The Public Impact Research Awards recognize individuals or teams at UCLA who have made a concerted effort to translate their research or creative activities for public benefit.
2025 Awardees
California Policy Lab
Janey Rountree
Executive Director, California Policy Lab
Till von Wachter
Professor of Economics | Faculty Director, California Policy Lab
The California Policy Lab (CPL) is a nonpartisan research institute that generates research insights for government impact. CPL partners with state and local government agencies to provide them with evidence they can use to inform their decision making and more effectively address the challenges people face. CPL’s research focuses on education, homelessness, criminal justice reform, the social safety net, health, and labor and employment.
CPL has dozens of active research projects in Los Angeles, spanning topics including the impact of time-limited subsidies, incarceration and homelessness, serious mental illness and homelessness, and interim housing. Additionally, CPL developed an artificial intelligence model that LA County uses to identify and help individuals who are at the highest risk of experiencing homelessness.
Labor: CPL has conducted extensive research on unemployment, job training, the minimum wage, and the impact of COVID on labor markets. This research has influenced local, state, and federal policies.
Sharon Gerstel
Professor of Art History | Director, UCLA Stavros of Hellenic Culture | George P. Kolovos Family Centennial Term Chair in Hellenic Studies
Sharon Gerstel is widely recognized for her work in Greek villages, both as a scholar and as an advocate for community empowerment. She has worked on a number of historic preservation projects in villages of southern Greece with the goal of reinvigorating depopulated communities. Her ongoing work with the cooperative of female weavers in Geraki, Laconia, has resulted in an extensive catalog of historic and contemporary kilims, a museum exhibition, and a program for re-branding the village as a site of craft tourism. These efforts are aimed at producing much-needed income and ensuring the settlement’s longevity. For her, inserting the female weavers of this village into a national narrative that is overwhelmingly male and urban is an essential step in reconstructing the totality of Greece’s history.
Catherine Juillard
Professor-in-Residence of Surgery | Marjorie Fine, MD, Endowed Chair in Clinical Surgery | Co-Director, Program for the Advancement of Surgical Equity (PASE) | Director, Trauma/Surgical Critical Care Fellowship
Catherine Juillard is the founding co-Director of the Program for the Advancement of Surgical Equity (PASE) in the Department of Surgery at UCLA, which is a research group that focuses on disparity in access to quality surgical care, both in the United States and globally. PASE has federally funded research initiatives in global health through its primary partnership with the University of Buea in Cameroon that focus on strengthening trauma care, which is a leading cause of death and disability. This 17-year partnership has resulted in improved patient care and significant scientific research capacity building at the University of Buea, supporting Cameroonian faculty and trainees to conduct their own trauma-related research and intervention development and prioritize what they think is most urgent. In Los Angeles, PASE launched the HEaL Trauma program (Heal, Elevate, and Liberate from Trauma) at UCLA Ronald Reagan Hospital. Traumatic injury disproportionately affects black and brown communities and individuals with unfavorable social drivers of health (like low education attainment and being unhoused). The HEaL team connects with patients while they are in the hospital and then continue to work with them for months to years after discharge to heal trauma at its root, reduce risk of reinjury, and improve long-term quality of life.
Stephanie Pincetl
Professor, Institute of the Environment & Sustainability | Director, California Center for Sustainable Communities
Stephanie Pincetl and her California Center for Sustainable Communities (CCSC) have advocated for California’s underserved communities in the state’s clean energy transition for over a decade. In 2013, on the record for the California Public Utilities Commission, CCSC successfully called for the provision of granular energy usage data to research institutions, while preserving privacy, to support the design and evaluation of energy and related policies. As one of several institutions granted access to this data, CCSC has pioneered analysis methods that link utility account information to building characteristics, sociodemographic data, and other spatial attributes, referred to as the UCLA Energy Atlas. The Energy Atlas supports local governments developing climate action and energy reduction efforts, and the identification of priority communities for investments. CCSC’s Energy Atlas enables insights critical to the sustainability of urban systems, including the effects of building size growth on residential energy efficiency and conservation, and the social and structural drivers of energy use. CCSC also works closely with community groups, as well as the California Air Resources Board, Public Utilities Commission, Energy Commission and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, helping to facilitate the city’s equitable and community-driven transition to 100% renewable electricity.
Aradhna Tripati
Professor, Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and Earth, Planetary & Space Sciences | Founding Director, Center for Developing Leadership in Science.
Aradhna Tripati has generated transformative public impact as both a PI on participatory action research and community engagement about climate change, environmental science and stewardship, and science communication, which has been conducted collaboratively with more than 60 community organizations, and through her training of hundreds of students in climate science and environmental science and geochemistry. This work has been done in her research lab over the past 16 years at UCLA, and more recently as the Founding Director of the Center for Developing Leadership in Science (CDLS). She not only researches and teaches about climate and the environment, she advocates fiercely for the communities who are most at risk of displacement due to its impact and who hold knowledge of climate solutions. She has contributed to the co-design of participatory research projects, such as documenting rising temperatures in Los Angeles due to climate change and the impact on this rise in temperature on lower income communities in our city and ways to mitigate heat vulnerability, to GIS for community health.
