Tess Abrahamson-Richards, MPH (she/her), is a citizen of the Spokane Tribe and has lived in Seattle on Coast Salish territory for many years. Tess received her PhD in Social Welfare at the University of Washington, where her research focused on social policy implementation and Indigenous family wellbeing in the prenatal-to-three period. Outside of school, Tess is the Director of Data Sovereignty at Hummingbird Indigenous Family Services. There, she oversees Hummingbird's research and data advocacy efforts, including serving as the Principal Investigator for the "Nurturing...
Jill Duerr Berrick is a Distinguished Professor and the Zellerbach Family Foundation Professor of Social Welfare. She also holds a joint appointment as a Professor II at the University of Bergen, Norway.
Dr. Berrick's research focuses on the child welfare system and efforts to improve the experiences of children and families touched by foster care. Her interests target the intersection of poverty, childhood development, parenting and the service systems designed to address family well-being. Berrick’s research approach typically relies upon the...
Dr. Chang’s research involves investigating the structural determinants that impact the health of unhoused people, focusing on the role of social policies (e.g. encampment sweeps) on unhoused people’s health outcomes. Recently, she has led mixed-methods studies which examine the soaring numbers of people dying while unhoused in Santa Clara County. Her lab developed the SCC Unhoused Death website, a...
Associate Professor Yu-Ling Chang's scholarly interests focus on the relationships among poverty, inequality and social safety net programs. Her research addresses both the process of policymaking and the consequences of public policies for economically disadvantaged populations. Her research agenda is informed by her professional experiences serving and advocating for individuals suffering from economic hardship during the global economic recession in the late 2000s.
Dr. Chang's current research focuses on racial equity and the TANF program at the state and federal levels in the US...
Anu Manchikanti Gómez is a scholar of sexual and reproductive health equity who uses participatory and engaged approaches to produce knowledge that centers the communities most affected by reproductive oppression. As a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Social Welfare and the director of the Sexual Health and Reproductive Equity (SHARE) Program, she has a long track record of conducting innovative and rigorous research that puts...
Dr. Kristina Lovato is an Assistant Professor of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley, where she also serves as Director of the Center on Immigration and Child Welfare Initiative (CICW)She is also an inaugural member of the Latinx & Democracy Cluster at UC Berkeley. For over 20 years, Dr. Lovato has worked at the intersection of immigration and child well-being as a researcher, social work educator, and former bilingual social work...
Dr. Angela (Angie) Perone is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley and directs the Center for Advanced Study of Aging Services. Dr. Perone is a licensed attorney and interdisciplinary scholar. Dr. Perone previously served as a civil rights attorney, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation health policy fellow in the United States Senate, and founding Executive Director of SAGE Metro Detroit. Dr. Perone’s research focuses on equitable aging, caregiving, and health policy and merges law, social services, and social science. Her current projects focus on conflicting...
Assistant Professor Laurent Reyesis committed to developing research that challenges current systems of inequality that directly affect older Black and Latinx adults. As an activist scholar and storyteller, Dr. Reyes leans on qualitative and visual methods to listen and elevate lifetime stories of resistance and solidarity among Latinx and Black elders to re-imagine a new framework of civic participation emerging from their lived experience. The goal of this research is to shift socio-political focus and resources towards the work and solutions that historically oppressed communities have...
Tina Sacks is an associate professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare. Her fields of interest include racial inequities in health, social determinants of health, and poverty and inequality. Professor Sacks focuses on the how macro-structural forces, including structural discrimination and immigration, affect women’s health. Her current work investigates the persistence of racial and gender discrimination in health care settings among racial/ethnic minorities who are not poor. She published a book on this subject entitled Invisible Visits: Black Middle Class Women in the...
Valerie B. Shapiro, PhD, is a professor jointly appointed in Social Welfare and Public Health, and the Co-Director of the SHIFT Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Shapiro is proud to have been selected as a William T. Grant Foundation Scholar (2020) and appointed the Scientific Director of CalHOPE Student Support - an effort to use research evidence to promote wellbeing in schools across the state of California (2021-2025).
Dr. Shapiro is a translation scientist who studies the persistent gap between rigorous research and the...
