Emerging Scholars Exchange Program: Michelle Nakphong, PhD

A long history of structural racism in the US including residential segregation and discriminatory lending has set the conditions under which low-income Black young adults are entering adulthood and establishing health over the life course. In this talk, Dr. Nakphong will discuss the legacies of structural exclusion among low-income Black young adults, their impacts on anxiety, depression, and hope, and guaranteed income as a potential inclusive policy solution. She will share mixed methods evidence from the Black Economic Equity Movement (BEEM) Project, an NIH-funded waitlist-controlled guaranteed income trial among low-income Black young adults in the San Francisco Bay Area. We find that participants navigate hidden yet multiple, overlapping experiences of housing instability which have implications for mental health difficulties. For many, mental health services are unable to meet their needs because participants consider structural factors to be core issues and that providers lack cultural competence. She will also share emerging findings on the impacts of guaranteed income on mental health and housing outcomes, as well as new research on participants’ interactions with the consumer credit system.

Speaker

Michelle Nakphong, PhD

Assistant Professor, Medicine, University of California, San Francisco

Dr. Michelle Nakphong, PhD (she/her) is a social epidemiologist whose research focuses on how social exclusion and inclusive policies impact the health of marginalized populations. Building on over 2 decades of community-based policy advocacy work, she strives to amplify voices from low-income and minoritized communities and illuminate structural drivers of health. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the UCSF Division of Prevention Science and is focusing on the health impacts of guaranteed income—an inclusive policy—in the Black Economic Equity Movement (BEEM) Guaranteed Income trial. She received her BA in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University in 2003 and her PhD from UCLA in Community Health Sciences in 2022.

The Emerging Scholars Exchange Program is a collaborative program with peer universities developed to provide professional development opportunities for early career faculty. Conceived by the Faculty Development Committee at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Healthcare Policy & Innovation (IHPI), the Exchange Program is a collaboration between IHPI, Penn LDI, and UCSF’s Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies.