Susan Lares-Nakaoka

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Dr. Susan Lares-Nakaoka is the Director of Field Education in the Department of Social Welfare in the Luskin School of Public Affairs.  As a third generation Japanese American/Chicana, her family’s World War II incarceration informs her teaching, scholarship and commitment to racial justice. She credits her UCLA undergraduate internship in a gang diversion program at Nickerson Gardens in Watts for sparking her career in social work.

Dr. Lares-Nakaoka’s research and writing focuses on the intersection of race and community development, critical race pedagogy and Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. She is lead author on a forthcoming book, “Critical Race Theory in Social Work,” and editor of an upcoming special issue of the Journal of Community Practice on race and social justice entitled, “Necessary Interventions: “Racing” Community Practice.”

As a critical race scholar, Dr. Lares-Nakaoka is co-founder and co-director of the Critical Race Scholars in Social Work (CRSSW) collective. CRSSW, a network of over 300 individuals, advances race scholarship in social work through a schedule of regular events and a bi-annual conference focusing on applying critical race theory within social work research, writing, education and practice.

Dr. Lares-Nakaoka spent over 12 years providing social services and program development for low-income residents across the country, including positions with the Housing Authority, City of Los Angeles, Asian Americans Advancing Justice and Venice Community Housing. Her experiences as Director of Field Education at CSU Dominguez Hills, the first MSW program with a critical race theory perspective, was foundational to her approach to social work pedagogy. Prior to coming to UCLA, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaii, CSU Sacramento and CSU Long Beach.

Academic mentors/advisors

Dr. Melvin Oliver, Yuji Ichioka, Dr. Harry H.L. Kitano, Dr. Mitchell T. Maki, Dr. Daniel Solorzano, and Dr. Lois Takahashi. Special gratitude goes to her beloved doctoral advisor, Dr. Leobardo Estrada.

Selected Community-based Research Projects

Photovoice project on the impacts of transit-oriented development in Little Tokyo

Case Studies of community development organizations: Little Tokyo Service Center (Los Angeles), Chinatown Community Development Center (San Francisco) , InterIm Community Development Association (Seattle) and Hoʻokuaʻāina (Kailua, HI)

Oral histories of Japanese American women activists, descendants of the Sacramento River Delta, and World War II Nisei Cadet Nurses.

Recent Publications

Nakaoka, S., Aldana, A. and Ortiz, L. (2023). “Dismantling Whiteness in Ways of Knowing.” In Social Work, White Supremacy, and Racial Justice. Oxford University Press.

 

Aldana, A., Nakaoka, S., Vazquez, N. and Ortiz, L. (2023). “Fifteen Years of Critical Race Theory in Social Work Education: What We’ve Learned.”  In Social Work, White Supremacy, and Racial Justice. Oxford University Press.

 

Ortiz, L. and Nakaoka, S. (2023). Critical Race Theory in Social Work.  Social Work Encyclopedia. Oxford Research Encyclopedias.

 

Maglalang, D.D., Sangalang, C.C., Mitchell, F.M., Lechuga-Peña, S., & Nakaoka, S.J. (2021). “The Movement for Ethnic Studies: A Tool of Resistance and Self-Determination for Social Work Education.” Journal of Social Work Education.

 

Nakaoka, S., Ka‘opua, L., and Ono, M. (2019). “He Ala Kuikui Lima Kanaka: The Journey Towards Indigenizing a School of Social Work.” Intersectionalities: A Global Journal of Social Work Analysis, Research, Polity, and Practice. 7 (1).

 

Agres, B., Dillard, A., Enos, K., Kakesako, B., Kekauoha, B., Nakaoka, S. and Umemoto, K. (2019). “Sustaining University-Community Partnerships in Indigenous Communities: Five Lessons from Papakōlea.”  AAPI Nexus. 16 (1&2).

 

Nakaoka, S., Ortiz, L. and Garcia, Betty.  (2019). “Intentionally Weaving Critical Race Theory in an MSW Program at a Hispanic Serving Institution.”   Urban Social Work.

