Health Disparities

Roch Nianogo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. He is a physician and scientist of preventive medicine and epidemiologist. Dr. Nianogo’s research strives to help reduce the burden of preventable chronic diseases, promote the health and wellbeing of patients and populations, especially those most vulnerable, and assist clinical, public health and policy decision-making. To this end, Dr. Nianogo has developed research interests that are both methodological and substantive in nature.

Ilan H. Meyer, Ph.D. is Distinguished Senior Scholar for Public Policy at the Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at UCLA’s School of Law, Adjunct Professor in Community Health Sciences at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, and Professor Emeritus of Sociomedical Sciences, Columbia University. Dr. Meyer studies public health issues related to minority health.

Elizabeth Rose Mayeda, PhD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology. Dr. Mayeda's research focuses on how to prevent or delay cognitive aging, Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, stroke, and other health outcomes in older adults. She is especially interested in social inequalities in healthy aging. Much of her current work focuses on identifying the origins of racial/ethnic and geographic inequalities in aging. Dr.

Randall Kuhn (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1999) is a demographer and sociologist who employs a wide array of research methods and data to study the social determinants of health, health program evaluation, and the health-development nexus. He has conducted seminal research on the impacts of migration on health. In Bangladesh, he leads a 35-year evaluation of the effects of randomized child and reproductive health interventions on health and socioeconomic change across generations.

Akihiro Nishi is an Assistant Professor in Department of Epidemiology. He is a social epidemiologist and experimental social scientist specialized in social network and behavioral intervention. His current areas of research include improving economic inequality and well-being inequality in online social networks (e.g.

I'm trained as a medical sociologist and use mixed-method and transdisciplinary approaches to examine psychosocial sources of risk and resilience and their impact on the psychophysiological health of Black Americans across the life course.

Dr. Beltrán-Sánchez’s research focuses on the demography of health and aging. He has written on health patterns and trends in low- and middle-income countries; on aging in high-income countries including issues about compression of morbidity; on the links between early life experiences and late life outcomes; as well as on biomarker data from Mexico to study physiological patterns of health and their link with sociodemographic factors.

James Macinko is Professor of Health Policy and Management and Community Health Sciences. He is a health services researcher specializing in global health and health policy analysis. Main areas of research include assessing the impact of health reforms and policy changes, developing tools to evaluate health system performance, and exploring the role of health policies and services in the production and potential reduction of health inequities. 

Sung-Jae Lee, PhD, is an Associate Professor-in-Residence in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, with a joint appointment in the Department of Epidemiology, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. He is the Director of the Recruitment Engagement and Retention Center (RERC) for the Adolescent Medicine Trials Network (ATN) U19. His current ongoing research focuses on designing interventions for vulnerable HIV-affected communities. Dr.