Qianyun Wang

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Qianyun is a third-year PhD student in Social Welfare. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Social Work from Beijing Normal University and her master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Calgary. Her extensive fieldwork and education in community development span diverse contexts, including India, Korea, the Philippines, Canada, and China. These experiences have fueled her commitment to addressing social exclusion, ageism, racism, and migratory injustice through both action and research.

Qianyun’s research focuses on the intersection of aging and immigration, with a particular interest in enhancing the well-being of older immigrants using an intersectional approach. She aims to critically examine grief and bereavement among older Chinese immigrants as part of her work.

In addition to her academic pursuits, Qianyun volunteers at the Chinatown Service Center in Los Angeles, where she assists low-income older immigrants with social services and housing issues. She is passionate about community-based research and believes in the importance of community involvement in addressing social issues.

Her research also encompasses well-being issues among migrant workers and public health challenges within sexual minority communities. She has collaborated with interdisciplinary research teams from the University of Calgary, Tsinghua University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Project-China.

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Qianyun-Wang-3

Madonna Cadiz

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Madonna Cadiz, LCSW is a Doctoral Student in Social Welfare at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. Previously, she held research positions at the Program for Torture Victims and the Suicide Prevention Center at Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services. In these roles, she contributed to quantitative and qualitative research projects aimed at evaluating client functioning and program efficacy. Her research seeks to expand knowledge on the etiology of mental illness and emotional distress among underserved populations by identifying connections among individual, meso-level, and macro-level factors that may contribute to or exacerbate such conditions. Furthermore, her work aims to center community members’ voices to better understand their own definitions and conceptualizations of mental health diagnoses and symptoms, as well as to identify potentially meaningful interventions that may promote positive mental health among individuals and communities served by social workers.

Natalie Fensterstock

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Natalie Fensterstock is a Ph.D. student in Social Welfare in the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. She holds a M.A. in Social Sciences and Comparative Education from the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies and a B.A. in English with minors in Secondary Education and Sociology from Wake Forest. Her research focuses on reducing the barriers to learning for our most vulnerable youth populations and on interventions for promoting holistic youth well-being. She is currently working on projects related to ongoing school readiness, teacher leadership and whole child education within the community schooling context, secondary trauma within schools, and developing policy solutions for addressing harm experienced by school staff and faculty during the COVID era. Prior to her time at UCLA, Natalie spent five years teaching middle and high school English and coaching new teachers in the Bay Area in California.

Domonique Henderson

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Domonique Henderson (she/her/hers) is a Compton, California native who graduated from Howard University with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology, Baylor University Garland School of Social Work with a Master of Social Work. Currently, she is a first-year doctoral student in UCLA’s Social Welfare program.

Domonique previously taught English in Spain and has traveled to various countries such as France, the United Kingdom, Greece, Germany, Mexico, in addition to some Caribbean islands. Throughout her work in the psychology and social work fields, she has gained significant experience in mental health, substance use, the prison population, children and adolescent population, LGBTQ+ populations, at-risk populations, international populations, and populations from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. During her studies at Baylor University, she interned at The Menninger Clinic which is an inpatient psychiatric hospital, worked as a Research Assistant in the SERVE research program which provided full funding for its students. As a Research Assistant, she assisted in investigating the female incarceration population, their physiological health, mental health, the impact on their families, and submitted a publication. She previously assisted in researching African caregivers and assisted with an NIH and NIAA funded study with the Choices4Health program with UT-Austin.

Domonique’s research interests are gendered racism and its implications on the mental health of Black women and girls. She is a firm believer in being a lifetime learner and enjoys opportunities to expand her knowledge. Currently, she is a part of research projects focused on Black youth civic engagement, a validation study with Casey Family Programs, experiences of ageism by youth of color, and she was awarded funding by the Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr. Social Justice Award for her study focused on the invisibility of Black girls in schools.

Along with clinical and research experience, Domonique values community. Watching mentees take tools and wisdom passed down to them as they navigate their journey as a woman is an amazing process. She genuinely enjoys guiding youth in their journey of growth. She has experience with mentoring marginalized youth and she recently founded a nonprofit organization, CRWND Incorporated, which centers mentorship and mental health for Black girls. Outside of professional and community interests, she relishes reading about/watching historical period dramas, especially about monarchs in Europe. Toni Morrison and Ta-Nehisi Coates books are some of her favorites. She also enjoys listening to R&B artists such as Stevie Wonder, Anita Baker, Toni Braxton, especially Lauryn Hill.