In other work, she has supported the inclusion of underrepresented groups, from women and women of color, to frontline community members, to queer students to veterans, in STEM research and career training. In total, as a professor, she has supported more than 500 people including students and community members who co-produce knowledge on water and land management, fight for environmental health, and organize for clean air and energy, while launching careers in environmental science.
Terence Keel
Professor, Institute for Society & Genetics and African American Studies | Founder, BioCritical Studies Lab at UCLA
Shocked by the murder of George Floyd yet propelled by the public protests of police violence in 2020, Terence Keel shifted his research focus from religion, history, science, and culture to investigate deaths of individuals in police encounters and in custody. Working with academic colleagues and community partners Dignity and Power Now and JusticeLA, Keel has turned to study how medical examiners-coroners process deaths in custody and their findings tend to naturalize state violence by describing these deaths as due to “preexisting conditions.” Keel’s research group, the BioCritical Studies Lab, involves 40 undergraduate students who analyze laws, policies, and institutions around the country as well as autopsies of those dying in custody to understand this process of naturalization. This research has enabled families and activists to better understand what happens to loved ones dying in custody. Keel has also been involved in drafting laws in California and Maryland and pursuing a lawsuit in Pennsylvania for public transparency, release of records, and independent investigations about deaths in custody. Keel has, to date, coauthored scholarly articles about deaths in LA County jails and police use of pepper spray.
Nicholas Shapiro and the Carceral Ecologies Lab
Nicholas Shapiro
Assistant Professor, Institute for Society & Genetics | Director, Carceral Ecologies Lab
Members of the Carceral Ecologies Lab
Click to view current and past members of the lab
Nicholas Shapiro and his Carceral Ecologies Lab have made a unique and vital public impact stretching over a decade. Deeply rooted in local, national, and global struggles for racial and environmental justice, Shapiro and his lab have developed a sophisticated array of tools to advance health equity. These include timely white papers, mini-documentaries viewed by millions, lawsuits against the LA Sheriff who illegally suppressed public documents, and the development of low-cost instruments to allow those with the highest stakes in environmental justice issues access to the tools of robust scientific knowledge production. Shapiro has additionally collaborated with leading artists to reconceptualize relationships between humans and their environments, as well with local groups in LA focused on environmental and racial justice. From temporarily housing community members in his home to helping to change state and federal policies, Shapiro and his lab exemplify both a tie to the grassroots and high impact stewardship of public discourse around complex and challenging social justice issues. The lab itself also aims to actualize more equitable practices for academic research by recruiting formerly incarcerated and system impacted students, putting those who are most excluded from scientific research at the cutting edge of public impact research.
Steven Shoptaw
Professor of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences and Family Medicine | Director, UCLA Center for Behavioral and Addiction Medicine | Director, UCLA Vine Street Clinic
Steven Shoptaw is a recognized leader in academic research on substance use and, more importantly, a driving force behind the translation of this work to address the needs of communities most heavily impacted by addiction and HIV. He has brought cutting edge research directly to the most underserved and marginalized communities through establishment of a research clinic in Hollywood, a medically underserved area with high rates of substance use and overdose death. He also launched a research mobile clinic in 2020 that brings medication assisted treatment and other health services to those with limited access to transportation and other barriers to care. He leads the Case-based Learning Collaborative on Stimulants which draws physicians, nurses, social workers, and community health workers and provides them with real-world scenarios and evidence-based approaches to treat patients with stimulant use disorders, including contingency management. He has further used his expertise in a collaboration with the LA County Department of Health and local community based organizations to evaluate their use of contingency management to address drug use and unruly behaviors that often interfere with the capacity of individuals to remain in housing. His career serves as a model of socially committed, community-based scholarship.
Tenant Power Toolkit
Hannah Appel
Associate Professor of Anthropology | Associate Director, UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy
Gary Blasi
Professor Emeritus of Law
Ananya Roy
Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography | Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy | Founding Director, UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy
As Covid-19 descended, millions of tenants lost their wages overnight, threatening mass eviction. In an early publication, Professor Gary Blasi estimated that 365,000 renter households in Los Angeles County alone were at risk (Blasi 2020). In response, Professors Appel, Roy and Blasi worked with community partners to launch the Tenant Power Toolkit, an online eviction defense application that helps any California tenant facing a legal eviction to file an Answer with the court. Working with housing justice lawyers, technologists, and community partners, the TPT team coded the regulatory landscape of California’s 580 jurisdictions into a program tenants can easily use on any internet-connected device, in Spanish or English, to assert their jurisdiction-specific defenses. Since the TPT launched in July 2022, more than 8,000 Eviction Answers have been prepared by the Toolkit, allowing ~21,000 California tenants—over a third of them children— to avoid default eviction. The TPT’s backend database provides unprecedented tenant-reported, real-time eviction data by zip code, landlord, tenant race/ethnicity and more. This research-organizing partnership enables tenants to fight their evictions, produces data to support ongoing and new tenant organizing, while also building translocal tenant power at a scale that can contend with the consolidation of rental housing ownership.
