Alana M. W. Lebrón

Alana M.W. LeBrón, PhD, MS, is an associate professor of Public Health and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan School of Public Health, her MS in Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and her AB in Gender and Women’s Studies from Bowdoin College. She completed her postdoctoral research fellowship at the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan.

Dr. LeBrón’s program of research examines how structural racism shapes racial/ethnic inequities in chronic conditions. Specifically, her scholarship examines how policy, systems, and environmental factors shape racial/ethnic health inequities and evaluates community-level interventions designed to remedy unequal systems and mitigate health inequities. Leveraging qualitative and quantitative methods, she examines the effects of immigration and immigrant policies, government-issued ID policies, environmental racism, and health care inequalities on health inequities among predominantly Latina/o, immigrant, and low- to moderate-income communities. Much of her scholarship involves community-based participatory research, working in partnership with members of affected communities to strengthen understanding of the ways in which structural racism shapes health inequities and to develop and evaluate strategies to advocate for structural change, mitigate the health impacts of structural racism, and create new systems to promote health equity.