Hector Palencia

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Mr. Palencia graduated with a B.A. in English and a Religious Studies minor from the University of California, Irvine. From there he was granted an M.A. in Systematic Theology (with honors) from Berkley’s Graduate Theological Union, with another Masters degree in Social Welfare from U.C.L.A.

Mr. Palencia put his graduate studies to work in the field of gang resistance diversion programs, Mr. Palencia has numerous professional qualifications in addition he has presented on Social Welfare and Gangs, Criminalization of Homelessness, Working with Trauma in Youth, and Gang Round Table Discussions.

Mr. Palencia’s work history demonstrates a compassion borne out of his spiritual endeavors and a capacity for working with marginalized young offenders. He comes to UCLA from El Rancho unified where he served as one of the mental health liaison’s responsible for district wide mental health services which included coordinating services with partnering agencies as well as responding to crisis and working specifically with tier three students. For 4 years, he was with the East Whittier City School District overseeing middle school diversion programs, created partnerships with community agencies to meet needs not being addressed for students, and he became successful in writing numerous grants including the Safe Schools/Healthy Students grant initiative. In his career, he has worked in hospice and as drug and alcohol counselor handling at-risk youth case loads.

 

 

Leyla Karimli

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Dr. Leyla Karimli’s interdisciplinary applied research critically examines the impact of poverty reduction interventions on the psychosocial wellbeing of vulnerable children and families in Sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia, highlighting the often-neglected significance of local social structures and revealing the multifaceted nature of poverty. Dr. Karimli uses multilevel longitudinal experimental and quasi-experimental studies to examine complex links between the economic dimensions of poverty, social norms, social support mechanisms, and psycho-social outcomes in order to inform programs and policies to address child poverty and deprivation in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia.

Dr. Karimli received her PhD from Columbia University’s School of Social Work with a concentration in social policy and social welfare. She completed her postdoctoral training at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration and New York University’s Silver School of Social Work’s McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research. Prior to her academic career, Dr. Karimli actively contributed to community-based empowerment and poverty reduction initiatives by working within development agencies in the former Soviet Union and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Dr. Karimli is a faculty affiliate at Luskin’s Global Public Affairs, the Global Lab for Research in Action, the International Center on Child Health and Asset Development (ICHAD), and UCLA’s California Center for Population Research (CCPR).

 Connect with her on X (formerly Twitter)

For full list of publications please visit her page at ResearchGate or Google Scholar

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Karimli, L., Ssewamala, F. M., & Neilands, T.B. (2023) The impact of poverty-reduction intervention on child mental health mediated by family relations: Findings from a cluster-randomized trial in Uganda. Social Science & Medicine, 332, 116102

Karimli L., Nabunya, P., Ssewamala, F.M., & Dvalishvili, D. (2023) Combining asset accumulation and multi-family group intervention to improve mental health for adolescent girls: A cluster-randomized trial in Uganda. Journal of Adolescent Health (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2023.08.012)

Gómez, A., Karimli, L., Holguinc, M., Chung, P., Szilagyi, P., & Schickedanz, A. (2022) Bills, babies, and (language) barriers: Associations between economic strain and parenting outcomes among parents of infants in low-income households. Family Relations, 71, 352-370

Karimli, L., Lecoutere, E., Wells, C. R. & Ismayilova, L. (2021) More assets, more decision-making power? Mediation model in a cluster-randomized controlled trial evaluating the effect of the graduation program on women’s empowerment in Burkina Faso. World Development, 137, 105159

Karimli, L., Bose, B., & Kagotho, N. (2020) Integrated graduation program and its effect on women and household economic well-being: Findings from a randomized controlled trial in Burkina Faso. Journal of Development Studies, 56(7), 1277-1294

Ismayilova, L. & Karimli, L. (2020) Harsh parenting and violence against children: a trial with ultra-poor families in Francophone West Africa. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, 49(1), 18-35

Karimli, L., Shephard, D.D., McKay M. M., Batista, T., & Allmang, S. (2020) Effect of non-formal experiential education on personal agency of adolescent girls in Tajikistan: findings from a randomized experimental study. Global Social Welfare. 7(2), 141-154

Salecker, L.M., Ahmadov, A., & Karimli, L. (2020) Contrasting monetary and multidimensional poverty measures in a low-income Sub-Saharan African country. Social Indicators Research, 151(2), 547-574

Karimli, L., Ssewamala, F. M.., Neilands, T.B., Wells, C. R., & Bermudez, L. (2019) Poverty, economic strengthening, and mental health among AIDS orphaned children in Uganda: mediation model in a randomized clinical trial. Social Science & Medicine, 228, 17-24

Karimli L., Rost L., Ismayilova L. (2018). Integrating economic strengthening and family coaching to reduce work-related health hazards among children of poor households: Burkina Faso. Journal of Adolescent Health, Special Issue, Global Perspectives on Economic Strengthening, 62(1):S6–S14.

