subcategory for PhD students of the various Luskin programs

Emanuel Nuñez

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Emanuel Nuñez is a first-year UCLA Luskin social welfare doctoral student and a registered associate clinical social worker from the California Central Valley. Emanuel’s research interests broadly include understanding the experiences of non-English speaking immigrants and their family/support systems navigating severe mental illness diagnoses including psychotic spectrum disorders and suicidality. Emanuel’s research interests are guided by a drive to advance access to psychiatric treatment for non-English-speaking immigrant communities. Emanuel completed his dual Bachelor of Arts in Chicanx Studies and Environmental Studies at UC Santa Barbara and his Master of Social Work degree at CSU Stanislaus.

Before starting doctoral studies at UCLA Luskin, Emanuel worked in outpatient mental health and emergency psychiatric response as an LPS-designated clinician. Emanuel has worked as a psychiatric social worker within the Los Angeles Department of Mental Health’s Psychiatric Mobile Response Team (PMRT) and as a mental health clinician within Stanislaus County Behavioral Health’s Crisis Care Mobile Unit, assisting individuals and their families seeking emergency psychiatric stabilization and treatment.

 

Danielle Dunn

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Danielle is an incoming first year doctoral student in the Department of Social Welfare at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. Her research interests center on strategies to increase access and engagement to evidence-based practices (EBPs) and the implementation and sustainment of EBPs that advance health equity in various settings.

Danielle currently works at Veterans Affairs at the Leading Evaluations to Advance VA’s Response to National Priorities (LEARN) Evidence-Based Policy Evaluation Center. She is a qualitative analyst on two evaluations of national programs focusing on the retention of Veterans with substance-use disorders in HUD-VASH and the implementation of chief wellbeing officers to address system-level drivers of clinician burnout. Prior to this, she gained experience in school-based mental health as the project coordinator for an R01 study examining the implementation and sustainment of a teacher-led prevention intervention for children at risk of developing emotional and behavioral disorders. At the UCLA Psychology Clinic, she also coordinated and helped design a large multisite study examining best practices in telesupervision, and conceptualized and implemented an independent study examining how the perceived helpfulness of prior therapy impacts premature termination from therapy.

Sarah Sung Hye Kang

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Sarah Sung Hye Kang is an incoming PhD student with a multidisciplinary background in social policy and international studies. She earned her MSc from the University of Oxford, fully funded by the Hakro Foundation, and holds a BA from Ewha Womans University in South Korea.

Her research interests focus on mixed methods, aging and disability, and aging and resilience, as well as the intersectionality of ageism and ableism, and how they shape issues within long-term care services and social policy.

Sarah’s professional experience includes roles as a researcher at the Korea Institute of Policy and Administration, a government policy research institute under the Prime Minister’s Office. Additionally, she worked at a social venture company in South Korea, where she led consulting projects with Samsung focusing on improving accessibility and inclusion for older adults and people with disabilities. Her work involved ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and developing policy recommendations informed by case studies and international comparisons.

She is dedicated to research that promotes equity and mental health, with a particular focus on supporting marginalized groups in aging societies. Her work emphasizes learning from the first-hand experiences of people aging with disability and aging into disability, ensuring their voices are at the center of policy development.

Derrick Behm Josa

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Derrick Behm Josa is an urban planner and a DeafSpace engagement and design consultant. He is currently a PhD student in Urban Planning at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs focusing his research on social infrastructures and community development, including how cities empower cultural production among Deaf communities through planning and design. He is also a recipient of the Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship award.

In the last decade Derrick has done various community development work in Washington, DC. Previously, he worked at Gallaudet University Office of Campus Design and Planning as a project coordinator and taught the DeafSpace Design Methodologies course. In 2019, he received his Masters degree from the Urban and Regional Planning program at Georgetown University. Through his experience and work, Derrick believes that the “accessibility” framework needs to continue evolving, rethinking how people connect within places.

Yeon Jae Hwang

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Yeon Jae Hwang is an incoming first-year doctoral student in the Department of Social Welfare at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. She received her Bachelor of Arts in English from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and her Master of Social Welfare from Yonsei University, South Korea.

As a queer person of color, she continuously sought ways to support and empower marginalized people’s voices during her undergraduate, mostly spending days on the street demonstrating and fostering ties with other advocates in the South Korean community. The number one question that opened her journey to academia was, ‘how does one not conventionally categorized survive in such a heteronormative and conservative society?’

Thus, her main objective as a social welfare student in her master’s was to initiate discourse in Korean academia by highlighting the marginalized groups’ existence and revealing the discriminatory reality they face via quantitative and qualitative research. Now she is engaged and actively participating in various research teams and projects, especially regarding LGBTQ+ research.

