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Maria-Elena De Trinidad Young

Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Health

Maria-Elena De Trinidad Young, PhD, MPH is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Health. She received her MPH from the University of California, Berkeley and PhD in Community Health Sciences from the University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to joining the faculty, she was a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Merced. She is a scholar of immigrant health and her research seeks to understand the impact of the US immigration system on the well-being of immigrants and their families. Her studies look at the disparities in health and health care access between US citizens and noncitizens. She examines how federal, state, and local policies that authorize surveillance, policing, and deportation of noncitizens exacerbate these disparities; as well as how policies that extend the social safety net can reduce these disparities. One of her recent studies shows that states with anti-immigrant policies have worse disparities in health care access between US citizens and noncitizens. In another study she found that news coverage of immigration policy focuses primarily on anti-immigrant policies, suggesting that media coverage of policy may play a role in driving health disparities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she has been conducting research on the health and economic impact of the pandemic on Latino families in rural regions of California. She mentors and works with Public Health doctoral students who are also pursuing research on the various impacts of immigration policy on immigrant populations. In her free time she loves reading novels and short stories.