I am an Associate Professor of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley. I conduct research on homelessness and drug/alcohol use, focusing on structural and environmental factors that shape these experiences. I am interested in how the approaches used to “manage” homelessness at the local level (shelters, encampment abatements/management, housing) shapes homeless people’s health and quality of life.
I am leading a multi-method mapping project to track and analyze the increasing number of people who are homeless and dying in Santa Clara County (the unhoused death dashboard). I am interested in ways structural racism and exclusionary practices harm API health, particularly in substance use treatment and housing. In the past I have led studies characterizing API health disparities at the neighborhood level in San Francisco, examining API experiences in drug and alcohol treatment, and investigating mortality disparities among homeless APIs.