Courtney Demko

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Courtney Demko’s research focuses on caregiver health and well-being. She is particularly interested in Alzheimer’s caregivers and young adult caregiver burden. Courtney’s dissertation uses national survey data and focuses on the multidimensional factors associated with caregiver burden among young adult caregivers from the millennial population. This research is of particular importance given the increase of the older adult population in the U.S. and will demonstrate to policymakers and program planners the unique needs of an overlooked population.

Courtney has training and experience in both quantitative and qualitative methodologies and has used her research skills on several grant-funded research projects at UCLA. She is a member of the Latino Economic Security (LES) team at UCLA which researches the economic impact of a nation growing older and more diverse. Courtney served as the Project Director for the team’s latest project which included conducting focus groups and surveying older white conservative adults in Orange County, CA looking at their attitudes and beliefs towards immigration and immigration policy. She has published in peer-reviewed journals such as The Journal of the American Society on Aging and book chapters on topics related to aging and diversity.

As part of Courtney’s doctoral training, she has also acquired management and administrative experience as the Assistant Director for the Center for Policy Research on Aging at UCLA’s Department of Social Welfare and Public Policy. Courtney’s expertise includes writing grants for leading foundations.

Courtney also has several years of teaching experience. She has assisted in teaching both master’s and undergraduate courses at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs Department of Social Welfare. These include classes in Social Work Research Methods, Social Work Policy and Diversity and Aging. She’s also served as a Guest Lecturer at UCLA’s Department of Social Welfare including topics on Caregiving and Public Policy. Prior to entering the doctoral program, Courtney acquired training leading support groups and providing one-on-one counseling with homeless women at the Downtown Women’s Center on Skid Row in Los Angeles. She also gained experience providing care consultations and co-facilitating support groups for early-stage Alzheimer’s patients and their family caregivers at the Alzheimer’s Association in Los Angeles.

Courtney earned her B.A. in Political Science from Davidson College (2005), and an M.S.W from UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, Department of Social Welfare with a specialization in Gerontology (2013).

SELECTED BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS

The Politics of Aging in a Majority-Minority Nation and Later-Life Social Support and Service Provision in Diverse and Vulnerable Populations.

Lia W. Marshall

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Lia W. Marshall’s research focuses on older adult well-being. She is particularly interested in understanding prolonged independence and ability to age in place by investigating the interconnections between social isolation, mobility, and the built environment. Lia’s mixed methods dissertation, situated at the nexus of social welfare, gerontology and urban planning, seeks to understand the mobility experiences of socially isolated older adult women. This research is an important step in guiding policymakers to effectively allocate resources to enable aging in place and to enhance the lives of older women.

While Lia has training in both quantitative and qualitative research methods, she is particularly skilled in employing qualitative methodologies. In collaboration with faculty in both UCLA’s Urban Planning and Social Welfare Departments, she has served as a graduate research assistant for several projects, including “Disrupting Aging & Building Livable Communities: Los Angeles”, and with The Los Angeles Community Academic Partnership for Research in Aging (L.A. CAPRA). Lia has presented her work at conferences across academic disciplines, and has taught and guest lectured with both master’s students and undergraduates. Lia’s interests in social welfare, gerontology and urban planning inspired her to develop and teach the course entitled: “Environmentally Sustainable Aging: Diversity, Resilience, and Health” as a teaching fellow at UCLA.

In addition to teaching, Ms. Marshall continues her community engagement work with the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust as a Steering Committee member for Golden Age Park, the first intergenerational park in Los Angeles, and as the Service Learning Coordinator for the UCLA undergraduate gerontology cluster. Lia received a Masters of Social Work from California State University, Los Angeles and a Bachelors of Arts in Psychology from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Skye Allmang

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Skye Allmang is a fifth-year PhD student in the Department of Social Welfare at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She holds a Master of Public Policy from Brandeis University and a Master of Social Welfare from UCLA. Prior to starting the PhD program, Skye worked as a project coordinator for a job-training program at a nonprofit in Southern California. Her research interests center around youth employment issues, with a particular interest in addressing barriers to employment, such as mental health issues and juvenile justice system involvement. She is currently a Hilton Scholar at the WORLD Policy Analysis Center, and is working on a research project that compares legislative protections for employer-provided job-training across 193 countries. Her dissertation is on the association between precarious employment and long-term health outcomes for young adults in the United States.