Ismayilova, L., Karimli, L., Sanson, J., Gaveras, E., Nanema, R., Tô-Camier, A., & Chaffin, J. (2018) Improving child mental health in ultra-poor families: Two-year outcomes of a cluster-randomized trial in Burkina Faso. Social Science & Medicine, 208, 180-189

Ismayilova, L., Karimli, L., Gaveras, E., Tô-Camier, A., Sanson, J., Chaffin, J. & Nanema, R. (2018) An integrated approach to increasing women’s empowerment and reducing domestic violence: Results of a cluster-randomized controlled trial in a West African country. Psychology of Violence, 8(4), 448-459.

Lovato-Hermann, K., Lopez, C., Karimli, L., & Abrams, L. (2018) The impact of deportation-related family separations on the well-being of Latino/a children and youth: a review of the literature. Children and Youth Services Review, 95, 109-116

Ssewamala, F. M., Karimli, L., Neilands, T. B., Wang, J. S. H., Han, C. K., Ilic, V., & Nabunya, P. (2016) Applying a family-level economic strengthening intervention to improve education and health-related outcomes of school-going AIDS-orphaned children: Lessons from a randomized experiment in Southern Uganda. Prevention Science, 17(1), 134-143

Karimli, L., Samman, E., Rost, L., & Kidder, T. (2016) Factors and Norms Influencing Unpaid Care Work: Household survey evidence from five rural communities in Colombia, Ethiopia, The Philippines, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Oxford, UK: Oxfam, Women’s Economic Empowerment and Care.

 

Darin Christensen

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Darin Christensen is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He received his Ph.D. in political science and M.A. in economics from Stanford University.

Darin studies political economy, focusing on institutions and policies that promote investment and mitigate social conflict in developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. He has consulted on projects for The Asia Foundation, USAID, and The World Bank.

Darin is a co-founder of the Project on Resources and Governance (PRG) and an affiliate of several academic centers, including the California Center for Population Research, Center for Effective Global Action, Evidence in Governance and Politics, and UCLA’s African Studies Center.

More information about his research and teaching can be found at darinchristensen.com.

Jim Newton

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Jim Newton is a veteran journalist, author and teacher. In 25 years at the Los Angeles Times, Newton worked as a reporter, editor, bureau chief, columnist and, from 2007 through 2010, editor of the editorial pages.

He is the recipient of numerous national and local awards in journalism and participated in two staff efforts, coverage of the 1992 riots and the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, that were awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In 2022, he was chosen by the American Political Science Association for the Carey McWilliams Award, which honors a journalist or organization each year for intellectual forthrightness and political independence in memory of a California lawyer who became an influential political leader, author and editor.

Before joining the Los Angeles Times, he was a reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and he began his career as the 1985-86 clerk to New York Times columnist James Reston. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College.

He came to UCLA full-time in early 2015 to teach in Communication Studies and Public Policy and to found Blueprint, a new UCLA magazine (blueprint.ucla.edu) addressing the policy challenges facing California and Los Angeles in particular. He serves as the magazine’s editor-in-chief.

Newton also is a respected author of four important, best-selling and critically acclaimed works of history: Man of Tomorrow: The Relentless Life of Jerry Brown (Little, Brown and Company, 2020); Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made (Riverhead, 2006); Eisenhower: The White House Years (Doubleday, 2011); and Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace (Penguin Press, 2014), a collaboration with former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. He recently signed with Random House to produce a book on Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead and the San Francisco counterculture of the 1960s. It’s tentatively slated for publication in 2025.

Ananya Roy

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Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography and The Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the founding Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA, which advances research and scholarship concerned with displacement and dispossession in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the world. Working in alliance with social movements and community organizations, the Institute seeks to build power and abolish structures of inequality. Previously she was on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received her Master’s in City Planning (1994) and Ph.D. in Urban Planning (1999). There she was the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest teaching recognition that the University of California, Berkeley bestows on its faculty.  In 2011, Ananya received the Excellence in Achievement award of the Cal Alumni Association, a lifetime achievement award which recognizes her contributions to the University of California and public sphere.

Ananya is a scholar of global racial capitalism and postcolonial development whose research is concerned with the political economy and politics of dispossession and displacement. With theoretical commitments to postcolonial studies, Black studies, and feminist theory, she seeks to shift conceptual frameworks and methodologies in urban studies to take account of the colonial-racial logics that structure space and place. As a researcher, Ananya strives to advance research justice, by which she means accountability to communities directly impacted by state-organized violence. At the very heart of her work is an insistence on the transformation of the public university – through teaching, public scholarship, and community engagement – so that it can be a force for social justice.

