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.

Erin Nakamura

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Education:

M.S.W., University of California, Los Angeles

B.A.. California State University, Long Beach

 

Publications:

Katz, L. S., Cojucar, G., Beheshti, S., Nakamura, E., & Murray, M. (2012). Military sexual trauma during deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan: Prevalence, readjustment, and gender differences. Violence and Victims, 27(4), 487–499. https://doi.org/10.1891/0886-6708.27.4.487

Tierra Bills

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Tierra S. Bills is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. She specializes in the evaluation of transportation planning and system outcomes, and travel demand modeling, with a special emphasis on transportation equity. Dr. Bills brings a unique and innovative perspective to the challenge of transportation inequity, aimed at impacting transportation science, practice, and quality of life for vulnerable communities. She has worked in the transportation equity domain since 2009 and her current work builds off this track record, including her master’s research, dissertation work, study and training as a Research Scientist at IBM Research, Michigan Society Fellowship research, and previous work as a former Assistant Professor at Wayne State University.

Dr. Bills has extensive training in travel demand modeling and is engaged in ongoing work on representation of transport vulnerable travelers, in household travel surveys. These travel surveys are traditionally used to estimate and validate travel demand models and this is a pathway to developing travel models capable of reflecting the needs and behaviors of disadvantaged travelers and fine-grain transportation equity outcomes. Dr. Bills also works to advance accessibility measurement for transportation project evaluation, and develops strategies for ranking alternative transportation plans using equity-based criteria. 

At UCLA, Dr. Bills directs the Transportation Equity Innovation (TrEI) Lab, and leads a team of graduate and undergraduate students in developing innovative, meaningful, and effective tools for assessing fairness in transportation infrastructure, systems, and policies.  Dr. Bills is also affiliated with the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, UCLA Bunche Center, and collaborates with students, faculty, and researchers across engineering, policy, planning and other disciplines. Her team’s work is published in a range of journals including Transport Policy, Transportation Research Part D, Transportation,  and Transportation Research Record. 

 

Selected Publications

Srisan, T., & Bills, T. (2024). A Case for Race and Space in Auto Ownership Modeling: a Los Angeles County study. Transport Policy. (Link)

Bills, T. S. (2022). Advancing the Practice of Regional Transportation Equity Analysis: a San Francisco Bay area case study. Transportation, 1-26. (Link)

Bills, T. S., Twumasi-Boakye, R., Broaddus, A., & Fishelson, J. (2022). Towards transit equity in Detroit: An assessment of microtransit and its impact on employment accessibility. Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, 109, 103341. (Link)

Bills, T. S., & Carrel, A. L. (2021). Transit accessibility measurement considering behavioral adaptations to reliability. Transportation research record, 2675(5), 265-278. (Link)

Bills, T. S., & Walker, J. L. (2017). Looking beyond the mean for equity analysis: Examining distributional impacts of transportation improvements. Transport Policy, 54, 61-69. (Link)

Bills, T. S., Sall, E. A., & Walker, J. L. (2012). Activity-based travel models and transportation equity analysis: Research directions and exploration of model performance. Transportation research record, 2320(1), 18-27. (Link)

Carolyn Hull

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Carolyn Hull works in areas of regional and urban planning, with an emphasis on economic and workforce development, industry cluster analysis, real estate financial modeling, and data-driven program development that focuses on equitable and sustainable outcomes tailored for each community. Ms. Hull is currently the General Manager for the Economic and Workforce Development Department for the City of Los Angeles. In her role as General Manager, she is charged with negotiating real estate transactions for redeveloping strategic city and privately-owned properties into commercial or industrial uses. Ms. Hull also develops, maintains, and coordinates programs designed to grow and improve Los Angeles’ economy while building a well-trained and job-ready workforce.

She was most recently the Vice President of Strategic Initiatives and Industry Cluster Development at the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation (LAEDC), where she oversaw strategies and programs to promote job creation, business investment, and workforce development initiatives to strengthen the alignment of LA County’s workforce and education systems with industry needs. In this role she also partnered with regional government agencies and non-profits to provide guidance in planning, negotiating, and implementing real estate and financing transactions to activate underutilized public assets for commercial and industrial uses to retain and expand Los Angeles’ living wage employment base.