Donte Boyd

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Donte Boyd is currently a third-year Ph.D. a student in the Department of Social Welfare at the University of California, Los Angeles.  Before entering the program Donte Boyd received his Masters in Social Work (MSW) from Washington University in Saint Louis. In entering the Ph.D. program at UCLA, Donte has received the Eugene V. Cota Robles fellowship for four years, which is awarded to exceptional applicants who also advance the Regents’ goals for diversification of the academy. As a continuing graduate student at UCLA in the Department of Social Welfare, he received two Summer Graduate Research Mentorship (6,000$) awards in academic years of 2015-16, and 2016-17.  His research examines the social context of Black adolescents, more specifically, in how the family and school context impacts HIV prevention. His research examines how the role of the family (e.g parent/sibling support, communication e.g.) and other important persons in Black males adolescents lives predict HIV prevention (HIV testing, condoms etc.).  Secondly, he’s interested in how the school context of Black male adolescents impacts sexual health behaviors including HIV testing. More specifically, how does racial discrimination, sense of belonging, and school safety impact HIV testing and knowledge in this context. Overall, my research utilizes an ecological approach to understand how family and school experiences, and contextual factors interact with one another to shape positive Health behaviors and HIV prevention.

Martin Gilens

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Martin Gilens is a Professor of Public Policy, Political Science, and Social Welfare at UCLA. His research examines representation, public opinion, and mass media, especially in relation to inequality and public policy. Professor Gilens is the author of Affluence & Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America, and Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy, and coauthor (with Benjamin I. Page) of Democracy in America?: What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do about It. He has published widely on political inequality, mass media, race, gender, and welfare politics. He earned a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and the Russell Sage Foundation. Professor Gilens is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and taught at Yale and Princeton universities before joining the Luskin School at UCLA in 2018. 

Click here for more information about Professor Gilens and his work.

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Ayako Miyashita Ochoa

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Ayako Miyashita Ochoa is an Adjunct Professor at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, Department of Social Welfare.  She serves as Co-Director of Luskin’s new Center, UCLA Hub for Health Intervention, Policy and Practice (UCLA HHIPP).  UCLA HHIPP’s mission is to co-create research that informs policy and practice and addresses intersecting oppressions in order to improve community health. As Co-Director for the Southern California HIV/AIDS Policy Research Center (SCHPRC), Professor Miyashita collaborates on interdisciplinary research with community and academic partners to bring 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, viral hepatitis, sexually transmitted infections and overdose.  Her research interests focus on HIV and other related health disparities at the intersection of race/ethnicity, sexual and gender identity, and migrant status.

In addition to serving as a faculty representative to the LGBTQ Affairs Committee at UCLA, Professor Miyashita is Co-Director of the Policy Impact Core for UCLA Center for HIV Identification, Prevention and Treatment Services (CHIPTS) as well as a Faculty Affiliate of UCLA California Center for Population Research (CCPR). Her teaching includes courses at UCLA Luskin, including LGBTQ Health, Law and Public Policy, Education and the Law, and Social Welfare Law and Ethics—a newly designed course.

Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA Luskin, 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. As the HIV Law and Policy Fellow at the Williams Institute in 2013-2015, her research included studies on HIV criminalization, unmet legal needs of PLWH in addition to issues related to HIV privacy and confidentiality.

In her legal practice, Professor Miyashita provided direct legal services to low-income clients living with HIV in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles counties. This included assisting clients in obtaining disability benefits and other supports necessary to live independently. Her legal expertise runs a broad spectrum of public benefits including income support, health coverage, and other support services necessary for individuals living with disabilities. Professor Miyashita regularly provides training and education to clients, advocates, health and social service providers, and legislative and policymaking bodies.

Professor Miyashita earned her Juris Doctor from U.C. Berkeley School of Law and was admitted to the State Bar of California in 2009.

Latoya Small

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Latoya Small’s scholarship is informed by her work in clinical social work practice and community-based research.

Her research focuses on health disparities, specifically, the intersection of mental health, treatment adherence, and HIV among women and children in the U.S. and Sub-Saharan Africa. Her global research addresses the urgent need for theory-driven, empirically-informed, and sustainable psychosocial HIV treatment approaches for youth living with perinatally acquired HIV in South Africa.

In the U.S., Dr. Small examines how poverty-related stress, parenting, and mental health interact and relatedly impact adherence in HIV medical services among Black and Latina women in urban communities. An extension of her work includes mental health and discrimination facing transgender women of color.

Dr. Small takes a collaborative approach in her scholarship, recognizing that traditional intra-disciplinary boundaries can impede the development of effective and sustainable research interventions. Her work aims to produce accessible, evidence-informed interventions that bolster youth development and women’s health.