UCLA COVID Behind Bars Data Project
Sharon Dolovich
Professor of Law | Faculty Director, UCLA Prison Law and Policy Program | Director, UCLA Law COVID Behind Bars Data Project
Aaron Littman
Assistant Professor of Law | Deputy and Acting Director, UCLA Law COVID Behind Bars Data Project
The UCLA Law COVID Behind Bars Data Project was founded in early 2020, in the first days of the pandemic, to track the impact of COVID on prisons, jails, and other carceral facilities. Sharon Dolovich and Aaron Littman assembled a team of hundreds, including many student and alumni volunteers, to compile and analyze information, and the Project’s work and reports have regularly appeared in media stories about the pandemic and prisons. Initially built around an open-source spreadsheet, the Project grew to have a full-time staff and well over a hundred volunteers. Through web-scraping and public records requests, the Project compiled a comprehensive database of infections, deaths, testing, and vaccinations, an index of prison policy changes, and a clearinghouse of litigation. Prisoner advocates across the country cited the Project’s data in emergency release motions, and journalists from countless media outlets drew on it in their reporting. The CDC relied on the Project’s data, and the U.S. Senate twice invited the Project’s input into its investigations of deaths in custody.
Yousef Bozorgnia
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering | Director, Natural Hazards Risk and Resiliency Research Center
Yousef Bozorgnia has spent decades carrying out impactful research in seismic hazard analysis and earthquake engineering. He has been the principal investigator of multiple sets of large multi-researcher research programs to quantify ground movements during earthquakes. The outcomes of these research programs are used worldwide for seismic analysis and design of a wide spectrum of structures ranging from single-family homes to tall buildings, bridges, power plants, dams, and water and natural gas infrastructure. In the United States, seismic designs in all seismic regions are impacted by the results of the community-based research projects that Bozorgnia has led. These projects provide important databases and models to compute the level of ground shaking during earthquakes. The U.S. Geological Survey adopts these models to generate seismic hazard maps for the entire U.S., which are used by professionals for seismic design and evaluation.
Laura Abrams and Elizabeth Barnert
Laura Abrams
Professor of Social Welfare
Elizabeth Barnert
Associate Professor of Pediatrics
Abrams and Barnert conducted research that helped lead to a minimum age law to protect younger children from juvenile legal involvement. California Senate Bill 439, passed in 2018, excludes children age 11 and under from juvenile court jurisdiction. Advocates have since partnered with Abrams and Barnert to lead other states to pass or consider similar legislation.
Dana Cuff
Professor of Architecture and Urban Design | Founding Director, cityLAB
Cuff is the founding director of cityLAB, an award-winning research center that studies how urbanism and architecture can contribute to a more just built environment. Based on cityLAB studies, Cuff and her team created BruinHub, a “home away from home” at the John Wooden Center for commuter and housing-insecure students. Cuff also co-authored a 2016 bill to advance the implementation of backyard homes in suburbs, and is working on design and legislation for affordable housing to be co-located with public schools.
Alex Hall
Professor of Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences
Hall's research is focused on producing high resolution projections for climate modeling, particularly in California. Hall is also working to understand the future of water resources and wildfires in the state. He co-founded the Climate & Wildfire Institute to champion collaboration between scientists, stakeholders and policymakers in the use of quantitative data on wildfires to shape management efforts in the western United States.
Kelly Lytle Hernández and the Million Dollar Hoods Team
Kelly Lytle Hernández
Thomas E. Lifka Professor of History | Professor of African American Studies and Urban Planning
Danielle Dupuy
Executive Director, Million Dollar Hoods
Million Dollar Hoods Team Members
Led by Kelly Lytle Hernández and Danielle Dupuy, Million Dollar Hoods is a team of university and community-based researchers who document the human and fiscal costs of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. Launched in 2016, the project began by mapping how much is spent per neighborhood on incarceration in Los Angeles County. The MDH maps have been used to advance policy and legislative change. The MDH project has also grown to deploy oral histories, archives, and rapid-response reporting to unmask how much mass incarceration has extracted from Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and working-class communities.
Thomas Smith
Distinguished Professor of ecology & Evolutionary Biology | Founder, UCLA Congo Basin Institute.
As UCLA’s first foreign affiliate branch, the Congo Basin Institute works with organizations and the local government and communities to find solutions to environmental and developmental problems facing Central Africa. Smith is also the founding director of UCLA’s Center for Tropical Research, which has conducted research in 45 countries to understand biodiversity in the tropics.
