Jacob Hibel received his degree in Sociology and Demography from
Pennsylvania State University in 2009. His research focuses on
the causes and consequences of childhood educational
inequalities, including those related to poverty, disability,
race/ethnicity, immigrant generation status, and spatial
segregation.
Marianne Page is a Professor of Economics and
Co-Director of the Center for Poverty & Inequality Research
at UC Davis. She has authored numerous scholarly articles
focusing on low-income families. A labor economist, she is
an expert on intergenerational mobility and equality of
opportunity in the United States. She has also published on
issues related to the U.S.
1138 Social Sciences & Humanities Building
Davis, CA
Professor Beatty is a Professor in the Department of Agricultural
and Resource Economics at the University of California,
Davis. His research relates to the empirical analysis of
consumption behavior, in particular as it relates to health
outcomes. Professor Beatty’s research has tended to focus on food
consumption and the demand for nutrition and health, at both the
household and aggregate levels.
Marianne Bitler is a Professor in the Department of Economics at
the University of California, Davis; a Research Associate at the
National Bureau of Economic Research; and a Research Fellow at
IZA. She received her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in 1998. Her research focuses on the effects of the US
social safety net on poverty, income, human capital, and health;
economics of the family; economics of education; and health
economics.
Dr. Guyer’s research focuses on the behavioral and neural
mechanisms that may underlie the way that adolescents think and
feel. One overarching question throughout her research is how
does attentional focus modulate the brain circuitry involved in
emotional responding?
Erin Hamilton received her degree in Sociology from the
University of Texas, Austin in 2009. Her current research
investigates the social and demographic sources of international
migration from Mexico to the United States.
2244 Social Sciences and Humanities Building
Davis, CA
Cassandra Hart is a professor of education policy. She evaluates
the effects of school, state and national education programs,
policies, and practices on overall student achievement, and on
the equality of student outcomes. Hart’s recent work has
focused on school choice programs, school accountability
policies, early childhood education policies, and effects on
students of exposure to demographically similar teachers.
She is also interested in the effects of virtual schooling on
student outcomes, both in K-12 and post-secondary settings.
Camelia Hostinar is a developmental psychologist who studies how
the social environment shapes child and adolescent health,
with a focus on the activity of the stress-response and immune
systems. She is probing the pathways linking poverty to
later risk for disease and investigating protective
psychosocial processes such as supportive
relationships that could help reduce this risk.
CMB Office: 202 Cousteau Place, Room 254
Young Hall Office: One Shields Ave., Room 174F
Dr. Ko looks at how policy, healthcare, and our social structure
are interconnected, and their impacts on disadvantaged
communities. She has conducted research on a variety of topics,
including the healthcare safety net, Medicaid, long-term care,
access to healthcare for minority populations, diversity in
medical education, and the healthcare workforce.
Michal Kurlaender’s work focuses on education policy and
evaluation, particularly practices that address existing
racial/ethnic and socioeconomic inequality at various stages of
the educational attainment process.
Abramsky is a Lecturer in the University Writing Program at UC
Davis. Much of his work over the past decade has centered on
America’s criminal justice system, and he also writes on
political goings-on and cultural trends.
Dr. Au’s research involves the assessment of dietary intakes and
the food environment for the prevention of obesity in low-income,
racially diverse infants and children. Her focus is on
understanding how to promote healthier eating and prevent obesity
in federal nutrition assistance programs, such as the Special
Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children
and the National School Lunch Program.
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.
Noli Brazil received his doctorate in Demography from the
University of California Berkeley in 2013, and is an Assistant
Professor in the Department of Human Ecology. His research and
teaching interests focus on the causes and consequences of
neighborhood inequality. Current research projects include
examining the interactions between neighborhoods and schools,
understanding the determinants of residential mobility and
attainment during young adulthood, and Hispanic US internal
migration.
Catherine Brinkley is a Professor of Human Ecology and Director
of the Center for Regional Change at UC Davis. With a PhD in city
and regional planning, a veterinary medical degree, and a masters
in virology, her research focuses on health and design; urban
planning; legacies of urban policy with regard to race and
income; and the long-term impacts of food, energy and water
infrastructure siting decisions.
A. Colin Cameron received his degree in Economics from Stanford
University in 1988. His research specialty is econometric theory
for cross-section data, especially count data, and applications
to labor economics and health economics data.
1124 Social Sciences & Humanities Building
Davis, CA
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.
Dr. Choe received his doctoral degree in Psychology with a
developmental emphasis from the University of Michigan in 2012.
His research examines the development of self-regulation,
executive functions, and conduct problems throughout childhood,
as well as family stressors, such as harsh parenting and maternal
depression, that contribute to the intergenerational transmission
of antisocial behavior, mental illness, and poverty.
Carolyn Dewa, M.P.H., Ph.D. joined faculty for the UC Davis
Department of Psychiatry in Fall 2015 and is the Director for the
Outcomes and Evaluations Core of the Behavioral Health Center of
Excellence at UC Davis.
Katherine Eriksson is a specialist in applied microeconomics
whose interests encompass economic history, labor economics, and
development economics. She is a member of the UC Davis Graduate
Placement Committee (2015–16). She is a member of the American
Economic Association, the Cliometric Society, and the Economic
History Association.