Tatiana Londoño

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Dr. Tatiana Londoño is a first-generation Latina born in Colombia and raised in Miami, Florida. Dr. Londoño graduated from Vassar College with a B.A. in Neuroscience and Behavior and from The University of Texas at Austin with an M.S.S.W. and then her Ph.D. Throughout her career, she has received funding from various sources such as OLLI NOVA Diversity Scholarship, St. David’s Foundation, Integrated Behavioral Health Scholars Program, and QuestBridge.

Tatiana Londoño’s scholarship focuses on the mental health and psychosocial wellbeing of Latine/x immigrant youth and their families, with an emphasis on the experiences and impact of migration. Specifically, her work explores how Latine/x immigrant youth and families navigate and adapt to the psychosocial consequences of migration and resettlement. She is particularly interested in how these experiences contribute to various outcomes, such as distress and post-traumatic growth, and how family processes can mitigate some of these outcomes. Her long-term goal is to incorporate her research into brief preventative interventions accessible to Latine/x immigrant populations in the U.S. Her work is published in Family Process, The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, Health Psychology, Journal of Adolescent Research, Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal, and Social Work in Mental Health. She has also published policy and research briefs with the Children’s Defense Fund and the Center on Immigration and Child Welfare.

Dr. Londoño is currently involved in several National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded studies concerning the mental health and psychosocial well-being of Latine/x youth and their families. She is using a mixed-method approach to explore the effects of migration and immigration detention on asylum-seeking children and families from Central America. Specifically, she is analyzing 1) migration trauma exposure and mental health outcomes among immigrant youth; 2) how migration shapes parent-child relationships; and 3) different trajectories of wellbeing among youth in the U.S. resettlement context and environmental contexts (e.g., neighborhood, school, immigration enforcement) that contribute to these trajectories. In addition to this project, she is currently investigating the cultural adaptation and implementation of a parenting intervention that integrates experiences of immigration-related challenges, discrimination, and biculturalism.

Dr. Londoño’s previous research projects include: (1) exploring why adolescent Latinas attempt suicide more than other females;  (2) examining the effects of immigration enforcement on U.S. citizen children of undocumented Mexican parents; (3) investigating service experiences of youth transitioning from child to adult mental health systems; (4) studying depression and suicidality among Mexican-American children and youth; and (5) assessing smoking dependence among Spanish-speaking Latine/x smokers.

Dr. Londoño also engages in needs assessment and evaluation research related to the communities she serves. She led the analysis of a campus-wide survey on assessing the needs of undocumented students at UT Austin and, with the Rooted Collective Task Force, drafted a proposal in support of a center for undocumented students. Dr. Londoño is also evaluating the Mental Health Collaborative at Girasol, a program that serves Texas immigrant children and families and educates service providers working with immigrant populations.

In the community, Dr. Londoño has worked in various settings such as schools, domestic violence agencies, and integrated behavioral health primary care clinics providing counseling, psychoeducation, and case management services to mostly Spanish-speaking families who experienced immigration-related trauma. Tatiana continues to volunteer her time to support immigrant families in detention with their credible fear interviews and orient asylum-seeking families at immigrant resource centers. She is currently the lead consultant on a project with New Mexico State University creating a trauma-informed training series for service providers working with Latine/x immigrant populations. This work is funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Professor Londoño teaches the following courses: 211A: Human Behavior in Social Environment.

You can follow Dr. Londoño on Twitter: @TatianaL924

Wesley Yin

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Wesley “Wes” Yin is a Professor of Economics at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, and the Anderson School of Management. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Faculty Affiliate at the Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT.

Yin’s research focuses on health care, consumer finance, and economic inequality. His recent work studies competition and market power in health care, and the links between health care financing and consumer financial health and well-being.

His work has been published in leading economics and policy outlets such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review, the Review of Economics and Statistics, JAMA, Health Affairs, and the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, and has been featured in or he has written for media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, Vox, and others.

