REGENTS OF UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - Key Persons
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- Member of the Steering Committee
- Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
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- Member of the Steering Committee
- Executive Director, Family Voices ( Engagement Core )
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- Member of the Advisory Committee
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- President and CEO, Forward Change Consulting
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- Member of the Advisory Committee
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- Member of the Advisory Committee
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- Center Staff Member
- Program Manager, Life Course Translational Research Network and Social Impact Labs
Chandler Beck, MPH is Program Manger of the Life Course Intervention Research Network at the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families, & Communities..
Chandler Beck, MPH (he/him/his) is the Program Manager for the Life Course Translational Research Network (LCT-RN) and the Early Childhood Ecosystems Transformation Accelerator Social Impact Lab at the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families & Communities. A native of Bakersfield, CA, he obtained his Bachelor's Degree in Public Health at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri and his MPH from the Department of Community Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Chandler works to make complex health concepts and issues more digestible and understandable in order to bridge the gap between the academy and the communities in which they exist in. He pulls from his knowledge and experiences in statistical analysis, health communication, multimedia design and intervention evaluation to complete his work.
Education and Degree(s)
Master of Public Health, University of California, Los Angeles, 2022
Bachelor of Science, Public Health, Saint Louis University, 2020
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- Member of the Advisory Committee
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- Member of the Advisory Committee
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- Professor of Health Policy of Management, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health
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- Member of the Advisory Committee
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- Founding Director
- Founding Director of the UCLA Center for Healthier Children
Dr. Neal Halfon is the founding director of the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families and Communities and the Director of the Life Course Intervention Research Network. Dr. Halfon has a long and distinguished career in child health with expertise in health measurement, health services delivery, health policy, and community interventions. Dr. Halfon has played an instrumental role in the development of the life course health sciences, with a particular focus on theory development and translation of research findings into clinical, programmatic, and policy interventions. In 2017, he received the C. Anderson Aldrich award by the American Academy of Pediatrics for his contributions to the field of child development with specific reference to his work on life course health development.
Education and Degree(s)
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- Senior Vice President for Programs and Partnerships, Lucile Packard Foundation for Children 's Health
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- Center Staff Member
- Director, Early Childhood Ecosystem Transformation Accelerator Social Impact Lab
efren serves as the Director of the Early Childhood Ecosystems Transformation Accelerator Lab at UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families & Communities.
efren aguilar serves as the Director of the Early Childhood Ecosystems Transformation Accelerator Lab at UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families & Communities (CHCFC). His work emphasizes the democratization of data and inclusion of local residents in developing: 1) community-based planning efforts; 2) actionable research; and 3) place-based funding decisions as core strategies to achieve health equity. His professional experience runs a broad range of issues including social justice, homelessness, supporting displaced political refugees, domestic violence, education, public health, and life course development. He is an autodidact and polymath with over 25 years of field work experience.
efren also serves a role at the Center providing technical assistance on population measures and their community contexts through the development of whole-child equity measurement systems. Integrating valid population measures with ecosystem contextual data, efren has pioneered new measurement approaches. His innovations have identified ethnoracial equity gaps that start in the earliest periods of human development, and have also quantified and revealed population level resilience patterns at the neighborhood level. He has served as a technical advisor to the New York Academy of Medicine East Harlem Action Collaborative for Child Health and Well-being Initiative and supported the UCLA Iris Cantor Women's Center's Reproductive Health and Environment Mapping Assessment Project (RHE-MAP).
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- Member of the Steering Committee
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- Member of the Steering Committee
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- Professor of Health Policy and Management, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health / Professor of Urban Planning, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs
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- Coordinator
- Cohort Coordinator, Social Impact Labs
Jenifer Ramos is the Cohort Coordinator for the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families & Communities and assists with the field work involved in collecting, understanding, and working with community members to learn about the information and data from their communities. She is a UCLA Class of 2021 alumna and earned her bachelor's degree in Public Affairs with a minor in Education. Prior to her work with the Center for Healthier Children, Families, and Communities, Jenifer worked as a Research Associate for the UCLA Commercial Sexual Exploitation Research Lab that led a reproductive health intervention for youth with histories of commercial sexual exploitation. The intervention aimed to understand how much sexual health information youth were able to remember across different time points. Jenifer enjoys being part of the learning process with her community and hopes to continue engaging towards a more equitable and just environment.
Education and Degree(s)
B.A., Public Affairs, Luskin School of Public Affairs, University of California, Los Angeles
Minor in Education
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- Member of the Advisory Committee
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- Data Analyst, Data Informed Futures
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- Center Staff Member
- GIS Unit Chief, Data Informed Futures
- Unit Chief for the Data Informed Futures
Josh Bader is the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Unit Chief for the Data Informed Futures (DIF) project. In this capacity, Josh is responsible for the mapping products related to all of the primary data collections tools. These data include the Early Development Instrument (EDI), Middle Years Development Instrument (MDI) and Childhood Experiences Questionnaire (CHEQ). Additionally, Josh plays an important role in developing new tools and visualizations that help make these important datasets more usable and actionable.
Josh received a Bachelor's degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in Biological Sciences and Geography and a Master's degree from the University of California-Santa Barbara in Geography. For the past 20+ years, Josh has worked in various GIS capacities for the Nebraska State Government, the University of California-Santa Barbara, the City of Santa Barbara, and now the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families, and Communities.