Prior to joining LAEDC, Ms. Hull was the South Los Angeles Regional Administrator for the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles (CRA/LA). In this role, she managed all redevelopment programs, activities and staff for the South Los Angeles region. During her tenure at CRA/LA, she served as the CRA/LA’s Manager of Capital Finance. In this capacity, she analyzed project-financing plans, and developed financing structures to optimize the utilization of public and private resources for all of CRA/LA’s priority projects. At the same time, she served as the co-founder and President of the Los Angeles Development Fund (LADF). Under her leadership, LADF received and managed a $75 million New Markets Tax Credit Allocation. In addition, she managed CRA/LA’s $700 million portfolio of conduit bonds.

Ms. Hull holds a Bachelor of science degree in industrial management from Carnegie-Mellon University and a Master of science degree in economics and urban planning from the London School of Economics, in addition to a Certificate in real estate finance from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Frederick Zimmerman

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Frederick J. Zimmerman is an economist with a background in the political economy of health and social policy. His research illuminates the intersection of economics and the determinants of health.

Dr. Zimmerman has a particular interest in how economic structure—including poverty and inequality and housing markets—influence population health. Research topics have included the measurement of health equity; the effects of housing affordability on health; transportation and health; media use and child development; and the opportunity costs of medical spending.

Dr. Zimmerman’s work has integrated economic, sociological, and psychological perspectives of behavior into a multi-level theory that unifies both individual and population-level determinants of health. His current research is in the UCLA Center for Health Advancement, where he has developed measures to systematically track health equity over time and across jurisdictions. His Win-Win simulation model of the impact of health and social policy on population health has shown how high-school graduation rates, crime rates, and local government finances are affected by multi-sectoral interventions in several jurisdictions around the country.

The New York Times, NPR, the BBC, Radio France Internationale and many other media outlets have covered Dr. Zimmerman’s research.

Dr. Zimmerman teaches classes on Advanced Statistical Research Methods, Determinants of Health, and Public Health Ethics.

Selected Publications:

  • Frederick J. Zimmerman. Public Health and Autonomy: A Critical Reappraisal. Hastings Center Report. December, 2017.
  • Selena E. Ortiz, Frederick J. Zimmerman, Gary J. Adler. Increasing Public Support for Obesity Prevention Policies using the Taste-Engineering Frame and Consumer-Oriented Values. Social Science & Medicine. 156:142-153. May, 2016.Donglan Zhang, Philippe J. Giabbanelli, Onyebuchi Arah and Frederick J. Zimmerman. Impact of Different Policies on Unhealthy Dietary Behaviors in an Urban Adult Population: An Agent-based Simulation Model American Journal of Public Health 104(7): 1217-1222. July, 2014.
  • Zimmerman, Frederick J. “Habit, custom, and power: A multi-level theory of population health.” Social Science & Medicine 80 (2013): 47-56.
  • Jeffrey C. McCullough, Frederick J. Zimmerman, Jonathan E. Fielding and Steven M. Teutsch. A Health Dividend for America: The Opportunity Cost of Excess Medical Expenditures. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 43(6):650-654. December, 2012.
  • Åsa Ljungvall and Frederick J. Zimmerman. Long-term Time Trends and Disparities in Body-mass Index among U.S. Adults 1960–2008. Social Science & Medicine 75(1):109- 119. July, 2012.
  • Zimmerman FJ, Christakis DA, Meltzoff AN. Associations Between Media Viewing and Language Development Among Children Under 2 Years Old Journal of Pediatrics 2007 Oct;151(4):364-8.
  • Zimmerman FJ and Christakis DA. Children’s Television Viewing and Cognitive Outcomes: A Longitudinal Analysis of National Data. Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine 159(7):619-625. July, 2005.
  • Zimmerman FJ, Carter MR. Asset Smoothing, Consumption Smoothing and the Reproduction of Inequality under Risk and Subsistence Constraints. Journal of Development Economics 2003 (August) 71(2): 233-260.

Juan Matute

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Juan researches public transit, transportation finance and governance, new mobility, and parking. He led UCLA’s work on two strategic transit plans for the State of California and long-range climate action plans for two Southern California communities. Juan has worked with research teams to quantify the number of parking spaces in Los Angeles County, assess life-cycle environmental impacts of the Los Angeles Metro system, and examine the cost-effectiveness of GHG reductions from California’s High Speed Rail.

As a Lecturer in Urban Planning, Juan teaches graduate classes related to Transportation Policy and Planning and Environmental Assessment for Urban Systems. As Deputy Director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, Juan manages the Center’s operations, external relations, research, and student programs.

Juan holds an MBA and Urban Planning MA from UCLA and a BA from Pomona College.