From 2012 to 2014, Yin served in the Obama Administration as Acting Chief Economist and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Microeconomic Policy at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and in the White House Council of Economic Advisers, advancing policing on health care quality, insurance affordability, higher education finance, and housing market stability. Since 2014, Yin has advised the state of California on health care reforms, including the design of state subsidies for marketplace insurance.

Previously, he was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago and Boston University, and a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy at Harvard University. He received his PhD in economics from Princeton University.

 

Selected Publications  

The Impact of Financial Assistance Programs on Health Care Utilization. 2022. (with Alyce Adams, Ray Kluender, Neale Mahoney, Jinglin Wang, and Francis Wong). Forthcoming at American Economic Review: Insights.

Personalized Telephone Outreach Increased Health Insurance Take-Up for Hard-to Reach Populations. 2022. (w/ Rebecca Myerson, Nicholas Tilipman, Andrew Fehrer, Honglin Li, and Isaac Menashe) Health Affairs 41(1): 129–137.

Medical Debt in the United States, 2009-2020. 2021. (with Ray Kluender, Neale Mahoney and Francis Wong) Journal of the American Medical Association 326(3). Media Coverage: NY Times, Washington Post, Vox, Marketwatch, CBS Evening News, Marketplace. JAMA editorial.

The Role of Behavioral Frictions in Health Insurance Marketplace Enrollment and Risk: Evidence from a Field Experiment. 2021. (with Richard Domurat and Isaac Menashe) American Economic Review 111(5): 1549–1574. [Online Appendix] Media Coverage: Tradeoffs Podcast

The Market for High-Quality Medicine: Retail Chain Entry and Drug Quality in India. 2019. (with Daniel Bennett) Review of Economics and Statistics 101(1) p.76-90 [Appendix]

Insurers’ Negotiating Leverage and the External Effect of Medicare Part D. 2015. (with Darius Lakdawalla), Review of Economics and Statistics 97:2 p.314-331 (an earlier version appears as NBER working paper no. 16251). Media coverage: New Yorker

R&D Policy, Agency Costs and Innovation in Personalized Medicine. 2009. Journal of Health Economics 28(5): 950-962.

Market Incentives and Pharmaceutical Innovation. 2008. Journal of Health Economics 27(4):1060-1077.

Female Empowerment: Impact of a Commitment Savings Product in the Philippines. 2010. (with Nava Ashraf and Dean Karlan) World Development 38(3): 333-344.

The Effect of the Medicare Part D Prescription Benefit on Drug Utilization and Expenditures (with Anirban Basu, James Zhang, Atonu Rabbani, David Meltzer, Caleb Alexander) Lead article at Annals of Internal Medicine 148(3): 169-177. Annals’ Summary for Patients.

Designing Targeting Schemes with Poverty Maps: Does Disaggregation Help?. 2007. (with Berk Özler, Chris Elbers, Tomoki Fujii, Peter Lanjouw) Journal of Development Economics 83(1).

Tying Odysseus to the Mast: Evidence from a Commitment Savings Product in the Philippines. 2006. (with Nava Ashraf and Dean Karlan) Quarterly Journal of Economics 121(2). Winner of TIAA-CREF 2006 Certificate of Excellence.

Deposit Collectors (with Nava Ashraf and Dean Karlan). 2006. Advances in Economic Analysis & Policy 6(2), Article 5.

 

Working Papers

Provider Market Power and Adverse Selection in Health Insurance Markets (with Nicholas Tilipman)

The Burden of Medical Debt and the Impact of Debt Forgiveness (with Ray Kluender, Neale Mahoney and Francis Wong). J-PAL Summary. AEA Pre-registration 1 (Old Debt). AEA Pre-registration 2 (Young Debt).

Trends in Medical Debt During the COVID Pandemic (with Raymond Kluender, Benedict Guttman-Kenney, Neale Mahoney, Francis Wong, and Xuyang Xia)

 

Other Publications and Policy Articles  

“Trends in Medical Debt During the COVID-19 Pandemic” (with Benedict Guttman-Kenney, Raymond Kluender, Neale Mahoney, Francis Wong, and Xuyang Xia) JAMA Health Forum. 2022, 3(5), 2022.