Education and Degree(s)
MA, Geography, University of California-Santa Barbara
BS, Biological Sciences & Geography, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Job Titles:
- Research Director
- Research Director, UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families & Communities / Assistant Professor of Social Welfare, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs
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- Director, UCLA Center for Community Schooling
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- Center Staff Member
- Operations Coordinator, Data Informed Futures
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- Center Staff Member
- Knowledge to Action Director, Data Informed Futures & All Children Thrive
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- Director, Data Informed Futures
Dr. Lisa Stanley, DrPH is the Director for Data Informed Futures at the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families & Communities.
Lisa Stanley has worked in the maternal and child health arena for the past 25 years. Before coming to UCLA, Dr. Stanley worked within the MCH field at the federal and county levels, as well as overseas in West Africa. She has led a variety of community-wide and program-level evaluations, strategic planning initiatives, policy analysis, program management and coalition development with a focus on evidence-based strategies that support children's overall developmental health and school readiness. Dr. Stanley is currently the Project Director for a national effort in the United States called Data Informed Futures which aims to spread and support the use of population level outcome measures focused on child wellbeing. Dr. Stanley led the pilot of the project's anchor measure, the Early Development Instrument (EDI), in 2008 in Orange County CA, adapting the instrument and protocols for a US educational system in collaboration with the EDI Publishers at McMaster University in Canada. Since that time, the EDI, which is filled out by teachers for children 4-6 years of age, has spread to over 90 communities from 18 states and the project has expanded to include an innovative suite of linked population measures that track child wellbeing through 14 years of age. Dr. Stanley manages the Data Informed Futures team which supports local communities with data collection but also provides data reports and GIS mapping products and one-on-one coaching and shared learning opportunities to local leaders to ensure that data is transformed to information and insights that can be effectively used for place-based planning and monitoring. Drawing on her doctoral studies and deep knowledge of population-based metrics, Dr. Stanley has served as a lead partner in three publications using the EDI including the first major predictive validity study of the EDI in the US which found, like in Canada and Australia, that the EDI administered in Kindergarten predicts later standardized test scores for children in math and English language arts in 3rd Grade.
Education and Degree(s)
DrPH, University of California Los Angeles
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- Member of the Advisory Committee
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- Associate Director for Research, UCLA Center for Community Schooling
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- Member of the Steering Committee
- Research Professor of Health and Human Development, Penn State College of Health and Human Development ( Family Node )
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- Professor of Public Policy, Political Science, and Law at UCLA
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- Member of the Steering Committee
- Professor of Pediatrics, University of Chicago ( Prematurity Node )
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- Member of the Advisory Committee
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- Member of the Steering Committee
- Executive Vice Chair for Research
- Executive Vice Chair for Research Training, Department of Medicine, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
Mitchell Wong, MD, PhD, Executive Vice Chair for Research Training, Department of Medicne, Director, CTSI KL2 Program, Executive Co-Director, UCLA Specialty Training and Advanced Research (STAR) Program, Co-Director, UCLA NRSA Primary Care Fellowship, UCLA (School Node)
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- Professor of Pediatrics, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
Job Titles:
- Member of the Steering Committee
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- Member of the Advisory Committee
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- Member of the Advisory Committee
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- Center Staff Member
- Operations Manager
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- Member of the Steering Committee
- Associate Professor in General Pediatrics and Vice - Chair of the Primary Care College, David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA ( School Node )
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- Member of the Advisory Committee
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- Member of the Advisory Committee
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- Senior Project Scientist, Life Course Translational Research Network
Shirley Ann Russ MB ChB (Hons), MPH, MD is the Senior Project Scientist for the HRSA-MCHB funded Life Course Intervention Research Network whose National Coordinating Center (NCC) is at UCLA Center for Children, Families and Communities. Initially trained as a pediatrician in the UK and Australia with a special interest in child development, she implemented and evaluated a statewide hearing screening program for which she was a corecipient of the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation's Research into Practice Award. She served as an Attending Physician at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles achieving the rank of Clinical Professor of Pediatrics. She coedited a Pediatrics Supplement on Improving the System of Care for Infants and Children with Early Hearing Loss, and co-chaired three national NICHQ learning collaboratives with a focus on improving the quality of whole systems of care for children with hearing loss and children with epilepsy across the US. She worked with Neal Halfon on a series of studies related to life course health including considering future directions for the Life Course Health Development approach and on the Life Course Research Network. She authored the chapter on a Life Course Approach to Hearing Health in the Handbook of Life Course Health Development and co-edited the LCIRN Pediatrics Supplement on Life Course Intervention Research.
Education and Degree(s)
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Committee
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- Member of the Steering Committee
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- Member of the Advisory Committee
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- Director, All Children Thrive / Professor of Social Welfare and Doctoral Program Chair, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs
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- Member of the Steering Committee
- Research Associate, Jordan Institute for Families, Research Assistant Professor, School of Social Work, UNC - Chapel Hill ( Measurement Core )
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- Center Staff Member
- National Training and Data Collection Coordinator, Data Informed Futures
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- Member of the Advisory Committee
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- Senior Fellow, UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families & Communities / Co - Founder, Kids Impact Initiative
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- Member of the Steering Committee
- Chief, Division of Developmental Medicine, Boston Children 's Hospital, Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School ( ADHD Node )