Bianca D.M. Wilson, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Welfare at the Luskin School of Public Affairs and an affiliate faculty member of the California Center for Population Research at UCLA. Her research explores the relationships between culture, oppression, and health. Dr. Wilson examines LGBTQ economic instabilities and involvement with systems of care and criminalization, with a focus on the ways racialization, sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression play a role in creating disproportionality and disparities.

Notably, she was the lead investigator on the first study to establish population estimates of how many LGBTQ youth are in foster care and has led similar work in juvenile criminalization. Similarly, she has led the largest qualitative study of the life and needs of LGBTQ people experiencing economic insecurity. Acknowledging the impact of this work, she was awarded the Distinguished Contribution to Public Policy Award by the American Psychological Association Division 44 (Society for the Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity). Underlying her substantive works on LGBTQ, health, system involvement and economic security is her attention to sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression (SOGIE) data collection and data policy. She has conducted SOGIE measurement research among youth and adults and continues to work with local, state and federal government efforts on increasing and improving LGBTQ inclusive data collection. She served on the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) Consensus Panel on the Measurement of Sex, Gender and Sexual Orientation- a report commissioned by the National Institutes of Health in the interest of informing data policy and practices in federal data collection. She is currently serving as a scientific committee member of NASEM’s Assessment of NIH Research on Women’s Health consensus study.

She was previously a Senior Scholar of Public Policy at the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy at the UCLA School of Law, and before that an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at California State University, Long Beach. Dr. Wilson earned a Ph.D. in Psychology from the Community and Prevention Research program at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) with a minor in Statistics, Methods, and Measurement, and received postdoctoral training at the UCSF Institute for Health Policy Studies and the UCSF Lesbian Health and Research Center through an Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ) postdoctoral fellowship.