subcategory for PhD students of the various Luskin programs

Chendi Zhang

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Chendi Zhang (she/her/hers) is a doctoral student in Urban Planning at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. Her research interests include age-friendly public space, participation and community engagement, urban design, smart city and technologies, and Urban China.

Prior to pursuing her PhD, Chendi was a landscape designer at OLIN, Philadelphia, assisted in curating Penn-China Design Dialogue 2019, worked on Beautiful China – Reflections on Landscape Architecture in Contemporary China as an assistant editor and book designer, and started to share tutorials about landscape architecture and her experience as an international student in design and planning major as a social media influencer.

Chendi studied and worked in the field of landscape architecture for ten years, holding her master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and bachelor’s degree of Science in Landscape Architecture from Beijing Forestry University. With her research concentration, practice experience, and design background, Chendi studies urban issues from a perspective of how planning and design processes can collaborate more tightly and efficiently to better respond to the demands of overlooked and misrepresented vulnerable groups and reduce spatial inequality in the built environment.

Website: chendizest.com

Keri Lintz

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Keri Lintz is a first-year doctoral student committed to examining the effects of public policy on child development. She is particularly interested in the prevention of early childhood adversity and understanding the factors that contribute to the disproportionality — and accompanying consequences — of such experiences.

Keri draws on almost two decades of experience and expertise in research, public policy administration, and social service delivery. Her first professional experiences were as a child welfare consultant and crisis intervention specialist. Subsequently, she worked for state government administering five federal grant programs designed to foster child and family well-being. Before joining UCLA, she was the executive director of the Center for Human Potential and Public Policy and The Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab at The University of Chicago where she gained a deep appreciation for the capacity of rigorous research to inform sound policy, programs and practice. In this role, she provided leadership in the implementation of large-scale field experiments and evaluation of promising programs dedicated to reducing social and economic inequality.

Stephanie Patton

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Stephanie Patton is an incoming first year doctoral student in the Department of Social Welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. She brings with her more than 10 years of practical social work experience in nonprofit administration and social policy. Prior to starting the PHD program at UCLA, she held positions with U.S. Soccer Federation, the American Red Cross, Michigan state Senator Jeff Irwin, and U.S. Senator Gary Peters. Most recently she served as a Project Manager for Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, helping them develop a learning health network for hospitals to share best care practices and conduct innovative research for individuals with single ventricle heart disease.

Stephanie holds a BA in Sociology and English from DePauw University. She received her MSW summa cum laude from the University of Michigan with a concentration on children and families and a focus on social policy. She is also a certified Project Management Professional through the Project Management Institute and has earned certificates in quality improvement and data visualization.

Her research interests center on child development, child welfare, abuse and neglect prevention, community networks, poverty, and material hardship.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephaniepatton1/

Irene Valdovinos

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Irene Valdovinos is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and an incoming first year doctoral student
in the Department of Social Welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. She received
her Master of Social Welfare and Master of Public Health from UCLA in 2012. Irene has
experience working in the fields of mental health and substance use treatment as a clinician in
integrated care programs. In these settings, she offered individual, family, and group counseling
services. Prior to returning to UCLA to start the PhD program, Irene worked at Azusa Pacific
University as a grant specialist and evaluation coordinator. There she managed multiple
workforce development and evaluation projects funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental
Health Services Administration, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health Substance
Abuse Prevention and Control division, and other local-level sponsors.

Her broad research interests include understanding factors that impact substance use and
enhancing early intervention and treatment services for minority youth and young adults
impacted by substance use.

Juan J. Nunez

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Juan J. Nunez is a doctoral student in Social Welfare at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public
Affairs. He has previously worked as a Data Analyst and Research Associate at WRMA, Inc., a
research firm dedicated to providing support to health and human services agencies. While at
WRMA, the two main projects he worked on are the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data
System (NCANDS) and the National Adult Maltreatment Reporting System (NAMRS). His
current research focuses on understanding the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on child
maltreatment reporting, analyzing the applicability of machine learning techniques to predict
adult maltreatment, and identifying methods to strengthen community assistance to at-risk
communities (e.g., children, older adults, adults with disabilities, young adults experiencing
inadequate housing). His research informs policy makers and key stakeholders on the
development of prevention programs and on the use of innovative methodologies to identify
community and individual protective factors. He holds a MA in Sociology from Boston College,
where his research focused on analyzing the effects of religion on mental health among older
adults, and a BA in Sociology from the University of San Francisco.

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jjnunez1

PUBLICATIONS:
Shusterman, G. R., Nunez, J. J., Fettig, N. B., & Kebede, B. K. (2021). Adolescent mother
maltreatment perpetrators’ past experiences with child protective services. International
Journal on Child Maltreatment: Research, Policy and Practice, 4(2),145–164.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s42448-021-00074-w

Qianyun Wang

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Qianyun Wang is a PhD student in Social Welfare in her first year. She holds a bachelor’s degree in social work from Beijing Normal University and a master’s degree in social work from the University of Calgary. She did community development fieldwork and received social work education in a variety of contexts, including India, Korea, the Philippines, Canada, and China. These events sparked her interest in taking action and doing research to address social exclusion, ageism, racism, and migratory injustice, among other issues.

Qianyun has been an active community practitioner and advocate, working in solidarity alongside marginalized people, including those living with poverty, TFWs, immigrants, the elderly, and others.

Qianyun’s research experience involves both quantitative and qualitative approaches, with the latter being her particular focus. Her master thesis explored the lived experiences of spousal bereavement among older Chinese immigrants in Canada. Before coming to UCLA, she worked with multidisciplinary research teams from the University of Calgary, Tsinghua University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Project-China, where she led and/or coordinated various research projects, including antiracism and anticolonization teaching and learning, social and psychological well-being among older immigrants during the pandemic in Canada, sexual health and services among older adults in the UK and China, HIV self-testing experience among gay men via Photovoice in China, and so on.

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.