Monica De La Cruz is a PhD student in the UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare. She holds an MPH from the University of San Francisco and a BS from San Francisco State University. Her research interests focus on ways to ameliorate economic inequality as a means to positively impact children’s health, specifically for communities of color. Prior to coming to Berkeley, she was the Program Manager for the Pediatric Advocacy Program at the Stanford School of Medicine. While at Stanford, Monica worked on an interdisciplinary team examining the impact of local interventions on addressing basic needs insecurity (food insecurity, diaper insecurity). She has extensive experience conducting qualitative, community-based participatory research. As a CSSTP fellow, Monica aims to broaden her research skill set and is interested in utilizing large datasets to explore and simulate the longitudinal effects of income support interventions on children’s health. In addition, she aims to draw on critical theory in her scholarship, centering equity and ethics in the research process to reclaim the use of quantitative methods to benefit communities this methodology has traditionally harmed.
Job title:
Computational Social Science Fellow
Department:
Social Welfare
Bio/CV:
Research interests: