangements during the first two and a half years
of the pandemic. Most workers whom employers allowed to work from home did so; most whose employers did not allow this reported to their workplaces.

Article J. Paul Leigh

Estimating Effects of Wages on Smoking Prevalence Using Labor Unions as Instrumental Variables
New article by J. Paul Leigh

Objectives: To test for the effects of wages on smoking using labor unions as instrumental variables. Methods: We analyzed four waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (2013 to 2019 alternate years). The overall sample included workers aged 18 to 70 years in 2013 and subsamples within blue clerical/white-collar and private/public sector jobs (N = 37,117 to 8446 person years). We used two instrumental variables: worker’s union membership and states’ right-to-work laws.

Meet the Researchers

Profile

Brittany Chambers
Assistant Professor of Human Development & Family Studies

Dr. Brittany Chambers is a community health scientist dedicated to advancing sexual and reproductive health equity among Black, Indigenous, and Other People Of Color’s (BIPOC). She merges critical and public health theories to partner with BIPOC women and birthing people and organizations to better understand, operationalize and dismantle racism.

Profile

Kristen M George
Assistant Professor of Epidemiology

Dr. Kristen George is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine. She received her BA in Political Science with minors in Public Health and Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. She received her MPH and PhD in Epidemiology with a minor in Biostatistics from the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on lifecourse vascular contributions to dementia and cognitive aging with a particular interest in race and sex disparities.

Profile

Lenna Ontai
Professor of Cooperative Extension

Lenna Ontai is a Professor of Cooperative Extension whose work focuses on the development of children’s health-related behaviors in the family context. Her current work is focused on understanding how families navigate barriers to facilitating children’s adoption of healthy lifestyle behaviors in early development. She actively translates and disseminates research in this area to inform UC Cooperative Extension programs that serve families living with limited incomes.

Profile

Peter James
Associate Professor of Public Health Sciences

Trained in environmental health and epidemiology, Dr. James has focused his research on estimating the influence of spatial factors, including exposure to nature, the built environment, the food environment, air pollution, light pollution, noise, and socioeconomic factors, on health behaviors, mental health, aging, and chronic disease within large prospective cohort studies. He has developed methodologies link smartphone-based global positioning systems (GPS) and wearable device accelerometry data to understand how spatial factors influence health behaviors.

Profile

Ariana Jeanette Valle
Assistant Professor of Sociology

Dr. Valle is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. She is a scholar of migration, race and ethnicity, and political sociology focusing on the experiences of Latina/os in the United States.

Profile

Dulce Westberg
Assistant Professor of Psychology

Dr. Dulce Westberg is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis. Her research examines how individuals from racially and ethnically minoritized groups navigate social structures, and how these structures shape personality and identity development. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative methods, she explores life narratives related to race, ethnicity, gender, and social class to understand their links to psychosocial adjustment. 

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Faculty Spotlight: Noli Brazil
Associate Professor and Vice Chair in the Department of Human Ecology (Community and Regional Development Program); faculty affiliate in the Community Development, Geography, Public Health, and Sociology Graduate Groups.

Interests

I study neighborhood inequality in US cities. Why are some neighborhoods more disadvantaged than others? What are the consequences of neighborhood disadvantage for health and well-being? What are the causes and consequences of moving to a more-advantaged neighborhood?

I have a specific interest in understanding these issues as they relate to adolescents and young adults, with a particular focus on the ways in which schools and neighborhoods interact to impact poverty and inequality.

Profile

Courtney Lyles
Director of the UC Davis Center for Healthcare Research and Policy

Courtney Lyles, PhD, is the Director of the UC Davis Center for Healthcare Research and Policy (CHPR) and the Arline Miller Rolkin Endowed Professor in Informatics. With over 15 years in academia, Dr. Lyles has wide-ranging research experience in health equity, digital health, and translational methods into real-world practice and policy.

Profile

Miriam Nuño
Professor of Biostatistics

Dr. Nuño is interested in the application of statistics and applied mathematical to solve public health challenges, reduce health disparities, and improve patient health outcomes. Her expertise lies at the interface of biostatistics, mathematical modeling, epidemiology, and public health. She is an author of more than 130 peer-reviewed publications and her areas of expertise include statistical methods for multivariable and clustered longitudinal study design, observational studies, and big data analytics.