Her research interests center on sexual minorities subjected to social discrimination and systematic oppression due to their multiple intersecting identities- including stigmas, prejudice, and microaggression. Her views focus on the systems in which such groups are placed by exploring the forces and powers within diverse levels of context.

Jianan Li

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Jianan Li (she/her) is an incoming first-year doctoral student in the Department of Social Welfare of the Luskin School of Public Affairs. She received her Bachelor of Law in Social Work from Southwest Petroleum University and her Master of Social Work concentrating in Policy Practice and Aging from Columbia University. She has practiced fieldwork in a variety of settings including schools, communities, social work service centers, and government departments. The practical experience has led her to conduct research projects among different populations and to focus more on the aging population, especially on improving the well-being of disadvantaged older adults.

During her master’s degree, Jianan interned at the New York City Department for the Aging. There, she participated in several pilot research projects focused on older adults, working on exploring ways to improve older adults’ mental health by mitigating the stigma attached to mental health services among professionals and older adults. She also worked as a research assistant at the Columbia Population Research Center, where she contributed to interviews and data analysis for the New York City Longitudinal Survey of Wellbeing, a longitudinal research project dedicated to tracking economic and social well-being in New York City.

Her areas of interest include examining the factors affecting the quality of life of older adults with long-term care needs in different settings to improve the current care system, and understanding the effects of productive engagement in later life to enhance the health and well-being of older adults.

Hillary Peregrina

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Hillary Nicole Peregrina, MA, MSW (she/her/hers) is a doctoral student committed to using developmental perspectives to address mental health disparities among immigrant and refugee adolescents and emerging adults. She obtained her Master of Arts in Social Work (Clinical Concentration) from the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. She also previously earned a Master of Arts in Asian American Studies from San Francisco State University and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Loyola Marymount University.

Prior to entering the field of Social Work, she taught Ethnic Studies courses at San Francisco State University and San Francisco Unified School District through Pin@y Educational Partnerships. Her social work experience encompasses a range of youth development roles including administrative non-profit research/program evaluation and counseling services for children and adolescents ages 8-18.

Her central research questions focus on the impact of racial discrimination and critical racial consciousness on various developmental outcomes including mental health, ethnic/racial identity, family processes, civic engagement, and racial solidarity. She has previously published on various public health issues that impact Asian American communities across the lifespan including family social support for chronic illness among older Asian Americans, and civic engagement among emerging young adults. Her research interests are an interdisciplinary blend of her experience in Social Work and Ethnic Studies. Ultimately, she hopes to use various forms of research to advocate for health equity, translate findings into public policy recommendations, and inform clinical and community-based interventions.

Selected Publications: 

Peregrina, H. N., Bayog, M. L. G., Pagdilao, A., Bender, M. S., Doan, T., & Yoo, G. J. (2024). Older Chinese and Filipino American Immigrants with Type 2 Diabetes and their Adult Child: A Qualitative Dyadic Exploration of Family Support. Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology, 39(2), 151–172. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10823-024-09505-w

Park, M., Woo, B., Jung, H.-M., Jeong, E., Choi, Y., Takeuchi, D., & Peregrina, H. N. (2024). COVID-19, Racial Discrimination and Civic Engagement Among Filipino American and Korean American Young Adults. Emerging Adulthood, 12(2),236-251. https://doi.org/10.1177/21676968231224098

Peregrina, H. N., Maglalang, D. D., Hwang, J., & Yoo, G. J. (2023). A qualitative exploration of the continuum of help-seeking among Asian American breast cancer survivors. Social Work in Health Care, 62(10), 345–358. https://doi.org/10.1080/00981389.2023.2244012

Peregrina, H. N., Yoo, G. J., Villanueva, C., Bayog, M. L. G., Doan, T., & Bender, M. S. (2022). Tiwala, Gaining Trust to Recruit Filipino American Families: CARE-T2D Study. Ethnicity & disease, 32(1), 49–60. https://doi.org/10.18865/ed.32.1.49

Maglalang, D. D., Peregrina, H. N., Yoo, G. J., & Le, M. N. (2021). Centering Ethnic Studies in Health Education: Lessons From Teaching an Asian American Community Health Course. Health education & behavior: the official publication of the Society for Public Health Education, 48(3), 371–375. https://doi.org/10.1177/10901981211009737

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 third-year PhD student at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, Department of Social Welfare. Her research addresses structural disadvantage by examining the ways in which public policies shape early foundations for healthy lifetime outcomes. Broadly, she studies how social policies support families and attend to factors that drive disparities in early childhood.

Keri is keenly interested in the careful and purposeful application of causal inference methods to child and family policy and serves as the manager for the UCLA Practical Causal Inference Lab. She is currently engaged in studies evaluating the effects of policies and programs on family financial stability, early childhood mental health, and access to healthcare.

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.