Alana M.W. LeBrón

Alana M.W. LeBrón, Ph.D., M.S., is an Assistant Professor of Public Health and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan School of Public Health, her M.S. in Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and her A.B. 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 research focuses on the (re)production of social inequalities that shape inequities in health and opportunities for intervention to promote health equity. Much of Dr. LeBrón’s scholarship centers on the intersections of race/ethnicity, socioeconomic position, immigrant generation, legal status, and gender with health inequities, with a focus on the health of Latina/o communities.

Current Work:

Dr. LeBrón engages a community-academic partnership approach with several of her research projects that seek to understand and address how racialization processes shape health inequities. Her areas of research include the health equity implications of policies and ideologies pertaining to (im)migration, government-issued IDs, and health care and social service access and utilization. Recently, as part of a community-academic partnership with the (Anti-) Soil Lead Project, Dr. LeBrón has initiated a new research project focused on understanding and addressing the environmental racism. This project seeks to identify the spatial distribution of soil lead throughout a predominantly Latina/o city in Orange County, CA, identify factors that contribute to soil lead in the environment, and identify disparate exposures by race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status. The goal of this work is to inform policy and programmatic interventions to prevent lead exposures in the first place, and to address the impacts of lead exposure for health and health inequities. Dr. LeBrón has published in several public health journals, including Progress in Community Health Partnerships, Ethnicity & Health, Journal of Immigrant & Minority Health, Journal of Healthcare for the Poor and Underserved, and Health Promotion & Practice.

With her scholarship rooted in understanding and addressing racialization processes that are linked with health inequities, Dr. LeBrón leverages several qualitative and quantitative research methods. These methods have ranged from: individual interviews as part of a case study of the health impacts of increasingly restrictive (im)migration policies for Latina/o residents in Detroit, Michigan, to longitudinal examinations of changes in reported discrimination and implications for cardiovascular risk, conducted with the Healthy Environments Partnership; to mystery shopper studies to examine racial bias in carding experiences as part of an evaluation of the Washtenaw ID; and sampling and mapping soil to assess the health impacts of disparate exposure to environmental contaminants.

Research Area Keyword(s):

Structural racism; health inequities; ID policy; immigration policy; environmental racism