“Options To Improve Affordability In California’s Individual Health Insurance Market,” (with Peter Lee, Katie Ravel and Nicholas Tilipman), a Covered California report for Gov. Newsom, California State Senate and State Assembly pursuant to AB1810, February, 2019

“How retail drug markets in poor countries develop” (with Dan Bennett) VoxDev.org, August, 13th, 2018.

“Potential Impacts of Graham-Cassidy-Heller-Johnson on Californians and the Individual Health Insurance Market” (with John Bertko) Covered California Report, September 25, 2017

“Evaluating the Potential Consequences of Terminating Direct Federal Cost-Sharing Reduction (CSR) Funding” (with Richard Domurat) Covered California Report, January 26, 2017  [Appendix]

“Trump’s “populist” economic proposals come with massive catches. Here’s what to watch for.” Vox, November 18, 2016

Strengthening Risk Protection through Private Long-Term Care Insurance. Brookings Institution, Hamilton Project Discussion Paper 2015-06, June 2015. Policy Brief.

Value of Survival Gains in Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (with John Penrod, J. Ross Maclean, Darius Lakdawalla and Tomas Philipson) American Journal of Managed Care 2012 Nov;18(11 Suppl):S257-64

The impact of Medicare Part D on Medicare-Medicaid Dual-eligible Beneficiaries’ Prescription Utilization and Expenditures (with Caleb Alexander and Anirban Basu), Health Services Research, February 2010, 45(1), pp. 133-151   

Valuing health technologies at NICE: Recommendations for Improved Incorporation of Treatment Value in HTA (with Dana Goldman, Darius Lakdawalla and Tomas Philipson) Health Economics October 2010, 10(11) pp. 1109-1116

Solutions and Challenges to Curing Global Health Inequality Innovations 2(4), October 2007, 2(4), pp. 72-80

Testing Savings Product Innovations Using an Experimental Methodology (with Nava Ashraf and Dean Karlan), Asian Development Bank, Economics and Research Department Technical Paper No. 8. November, 2003

A Review of Commitment Savings Products in Developing Countries (with Nava Ashraf, Nathalie Gons, Dean Karlan) ERD Working Paper, July 2003.

 

Current Teaching

Public Finance and the Economics of Inequality (Econ 415)

Health Care Finance and Management (MBA and MPP elective) (MGMT298 & PP290)

Econometrics for Policy Analysis (MPP Core) (PP208)

Applied Policy Project (APP) Capstone Advisor (PP298A-D)

Robert Fairlie

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I am a Professor of Public Policy and Economics at UCLA, and a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). I study a wide range of topics including entrepreneurship, education, labor, racial, gender and caste inequality, information technology, immigration, health, and development. I strive for my research to have a broad impact by providing rigorous, unbiased and objective evidence on questions that are important for society and often involve highly-charged policy debates. My methodological focus is on conducting randomized control field experiments, employing advanced econometric techniques and identification strategies, and working with and building large administrative datasets. Publications from my research have appeared in leading journals in economics, policy, management, science, and medicine.

 

I received a Ph.D. and M.A. from Northwestern University and B.A. with honors from Stanford University. I have held visiting positions at Stanford University, Yale University, UC Berkeley, and Australian National University. I have received funding for my research from the National Science Foundation, National Academies and Russell Sage Foundation as well as numerous government agencies and foundations, and have testified in front of the U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Department of Treasury, and the California State Assembly. Recent awards and honors include a joint resolution from the California State Assembly, Choice Academic Title award, and the Bradford-Osborne research award in both 2020 and 2021. I am regularly interviewed by the media to comment on economic, education, entrepreneurship, inequality and policy issues.

 

 

 

My new book on entrepreneurship, job creation and survival just came out at MIT Press.

 

 

 

 

For more information on my research, teaching, and policy work, please visit: https://rfairlie.sites.ucsc.edu/

 

Megan Mullin

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Megan Mullin is Professor of Public Policy and holds the Luskin Endowed Chair in Innovation and Sustainability at UCLA. She is Faculty Director of the Luskin Center for Innovation, which partners with civic leaders on research to advance equitable public policy addressing environmental challenges.