Khush Cooper

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Khush Cooper, MSW, PhD. is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs as well as a consultant to public child welfare systems and private child welfare organizations in the areas of foster care reform, LGBTQ youth in systems, implementation science, and leadership. Dr. Cooper teaches Child Welfare Research, Leadership, Public Policy for Children and Youth, and Macro Practice at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA and is a foster care subject matter advisor to the UCLA Williams Institute, a nationally renowned LGBT research and policy analysis center. She received her MSW (2000) and PhD (2010) in Social Work from Luskin.

 

Her research projects include the California Residentially-Based Services (RBS) Demonstration Project which tested new models for the provision of residential treatment to foster children across four jurisdictions, which models influenced AB 403 Continuum of Care Reform – the largest overhaul of California’s child welfare system in 30 years; the RISE Project, a $13 million, federally-funded 5-year demonstration project which developed evidence-based practices and a rigorously evaluated training curriculum aimed at reducing barriers to permanency for LGBTQ youth in foster care; the Los Angeles Foster Youth Study, the first empirical study to determine the disproportionality of LGBTQ youth in a large urban child welfare system; and the LA LGBTQ Youth Preparedness Scan which used a preparedness framework (as opposed to a cultural competence framework) to analyze the eleven youth-relevant Los Angeles County departments’ capacity to properly serve LGBTQ children, youth and families.

 

Additionally, as a social entrepreneur and specialist in the study and implementation science, Dr. Cooper has cultivated long-standing relationships with policymakers, leading practitioners, and consumers to shield and guide California’s child welfare organizations, both public and private, through reform initiatives. Her credibility in the child welfare field is further enhanced by her years of direct practice experience in foster care, residential treatment and community adolescent service settings. She has deployed performance management systems for large multi-site child welfare and mental health provision organizations; designed practical implementation support and readiness initiatives with regard to state and federal legislative mandates (such as the Title IV-E Waiver Demonstration Project and the Families First Prevention Services Act; and currently is an adjunct member of the Implementation Collaborative within Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago as well as CQI subject matter expert utilized widely by Casey Family Programs.

 

Michael Fleming

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Michael Fleming is the Executive Director of the David Bohnett Foundation – a grant making foundation charged with “improving society through social activism”. Since 2000, he has shepherded more than $125 million dollars to organizations and institutions that share the foundation’s goals and vision.

Michael has been appointed to boards and commissions at every level of government.  In 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom named him as one of his two appointees to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission, a Joint Powers Authority between the City of Los Angeles, the County of Los Angeles, and the State of California. From 2018 to 2022, he was a member of the Board of Directors of the Getty House Foundation, dedicated to civic education, community engagement, and the preservation of Getty House, the official residence of the Mayor of Los Angeles.

From 2013 to 2017, Michael served on the Los Angeles Board of Water and Power Commissioners – the five member panel that oversees the nation’s largest public utility. He previously served as the President of the East Los Angeles Area Planning Commission and as a Commissioner on the Board of the Los Angeles Convention Center. In 2010, President Barack Obama named Fleming to the White House Council for Community Solutions.

Michael sits on the boards of numerous non-profit organizations including The Carr Center at Harvard Kennedy School, The University of Limerick’s Kemmy School, and public radio powerhouse KCRW, where he served as Chairman of the Board and Co-Chair of their capital campaign.  Since 2003, he’s been an adjunct professor of organizational development and public policy at UCLA, a member of the LGBTQ Studies Faculty Advisory Committee, and, in 2023 was awarded the Student’s Choice Outstanding Faculty Award at UCLA’s 25th annual Lavender Graduation.  From 2013 to 2016 Michael was also an adjunct professor of public policy at NYU.

Michael is married to California Court of Appeal Justice Luis A. Lavin.

 

Michael is currently teaching:

  • Politics, Power, and Philanthropy (Public Policy M227, Social Welfare M290S, Urban Planning M287) – Winter
  • Institutions & Organizations (LGBTQ Studies 180XP) – Spring

Monica Blauner

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Monica Blauner, LCSW is a graduate of Smith College School for Social Work 1979, and earned a certificate in psychoanalysis from the New York Freudian Society Psychoanalytic Training Institute. She is currently in private practice in Los Angeles, and has worked at all levels of care in mental health and substance abuse treatment. She has led an Integrative Seminar for Smith College School for Social Work students placed in Los Angeles and taught at The Psychoanalytic Training Institute of the New York Counseling Center and Metropolitan Institute for Training in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. She is dedicated to teaching foundational clinical skills, including client engagement, understanding unconscious process and using the therapeutic relationship.