Vanessa Warri

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Vanessa Warri, MSW, is a community-based scholar, strategist, and advocate dedicated to advancing the health and wellbeing of Black, Indigenous, and transgender, and gender-expansive (TGE) people of color. With over a decade of experience providing direct services and education for multiple vulnerable populations — namely LGBTQ youth, foster youth, and system-involved individuals — Vanessa is committed to addressing the systemic inequities that impact these communities.

As a Ph.D. student in Social Welfare, Vanessa’s research focuses on the education-health relationship across the lifespan of transgender and gender-expansive populations of color. Her work explores how early educational disruptions—particularly those stemming from cisnormative exclusion and violence in schools—create long-term barriers to health and wellbeing. Vanessa employs a life course perspective to understand how these early experiences affect mental health, access to healthcare, and overall life outcomes from adolescence through late adulthood.Through her research, Vanessa seeks to develop nonmedical, education-based interventions that address health disparities and promote psychological wellbeing within marginalized communities. Her work critiques traditional health models for vulnerable populations by advocating for approaches that connect upstream social determinants, such as education, to downstream health outcomes.

In addition to her academic work, Vanessa is an experienced community-based researcher and consultant, providing strategic support to nonprofit and corporate organizations committed to equity and inclusion. Her work is grounded in a deep commitment to empowering marginalized communities and transforming systems of care to be more inclusive and affirming.

Currently Vanessa is working with the APA Taskforce on Violence Against Educators to analyze data regarding the safety concerns and policy recommendations of a national sample of LGBTQ school personnel. She also works with the UCLA Hub for Health Intervention, Policy, and Practice (HHIPP) to adapt an existing evidence-based intervention to improve HIV outcomes along the continuum of care for transgender women of color with lived sex work experience in Los Angeles County.

Emily M. Waters

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Emily M. Waters is an incoming Doctoral Student in the Department of Social Welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and works as a Policy and Research Advisor at the Transgender Law Center. Emily has extensive experience conducting community-based research and policy advocacy on issues related to queer and trans rights, with a particular focus on domestic, sexual, and state violence. She focuses on developing and advocating for policy solutions that move power and resources into community and challenge systemic oppression rather than reinforce the carceral state. Her work can be found in The New York Times, HuffPost, and The Advocate. 

As a Doctoral Student, Emily is interested in exploring the social and political regulation of gender-segregated services and environments (e.g., domestic violence shelters, bathrooms, or sports teams). She would like to examine the social norms, attitudes, and beliefs that uphold the perceived need for gender-segregated spaces. For example, gender essentialism and benevolent sexism which uphold the perceived need for segregation for ‘women’s’ safety. She is particularly interested in the association between these beliefs and implicit and explicit prejudice toward transgender and gender nonbinary people. Finally, she would like to explore how people from seemingly different political affiliations (e.g., conservative and feminist) find alignment in their political goal of maintaining gender-segregated spaces. 

Previously, Emily served as an Adjunct Professor at the School of Social Work at Columbia University, where she taught courses on Program Evaluation and working with LGBTQ Communities. She holds a Masters of Social Work and a Masters of Public Health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an undergraduate degree in International Relations and Human Rights from the University of Southern California.

Personal website: Emilywaters.com

Juan C. Jauregui

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Juan C. Jauregui, MSW, MPH is a PhD candidate in the Department of Social Welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. His research centers LGBTQ+ young people and explores the intersection of social processes with health outcomes. Specifically, Juan investigates the interplay between social connectedness, stigma, and mental health within LGBTQ+ communities in low- and middle-income countries.

Before entering the doctoral program at UCLA, Juan worked with the Resilience + Resistance Collective at the University of Michigan School of Public Health where he was involved in LGBTQ+ mental health and sexual health projects in the U.S., Kenya, Zambia, and the Dominican Republic. Juan’s previous professional experiences include working as a Research Associate for the UCLA Adolescent Trials Network and as a Crisis Worker for a national suicide hotline.

Throughout his doctoral training, Juan has continued to build his global health research agenda. His doctoral research has involved co-leading the launch of a national survey focused on LGBTQ+ youth mental health in both Peru and the Philippines. Juan is a recipient of the NIMHD T37 LEAD Global Training Fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis, as well as the 2023 Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship.

