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, LCSW, MPH is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Social Welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. As an emerging scholar, Irene is focused on examining the life experiences of racial and ethnic young adults beginning treatment for substance use disorders to further understand the treatment engagement process.  Irene expects to gather and analyze substance use-related data that informs nuanced methods to ameliorate the substance use treatment gap that exists within communities impacted by health disparities. Specifically, her research has implications for developing novel ways to enhance pathways to treatment engagement for young adults and in shifting narratives to focus on the factors that can better support young adults in their health trajectories.

Irene is well-positioned to carry out this research. She has served as a mental health clinician in integrated care programs. In these settings, she offered individual, family, and group counseling services to individuals impacted by co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders. In witnessing how substance use impacts individuals and families, Irene became motivated in learning how larger systems and system change could lead to broader impacts on improving substance use-related and behavioral health outcomes. While working at Azusa Pacific University (APU), Irene managed multiple workforce development and evaluation projects funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health Substance Abuse Prevention and Control division, and other local-level sponsors. Through this work, she gained insights on substance use-related policies, service continuum, provider perspectives, and program planning, implementation and evaluation processes. Irene continues to collaborate with her APU and UCLA colleagues on substance use-related evaluation and technical assistance projects, including a project with the California Department of Health Care Services, which aims to develop a resource repository for substance use prevention providers. Irene Valdovinos’ research and graduate education enables her to provide professional and leadership roles in addressing mental health and substance use challenges.

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

 

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

Yoh Kawano

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Yoh Kawano came to Los Angeles and UCLA after living across the globe, in five different countries. At UCLA he works at the GIS and Visualization Sandbox as a member of the Research Technology Group for the Office of Advanced Research Computing (OARC), serving as a Lead Computation Scientist for GIS and Spatial Data Science. He has supervised projects in urban planning, emergency preparedness, disaster relief, volunteerism, archaeology, social justice, and the digital humanities. Current research and projects involve the geo-spatial web, visualization of temporal and spatial data, and creating systems that leverage data science methods. In the summer of 2020, Yoh completed the PhD program at UCLA’s Department of Urban Planning, submitting his dissertation titled “Human Error and Human Healing in a Risk Society: The Forgotten Narratives of Fukushima.”

Yoh is on the faculty in both the Urban Planning Department and the Digital Humanities Program. In Urban Planning, he teaches “GIS and Spatial Data Science” in the master’s program, and in the Digital Humanities, he teaches “Introduction to Digital Mapping: Web GIS.”

Yoh has co-authored “Hypercities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities”, published in 2014 via Harvard Press. He also directed, produced, and edited “Human Error,” a documentary film that sheds light to the many narratives that percolate the abandoned spaces of Fukushima. Yoh has a PhD in Urban Planning from UCLA and a BA in Sociology from the International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo.

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 measurement 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 disadvantaged communities. She has worked in the transportation equity domain since 2009 and her current work builds off this long 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 an 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 disadvantaged groups in household travel surveys, which are traditionally used to estimate and validate travel demand models. This is the first step to developing travel models capable of reflecting the preferences 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. Her work is published in a range of journals including Transport Policy and Transportation Research Record, and a recent contribution to the popular planning research press: The Metropole. She also currently serves as a Guest Editor on a Special Issue of Transportation Research Part D.

Dr. Bills has a strong record of advocacy for transportation equity and representation in STEM fields, including providing testimony for the a U.S. House of Representatives’ subcommittee hearing (see: https://science.house.gov/hearings/field-hearing-smart-mobility-its-a-community-issue), membership on the Equity in Transportation Committee of the Transportation Research Board, and co-developing an entry on her research in the ColorMePhD coloring book series (see: https://ce.berkeley.edu/news/2511).

 

Selected Publications

Bills, Tierra (2022). Advancing the Practice of Regional Transportation Equity Analysis: A San Francisco Bay Area Case Study. Transportation Research Part A. (Pending)

Goodspeed, Robert, Meixin Yuan, Aaron Krusniak, and Tierra Bills. (2021). Assessing the Value of New Big Data Sources for Transportation Planning: Benton Harbor, Michigan Case Study. 17th International Conference on Computational Urban Planning and Urban Management (CUPUM).

Bills, Tierra. S., & Carrel, A. L. (2021). Transit Accessibility Measurement Considering Behavioral Adaptations to Reliability. Transportation Research Record, 0361198120986567.

Nahmias-Biran, Bat-hen, Tierra Bills, and Yoram Shiftan. Incorporating Equity Consideration in Transport Project Evaluation: San Francisco Bay Area Case Study. Presented at the 96th Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, January 9th, 2017

Bills, Tierra, and Joan Walker (2017). Looking beyond the mean for equity analysis: Examining distributional impacts of transportation improvements. Transport Policy, 54, 61-69.

Bills, Tierra., Bryant, R., & Bryant, A. W. (2014). Towards a frugal framework for monitoring road quality. In Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), 2014 IEEE 17th International Conference on ITS (pp. 3022-

3027). IEEE.

Bills, Tierra, Elizabeth Sall, and Joan Walker (2012). Activity-based Travel Demand Models and Transportation Equity Analysis: Research Directions and An Exploration of Model Performance. In Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, Washington, D.C.

 

 

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.

Faye Nixon

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Farre (“Faye”) Nixon (she/her) is a freelance designer and adjunct instructor residing in Los Angeles. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Urban Studies and Planning from MIT and dual Master degrees in Architecture and Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design.

Her research interests include investigating speculative and critical design methodologies, using creative writing techniques such as worldbuilding as a design tool, interrogating the ways emerging technologies and design intersect, and designing for humans and their non-human counterparts within the context of uncertain climate futures. She was recently contracted as a Design Lead with Experimental Design, an agency specializing in the creation and visualization of narrative worlds, where she led a team of researchers, screenwriters, and producers to visualize a future in which a major European auto manufacturer transitioned away from producing cars to instead become a global leader in the circular economy.

Faye is also a strong advocate for transdisciplinary and collaborative practice, an ethos she tries to embody through her own practice as a planner, architect, landscape designer, and co-instructor. She currently co-teaches Advanced Visual Communications for graduate planning students at UCLA with Ellen Epley, and Asymmetries of Access, a transdisciplinary seminar on the participatory design of public spaces for the inclusion of racial and gender non-conforming minorities, at the University of Southern California. She has previously worked as a Landscape Designer for the non-profit planning and design firm Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI) and for the Oslo-based office of Snøhetta