Profile

Tina Law
Assistant Professor of Sociology

Tina Law is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. She studies inequality, race and ethnicity, democracy, AI, and computational methodology. She uses computational and quantitative methods to understand the social and political experiences of racially minoritized and low-income Americans, particularly how they define and advance their goals for housing, safety, and political self-determination in cities that are often highly unequal. She also develops approaches for using AI and natural language processing to analyze text and image data.

Profile

Joss Greene
Assistant Professor of Sociology

Dr. Joss Greene is a qualitative researcher who studies gender, punishment, labor, and social change.  He has researched transgender people’s experiences with prisons, reentry, work, and community care.  He has also written several papers about parole boards.

Profile

Dani Sandler
U.S. Census Bureau’s Center for Economic Studies

Dani Sandler is a principal economist at the U.S. Census Bureau’s Center for Economic Studies, where she leads research efforts, supports collaborative projects, and develops statistical products. With over a decade of experience at the Census Bureau, Dani has held various roles, including FSRDC administrator and research economist. She currently facilitates partnerships between the U.S. Census Bureau, Princeton’s Evictions Lab, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

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Faculty Spotlight: Kevin Gee
Professor in the School of Education and Director of the School Policy, Research, and Action Center

Interests

I’m interested in understanding how structural adversities impact the educational achievement and wellbeing of marginalized children. I also focus on how school policies, practices, and programs can support the wellbeing of vulnerable youth populations, including children in the foster care system and those facing schooling-related challenges like chronic absenteeism and bullying.

Faculty Spotlight: Jacob Hibel
Associate Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Center for Poverty and Inequality Research

Interests

I am primarily interested in the connections between schooling and social inequality. In addition to the Department of Sociology, I am also on the faculty of the Graduate Group in Education.

Faculty Spotlight: Erin Hamilton
Professor of Sociology

Interests

Migration and health.

Poverty and Inequality Research

A major question that motivates Erin’s research is how inequality is generated and/or changed through migration and the policies that regulate migration. Erin has studied:

Faculty Spotlight: Daniel Ewon Choe
Associate Professor of Human Development & Family Studies within the Department of Human Ecology

Interests

Children’s development of self-regulation and behavior problems, how they relate to parents’ mental health and parenting, and their contributions to mental illness in childhood and adolescence.

Profile

Briana Ballis
Assistant Professor of Economics, University of California-Merced

Briana Ballis is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California-Merced. Her research interests are in labor economics. Much of her work focuses on studying the determinants of inequality in education. Through her work, she seeks to better understand how individuals’ educational investment decisions are shaped by their environments and backgrounds, and, in particular how policies or programs that impact vulnerable youth can sere to reduce (or exacerbate) pre-existing gaps in later life.

Profile

Katheryn Russ
Professor of Economics

Katheryn Russ has expertise in open-economy macroeconomics and international trade policy. She is a faculty research associate in the National Bureau of Economic Research International Trade and Investment Group and Co-Organizer of the International Trade and Macroeconomics Working Group. She is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and served as Senior Economist for International Trade and Finance for the White House Council of Economic Advisors 2015-16.

(530) 752-9241
Profile

Robert Faris
Professor of Sociology

Robert Faris uses social network analysis to investigate how health risk behaviors, including bullying, dating violence, substance use, and delinquency, spread through social ties and are structured in the  social hierarchies of schools. His recent work shows that adolescents bully their own friends, as well as schoolmates with whom they share friends, to achieve higher social status, and examines the moderating role of network stability in this dynamic. 

Profile

Rose Kagawa
Associate Professor, Department of Emergency Medicine

Rose Kagawa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine. Dr. Kagawa conducts research on violence prevention and firearm policy and has particular interest in understanding how social and environmental contexts influence violence perpetration and victimization through the life course.

Upcoming Events

Event 2203 SS&H Andrews Conference Room

Sophie McGuinness
Assistant Professor of Education Policy at Florida State University