Juan is currently based in Lima, Peru, where he is conducting his dissertation fieldwork. His qualitative dissertation titled “Cuida Positivo: An Exploratory Study on Stigma, Mental Well-Being, and HIV Treatment Engagement Among Sexual and Gender Minority Young People Living with HIV in Peru” is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health as part of the Fogarty UCGHI GloCal Health Fellowship. He was also awarded the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, which supports his continued research with young people living with HIV in Loreto, a region of the Peruvian Amazon. These projects prioritize generating knowledge to improve community-based service provision and interventions that address the mental health and HIV care needs of these vulnerable populations.

Juan is a Mexican-American, first-generation college student. He earned his BS in Psychobiology from UCLA in 2017 and Master of Social Work and Master of Public Health from the University of Michigan in 2021.

Selected Publications:

Jauregui, J. C., Lewis, K. A., Moore, D. M., Ogunbajo, A., Odero, W., Wambaya, J., Onyango, D. P., Jadwin-Cakmak, L., Harper, G. W. (2025). “It kills the freedom or the spirit of people being who they are”: Impact of Sexuality-Based Stigma and Discrimination on the Lives of Gay and Bisexual Men in Kenya. Global Public Health, 20(1). doi: 10.1080/17441692.2025.2489713

Jauregui, J. C., Harper, G. W. (2025) LGBTQ+ Cultural Sensitivity Training for Mental Health Professionals in the United States. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 54, 1309-1315. doi: 10.1007/s10508-025-03132-3

Jauregui, J. C., Hong, C., Assaf, R. D., Cunningham, N. J., Krueger, E. A., Flynn, R., Holloway, I. W. (2024). Examining Factors Associated with Cannabis Use Among Sexual and Gender Minority (SGM) and non-SGM Emerging Adults in California. LGBT Health. doi: 10.1089/lgbt.2023.0050

León-Morris, F.D., Reyes-Diaz, E.M., Jauregui, J.C., Konda, K.A., Taylor, A.B., Jarrett, B.A., Lee, W.Y., Muñoz, G., & Nath, R. (2024). 2024 Perú national report on the mental health of LGBTQ+ young people. West Hollywood, California: The Trevor Project. Available at: https://thetrevorproject.org/survey-international/pe/2024/en/

Jadwin-Cakmak, L., Jauregui, J. C., McDowell, H., Davis, K., LaBoy, R., Johnson, G. L., Hosek, S., Harper, G. W. (2023). “They’re not feeling the love they need to feel”: HIV stigma and other intersecting stigmas among Black gay and bisexual men and transgender women in house and ball communities. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health, 28(3), 424-451. doi: 10.1080/19359705.2023.2200375

Jauregui, J. C., Mwochi, C. R., Crawford, J., Jadwin-Cakmak, L., Okoth, C., Onyango, D. P., & Harper, G. W. (2021). Experiences of violence and mental health concerns among sexual and gender minority adults in western Kenya. LGBT Health, 8(7), 494-501. doi: 10.1089/lgbt.2020.0495.

Julia Lesnick

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Julia Lesnick is a doctoral candidate in social work whose scholarship centers on youth justice and the governance of youth crime. Her research investigates how policies and practices are developed, implemented, and experienced within systems that respond to young people in contact with the law. She focuses on institutional, organizational, and fiscal reforms to youth justice systems, and examines how these policy and practice changes impact youth and public safety.

Her dissertation, “Who governs a decentralized system of youth justice? Realignment, reform, and the battle to reimagine youth justice in California,” uses an in-depth case study of state and county implementation of California’s major 2020 juvenile justice reform bill. The project examines core questions around the governance, power, ideology and logistics of closing state youth prisons, and shifting towards a local model of custody and care for young people with serious, violent convictions.

Julia’s work also explores the broader social, economic, and political forces shaping youth justice. This includes research examining innovative policy and practice interventions such as guaranteed income programs and credible messenger mentoring. Additionally, she examines youth and community organizing to build power and shape youth justice reform agendas, including leading a study of youth voice with formerly incarcerated young people.

Julia is also a practitioner and advocate for justice. After earning her MSW in 2023, Julia became a restorative justice mediator. In this role, she guides youth, families, and harmed parties through structured dialogues aimed at accountability, healing, and diverting young people from formal system involvement. Prior to UCLA Julia served as an AmeriCorps VISTA at the NYC Division of Youth and Family Justice, and taught in a prison-based college degree program during her undergraduate studies at Cornell University.