Gender & Health Justice

Melissa Smith, M.D., is a family medicine physician who has worked in primary care clinics in low-income communities in the US and Central America for three decades. Dr. Smith is the Director of Health Equity Initiatives at UC Santa Barbara, where she co-teaches a seminar on Community-based Participatory Research on health disparities, and is involved in collaborative efforts to address health concerns of historically marginalized communities in Santa Barbara County. She is also a member of UCGHI’s Black Lives Matter Task Force.

Dr. Smith has developed culturally sensitive training programs for community health workers and midwives in Nicaragua and Guatemala, and has been engaged in a Participatory Action Research project focused on maternal health in Mexico. She has served as medical editor and writer for Hesperian Health Guides, who produce widely used public health manuals on community health and empowerment. Dr. Smith is lead author of Hesperian's book, Health Actions for Women: Practical Strategies to Mobilize for Change, which is now translated into six languages and accessed by people around the globe on Hesperian’s open-source digital platform.

Dr. Smith obtained a BA from Harvard University and an M.D. from the University of Washington.

Dr. Sean Arayasirikul (they/them) is an Associate Professor In-Residence in the Department of Health, Society, and Behavior (DHSB) at UCI’s Program in Public Health (PPH). They earned their PhD in Medical Sociology from UCSF. Dr. Arayasirikul’s research is focused on the following lines of inquiry: 1) the examination of health disparities and inequity among sexual and gender minoritized (SGM) communities, particularly trans women and BIPOC communities; 2) the development and implementation science of systems-level, digital health interventions; and 3) liberatory applications of participatory approaches to surveillance and data democratization. They are the PI of an NIAID New Innovator Award (DP2) to measure intersectional stigma among SGM communities of color in the national House and Ballroom Community. As a RWJF Interdisciplinary Research Leader, their community-engaged research project called, "Not One More: Violence at the Intersection of Structural Racism and Transphobia & the Imperative to Value the Lives of Trans Women of Color," will use ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) to measure, characterize, and visualize the magnitude and types of intersectional violence that transgender women of color experience situated in time and place. We will develop a data democratization tool to engage public health and policy stakeholders to increase protections and structural accountability for trans and gender expansive communities.

Dr. Arayasirikul is deeply committed to teaching and mentorship as a community-grounded scholar, having come from the communities they collaborate with and serve in their research. They are especially proud to be the MPI of SHINE Strong (www.weshinestrong.org), the first NIMH-funded undergraduate training program to develop the next generation of HIV prevention scientists with expertise in trans and nonbinary population health. They are a Co-Investigator on research projects to advance health equity among trans women in Nepal, New Orleans, Louisiana, and young SGM men in Brazil.

Jennifer Wagman earned her PhD in Reproductive, Perinatal and Women’s Health and her Master’s degree of Health Science in International Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; and a Bioethics and Health Policy Certificate from the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. Her postdoctoral training, completed at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, was in alcohol and substance use, HIV and related infections. Since 2000, Dr. Wagman has collaborated with the Rakai Health Sciences Program to: examine the relationship between intimate partner violence (IPV), reproductive health and HIV infection; create protocols for safe and ethical research on interpersonal violence; and lead intervention research to find effective, combination IPV and HIV prevention approaches in rural Uganda. More recently, Dr. Wagman expanded her research in Uganda to focus on the epidemiology of alcohol use and its association with IPV and HIV transmission, and throughout sub-Saharan Africa to examine the science of implementing proven successful violence and HIV prevention approaches. In California, Dr. Wagman leads UC Speaks Up, a public health research project to address and prevent sexual assault and dating violence on three University of California campuses. Since 2016, she has been the Director of Violence Prevention Research with the 10-campus UC Global Health Institute Center for Gender & Health Justice.

Dallas Swendeman is an Associate Professor in the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences in the David Geffen School of Medicine. He is an applied social and behavioral scientist whose work focuses on multi-level interventions at the intersection of empowerment, prevention, self-management and mobile and social media technologies. Dr. Swendeman has multi-disciplinary training in psychological and medical anthropology, sociology, organizational studies, epidemiology and community health sciences (public health).

Over the past 20 years, he has led and supported projects developing, testing, adapting and scaling up evidence-based interventions for HIV prevention, substance abuse, self-management and empowerment with youth, sex workers, and persons living with HIV. More recently, Dr. Swendeman's work has focused on mobile health ("mHealth") using text-messaging, interactive voice response, smartphone applications and social media for research and intervention. In particular, his work explores mixed-methods research and context sensing mobile technologies with adolescents and parents, mobile applications to support home visiting community health workers to address pre- and post-natal support and for sex workers around HIV/STD prevention. His work has been conducted with community-based partners in the U.S., India, and South Africa.

Ushma Upadhyay, PhD, MPH is Associate Professor at UCSF and a public health Social Scientist at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH). She is also Co-Director of the University of California Global Health Institute’s Center for Gender & Health Justice. Dr. Upadhyay was born and raised near Boston, Massachusetts. As a person of South Asian descent, primarily raised by her mother who immigrated to the U.S. from Tanzania, she is drawn to reproductive health from a social justice perspective. Dr. Upadhyay has expertise in abortion safety, abortion access in the U.S., medication abortion, and state-level abortion restrictions. Her current research focuses on the safety, efficacy, and acceptability of telehealth for abortion care and how telehealth can increase reproductive equity. She has developed and validated two measures: the Reproductive Autonomy Scale and the Sexual and Reproductive Empowerment Scale for Adolescents and Young Adults, both of which researchers can use to quantitatively measure individual-level power in reproductive outcomes. She co-authored Family Planning: A Global Handbook for Providers, a Johns Hopkins/WHO/USAID publication. She earned a BA in Public Communication and International Studies from American University, her MPH from Columbia University, and her PhD from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.