Ananya’s books have focused on urban transformations and land grabs in the global South as well as on global capital and predatory financialization. They include City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty; Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, South, Asia, and Latin America; Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global; Territories of Poverty: Rethinking North and South; and Encountering Poverty: Thinking and Acting in an Unequal World. Ananya is the recipient of several awards including the Paul Davidoff book award, which recognizes scholarship that advances social justice, for Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development. Ananya has also played a key role in leading the call for “new geographies of theory,” critiquing the EuroAmerican parochialism of urban studies and demonstrating the capacious concepts that can be generated by thinking from the intellectual traditions of the global South.

Ananya leads a National Science Foundation Research Coordination Network on Housing Justice in Unequal Cities, which creates a field of inquiry into housing justice shared by university-based and movement-based scholars. Along with colleagues at UCLA, Ananya has recently led a Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on Sanctuary Spaces: Reworlding Humanism, which is concerned with the place of racial others in liberal democracy. Situating transnational inquiry and solidarity at the present moment of resurgent white nationalism and xenophobia, her work on sanctuary challenges Western humanism and foregrounds alternative frameworks of freedom and justice. Ananya was Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research from 2016 to 2020. She is the 2020 Freedom Scholar, an award bestowed by the Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Foundation to social justice leaders.

Her current research is concerned with racial banishment, the expulsion of working-class communities of color from cities through racialized policing and other forms of dispossession. Such work is reflected in her scholarship on property, personhood, and police, which studies policing as a race-making project, as well as in her role as convener of the After Echo Park Lake research collective, which studies displacement in Los Angeles. For Ananya, the horizon of abolition is at stake in such scholarship. This is in turn involves “undoing property,” including the transformation of the policed-propertied order that is the elite university.

Website: https://challengeinequality.luskin.ucla.edu/ananya-roy/

Zev Yaroslavsky

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During a career in public life spanning nearly four decades, Zev Yaroslavsky has been at the forefront of Los Angeles County’s biggest issues, including transportation, the environment, health care, and cultural arts.  He has been a pioneering advocate for the region’s homeless population and has played a key role in efforts to reform the county’s law enforcement agencies.

Mr. Yaroslavsky was first elected to office in 1975, stunning the political establishment by winning the Los Angeles City Council’s coveted 5th District seat at the age of 26.  He honed his fiscal skills as chairman of the Council’s Finance Committee and earned a reputation for being unafraid to tackle controversial issues, including the Los Angeles Police Department’s use of excessive force and its improper spying on law-abiding residents.  He authored two landmark ballot initiatives, one which cut in half the size of new commercial developments near residential neighborhoods in the City of L.A., and the other which banned oil drilling along the city’s coastline.

In describing Mr. Yaroslavsky’s City Hall tenure, the Los Angeles Times wrote that he “was more often than not a dominant player in virtually every municipal initiative of note since he joined the City Council.”

In 1994, Mr. Yaroslavsky was elected to the five-member Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, representing the western part of the county and a constituency of two million people.  He served five terms as the Board’s Third District representative.  Because of term limits, he retired from office on December 1, 2014.  Supervisor Yaroslavsky’s award-winning website, which ran from late 2009 until the end of his term, including blog entries and feature stories on County issues, programs and personalities, can be accessed here.

As a member of the Board of Supervisors, Mr. Yaroslavsky quickly emerged as a leader on fiscal, health care, transportation, cultural and environmental matters.  He authored several landmark ballot initiatives:  the 1996 park bond, which resulted in the preservation of a broad swath of rural open space and the development of urban parks throughout the county, and the 2002 trauma tax, approved by more than 73% of county voters—a measure credited with saving two public hospitals from closure and keeping the county’s emergency services intact.

Mr. Yaroslavsky was the driving force behind several major transit projects, including the hugely successful Orange Line busway across the San Fernando Valley, the Exposition Light Rail line from downtown to Santa Monica which will be completed at the end of 2015, and the subway—Purple Line—extension from Western Ave. to West Los Angeles which broke ground in 2014.

After the closure of Martin Luther King, Jr. hospital in south Los Angeles, Mr. Yaroslavsky proposed a partnership between the University of California and Los Angeles County upon which the recently re-opened hospital was modeled.  Mr. Yaroslavsky also launched the building of three innovative school-based health clinics in largely working-class neighborhoods where many residents are living below the poverty line and rarely seek medical attention.  He also led the effort to provide permanent supportive housing for thousands of homeless persons who’ve been identified as most likely to die if they remained on county streets.

During his public service career, Mr. Yaroslavsky was the county’s leader in the cultural arts.  The Los Angeles Times said of him before he retired, “It would be hard to find another major politician anywhere in the entire country with Yaroslavsky’s record for outright arts support and achievement.” He championed efforts to rebuild and modernize the world famous Hollywood Bowl amphitheater and was instrumental in the development of architect Frank Gehry’s iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall, home of the L.A. Philharmonic Orchestra.  He has also funded major investments in the County Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History and the San Fernando Valley Performing Arts Center.