Dr. Falbe’s research focuses on studying programmatic, policy,
and environmental interventions to prevent chronic disease and
reduce health disparities. Dr. Falbe led an evaluation of the
nation’s first soda tax in Berkeley, California. Her research has
also examined primary care nutrition and physical activity
interventions for youth, healthy retail programs, and
multi-sector community interventions to prevent obesity. Dr.
Falbe received a dual doctorate in Nutrition and Epidemiology in
2013 from Harvard University.
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.
Dr. Kevin Gee is a Professor in the School of Education
(School Organization & Educational Policy emphasis area) and
Director of the School Policy, Research,
and Action (SPARC) Center. He is also a Faculty Research
Affiliate with the Center for Poverty & Inequality Research.
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.
Gail Goodman received her degree in Developmental Psychology from
UCLA in 1977. Her areas of research expertise include welfare
recipients, foster care, and the intergenerational transmission
of attachment insecurity.
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.
Drew Halfmann’s research and teaching focuses on the politics of
health and social policy, with an emphasis on the role of
political institutions. His first book was on the
politics of abortion in the United States, Britain and
Canada. His next book will examine the African-American
struggle for health equality from Reconstruction to Obamacare.
Paul Hastings received his degree from the University of Toronto.
His research focuses on the impact of stressors on child and
adolescent well-being, and the effects of poverty on
physiological reactivity, regulation and development of mental
and physical health problems.
Dr. Hernández’s research program investigates Latino/a/x
children’s emotional, social, and academic development with a
focus on relevant cultural and ethnic-racial processes in the
school context. Dr. Hernández employs various applied
longitudinal measurement and analytical methods to test
individual differences and developmental trajectories from
childhood to adolescence.
Dr. Leah Hibel is a Professor in the Department of Human Ecology.
She received her degree in Biobehavioral Health from Penn State
University in 2009. Dr. Hibel’s research focuses on maternal and
child health particularly in the context of family stress.
Dr. Hoch’s experience is in health services research related to
cancer, mental health, and other health issues affecting poor and
vulnerable populations. He is an award winning teacher who has
taught Health Economics and Economic Evaluation classes in the
United States and internationally. Dr Hoch pursues research
making health economics more useful to decision makers.
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.
Kevin Johnson received his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1983.
His research interests include immigration law and policy,
refugee law, civil rights, and the Critical Race and Latina/o
theories.
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.
Nicole Kravitz-Wirtz is a sociologist and epidemiologist and
Assistant Professor with the Violence Prevention Research Program
in the Department of Emergency Medicine. Her research focuses
broadly on the social and policy determinants, consequences, and
prevention of violence and related health outcomes over the life
course and across generations, with a particular emphasis on
inequities by race-ethnicity and neighborhood context.
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.
Hannah Laqueur is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Emergency Medicine and core faculty in the Violence Prevention
Research Program (VPRP) and UC Center for Firearm Violence
Research (UCFC). She holds a Ph.D. from Berkeley Law’s
doctoral program in Jurisprudence & Social Policy, a Master’s
degree in Biostatistics from UC Berkeley, and a Master’s in
Public Policy & Administration from Columbia University. Her
research includes work on gun violence, drug policy, and risk
assessment and decision making in the criminal justice system.
J. Paul Leigh received his degree in Economics from the
University of Wisconsin, Madison. His fields of expertise are
health and labor economics as well as econometrics.
Jonathan K. London received his degree in Environmental Science
Policy and Management from UC Berkeley in 2011. His research
addresses conflicts and collaboration in natural resource and
environmental issues, specifically on marginalized rural
communities and environmental justice issues in the Sierra Nevada
and the Central Valley.
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.
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.
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.
Mike Palazzolo received his degree in Marketing from the
University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business in 2016. His
research examines various intertemporal trade-offs, ranging from
consumer search to financial decision making.
Giovanni Peri received his degree in Economics from UC Berkeley
in 1998. His research focuses on the determinants of
international migrations and their impact on labor markets,
productivity, and investments.
1140 Social Sciences & Humanities Building
Davis, CA
Lisa Pruitt’s areas of research include legal and policy
implications of income inequality along the rural-urban continuum
and legal aspects of declining mobility, with an emphasis on
diminishing access to higher education.
Richard W. Robins is a Professor in the Department of Psychology
at the University of California, Davis. His research
focuses on risk and resilience processes in Mexican-origin
families, with an emphasis on mental health problems, antisocial
behavior, family stress processes, self-esteem, and personality
development. For the past 10 years, he has served as
Director of the California Families
Project, an ongoing 15-year longitudinal study of 674
Mexican-origin families.
Gloria M. Rodriguez (Ph.D., Stanford University) is an Associate
Professor at the University of California, Davis School of
Education. Her research focuses on educational leadership and
resource allocation from a critical, social justice perspective.
She presently serves as the principal investigator for the
Leadership for Real Impact (LRI) Project, which employs a
case-study approach to investigate the intersections of
leadership and resource allocation practices that support the
academic success and well-being of low-income students of color
in K-12 and Community College settings.
Heather Rose studies the effects of school finance systems,
accountability programs, and governance structures on the
distribution of school resources, student outcomes and
achievement gaps.