Mullin is a political scientist whose research examines how coordination problems, accountability failure, and inequality in environmental risks and benefits shape political response to environmental change. Recent projects focus on the governance and finance of urban water services, public opinion about climate change, and the local politics of climate adaptation. She also has published on federalism, election rules and voter turnout, and local and state institutional design.

Mullin’s work has appeared in Nature, Science, American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and other journals in political science, public administration, and planning. She is the recipient of five awards from the American Political Science Association, including the Lynton Keith Caldwell Award for her book, Governing the Tap: Special District Governance and the New Local Politics of Water (MIT Press, 2009). Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Geological Survey, and private foundations. She works regularly with policy makers, and her research and commentary have appeared in many national and international media outlets. In 2020, she was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow.

Mullin received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. She served on the faculties at Temple University and Duke University prior to joining UCLA in 2023.

Siddharth Kara

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Siddharth Kara is an author, researcher and activist on modern slavery. Over the past two decades, Kara has conducted ground research in more than 50 countries to personally document the cases of several thousand slaves and child laborers.

In addition to several academic reports and journal articles, Kara has published three books with Columbia University Press: “Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery” (2008); “Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia” (2012); and “Modern Slavery: A Global Perspective” (2017). “Sex Trafficking” earned the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, awarded to the best book written in English on slavery or abolition, and was later turned into the Hollywood movie “Trafficked.”

Courtney Demko

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Dr. Demko’s research focuses on older adult health and well-being. She is particularly interested in Alzheimer’s caregiver burden. Her research involves using national survey data and focuses on the multidimensional factors associated with caregiver burden among young adult caregivers.

Dr. Demko’s research experience includes both quantitative and qualitative methodologies and she has used her research skills on several grant-funded research projects at UCLA including grants from the Ford Foundation and Archstone Foundation. She was a member of the UCLA Latino Economic Security (LES) team, which researches the economic impact of a nation growing older and more diverse. Dr. Demko served as the Project Director for the team’s latest project which included conducting focus groups and surveying older white conservative adults to understand their attitudes and beliefs toward immigration and immigration policy. She has published her work in peer-reviewed journals such as The Journal of the American Society on Aging.  She also gained administrative and managerial experience as the Assistant Director for the Center for Policy Research on Aging at UCLA’s Department of Social Welfare and Public Policy.

Dr. Demko also has several years of teaching experience. She is currently teaching 211A Human Behavior in the Social Environment and 260A Research Capstone at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs Department of Social Welfare. She has also taught at California State University Los Angeles School of Social Work teaching both graduate and undergraduate Social Work Research Methods and Statistics courses.  Her teaching philosophy includes using a variety of teaching modalities to be inclusive of students’ varying learning styles.

She earned her B.A. in Political Science from Davidson College (2005), and an M.S.W (2013) and PhD (2021) from UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, Department of Social Welfare with a specialization in Gerontology.

Maximilian Buchholz

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Max Buchholz is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Urban Planning and an affiliate with the California Center for Population Research. His research examines the causes of disparities in economic opportunity across cities. A key theme in his work is understanding how the drivers of economic disparities across city-regions also produce unequal outcomes for different segments of the population (e.g. across race, gender, or educational attainment).

Max’s work at UCLA is funded by a National Science Foundation Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. In this research, he is examining whether increasing urbanization within U.S. cities causes racial and gender income inequality to increase.

Max holds a PhD in geography from the University of Toronto, as well as MA and BA degrees in Latin American Studies and history from UCLA and UC Berkeley. Prior to coming to UCLA, Max was the Pollman Postdoctoral Fellow in Real Estate and Urban Development at Harvard. He also spent several years working for a community development organization in Los Angeles where he developed afterschool enrichment programming for high school students from low-income communities.

For more details on Max’s work and publications, please visit https://www.maximilianbuchholz.com/.