Health equity has become a priority across various organizations, especially during the past 2 1/2 years. As the COVID-19 pandemic intensified disparities, a spotlight was placed on inequities that have long existed across multiple social policy domains in California and across the nation.
The UCLA Fielding School of Public Health is partnering with Howard University and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences to proactively engage historically marginalized and disadvantaged populations, and provide crucial information and resources during public health crises.
Tears are streaming down Nakeya Bell’s face as she listens to students in her IQ Squad program, Amari Haysbert and Jenalyn Phanh, open up about their trauma.
At just 18 years old, Haysbert and Phanh are both young women of color who say their lives were upended by unstable familial structures, housing insecurity and COVID-19 while attending high school.
In 1998, Noe Ramirez crossed into the United States from Mexico, hoping to earn enough to buy a new taxi to replace the sputtering cab he drove in Mexico City. The part-time musician found construction work in Houston, playing guitar on the weekends.
One morning as he rode his bike to work, he was hit by a drunk driver. The driver fled, leaving him bleeding on the street, his spinal cord crushed. After being hospitalized, he was taken in by a local shelter for undocumented migrants, receiving medical care through a county program for low-income residents.
Research co-authored by UCLA Fielding School of Public Health faculty and staff illustrates the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on ethnic communities in the United States over the past three years, and the need to improve understanding of how the pandemic rippled through those same groups.
New research from UCLA studies how stress, racism and discrimination impact biology.
A UCLA Fielding School of Public Health program that aims to strengthen the public health workforce by introducing a diverse pool of undergraduates to the field through an eight-week residential summer program has received more than $3 million in funding over the next five years from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Office of Minority Health and Health Equity. The Fielding School’s UCLA Public Health Scholars Training Program was one of seven such programs across the country selected to collaborate as part of CDC’s newly established John R.
Dr. Philip M. Massey, PhD, MPH, is an Associate Professor in Community Health Sciences in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. His health communication scholarship focuses on media and technology in the U.S. and globally, on topics ranging from social media, vaccine communication, health literacy, entertainment education, and ethics in social media research. His work takes a mixed-methods approach focusing on health and media literacy in the context of multiple media environments.
Education
- PhD, Public Health; University of California, Los Angeles
- MPH, Public Health; University of California, Los Angeles
- BS, Biology; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
SARAH FANTA LOVED HER JOB AS A DIETITIAN with the Public Health Foundation Enterprises WIC program, which provides healthy free food, nutrition education, breastfeeding assistance, and family resources to more than 200,000 women, children, and families in Southern California. As a supervisor at WIC offices in South Los Angeles and Culver City, Fanta managed teams that provided support services as well as high-risk counseling to WIC participants.
AFTER SPENDING MUCH OF HER CAREER in the realm of maternal and child nutrition — striving to improve the life trajectory of children by focusing on pregnancy and diet during the first five years of life — Dr.