Mr. Yaroslavsky is also credited with playing a leading role in the sweeping reforms of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.  He is responsible for the creation of the Citizen’s Commission on Jail Violence in 2011 which recommended dozens of measures to restore constitutional policing and integrity to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and its jails.

Apart from his responsibilities as an elected official, Mr. Yaroslavsky has long been associated with the National Democratic Institute (NDI), a non-governmental organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., that promotes the development of democratic institutions in burgeoning democracies.  He has monitored five elections for NDI:  Romania (1990), Mexico (2000), Ukraine (2004), and Nigeria (2011 & 2015).  He has conducted seminars on local government finance and democratic institution-building in Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and Bosnia/Herzegovina.

Mr. Yaroslavsky is now the Director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and the Department of History, focusing on the intersection of policy, politics and history of the Los Angeles region.

Mr. Yaroslavsky was born and raised in Los Angeles and earned an M.A. in British Imperial History and a B.A. in Economics and History, both from UCLA.  He is a graduate of Fairfax High School in Los Angeles.

Michael Lens

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Michael Lens is Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy, and Associate Faculty Director of the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. Professor Lens’s research and teaching explore the potential of public policy to address housing market inequities that lead to negative outcomes for low-income families and communities of color. This research involves housing interventions such as subsidies, tenant protections, and production. Professor Lens regularly publishes this work in leading academic journals and his research has won awards from the Journal of the American Planning Association and Housing Policy Debate.

In ongoing research, Professor Lens is studying the neighborhood context of eviction, the role of charter schools in neighborhood change, and is engaged in multiple projects (with Mike Manville and Paavo Monkkonen) concerning housing supply in California. Lens is also working on a book project that examines fifty years of neighborhood change in Black neighborhoods following the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

Professor Lens’s research has received funding from the MacArthur Foundation, the Arnold Foundation, and the Terner Center for Housing Innovation, among other sources.

Professor Lens teaches courses on quantitative analysis, poverty and inequality, community development, housing policy, and research methods.

For an appointment, please send an email.

 

SELECTED BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS

It’s Time to End Single-Family Zoning
Journal of the American Planning Association (Forthcoming)
With Michael Manville and Paavo Monkkonen
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Extremely Low-Income Households, Housing Affordability and the Great Recession
Urban Studies 55(8): 1615-1635
Download file

Spatial Job Search, Residential Job Accessibility, and Employment Outcomes for Returning Parolees
Demography 54: 755-800
With Naomi Sugie
Download file

Employment Proximity and Outcomes for Moving to Opportunity Families
Journal of Urban Affairs 39(3): 547-562
With C.J. Gabbe
Download file

Job Accessibility Among Housing Subsidy Recipients
Housing Policy Debate 24(4): 671-691
Best Paper of 2013-14, Housing Policy Debate
Download file

The Impact of Housing Vouchers on Crime in U.S. Cities and Suburbs
Urban Studies 51(6): 1274-1289
Download file 

The Limits of Housing Investment as a Revitalization Tool: Crime in New York City
Journal of the American Planning Association 79(3): 211-221
Best Article of 2014, Journal of the American Planning Association
Download file

Safe, but Could be Safer: Why do Voucher Households Live in Higher Crime Neighborhoods?
Cityscape 15(3): 131-152
Download file

Subsidized Housing and Crime: Theory, Mechanisms, and Evidence
Journal of Planning Literature 28(4): 352-363
Download file

American Murder Mystery Revisited: Do Housing Voucher Households  Cause Crime?
Housing Policy Debate, 22(4): 551-574
Download file

Do Vouchers Help Low-Income Households Live in Safer Neighborhoods? Evidence on the Housing Choice Voucher Program (with Ingrid Gould Ellen and Katherine O’Regan)
2011, Cityscape, 13(3): 135-159
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Kimberly Ling Murtaugh

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Kimberly Ling Murtaugh is a lecturer in Public Policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

She received her Ph.D. and M.Sc. from Carnegie Mellon University in organizational behavior and theory with a special focus on behavioral economics, judgment and decision-making, and her B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in the biological basis of behavior with minors in psychology and Spanish. She also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Family Medicine at UCLA, Center for Behavioral and Addiction Medicine.

Dr. Ling Murtaugh’s current research focuses on the use of behavioral economic principles to evoke health behavior change in addiction medicine.

She recently worked with a team creating UN guidelines for methamphetamine use and HIV/AIDS risk worldwide. She has worked in strategy management consulting as well as serving as the Chief Strategy Officer for the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress, a national network of researchers and practitioners that develop best practices for treating child trauma.

She is also a founding board member of The Ling Family Foundation.