Public Voices Fellowship on Homelessness

Ryan Assaf, PhD, MPH (he/him), is a postdoctoral fellow with the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative under the Center for Vulnerable Populations. He received his PhD and MPH in epidemiology from UCLA. His research has focused on HIV/STIs, substance use, overdose, harm reduction, and sexual health particularly among populations that are historically marginalized. He is also interested in research that understands how social, structural, and political factors influence health and health behaviors. Currently, Ryan is working with data from the California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness to describe substance use, treatment, and non-fatal overdose experiences in this population. Additionally, Ryan has worked or volunteered with various community-based organizations throughout his career and currently volunteers with Homeless Youth Alliance’s needle exchange program in San Francisco.

Dalma Diaz, MA (she/her) is a health equity fellow at the California Health Care Foundation, where she works with the Advancing People-Centered Care team to improve care delivery and outcomes for Californians experiencing homelessness, particularly those with complex health needs who have not been well served by the status quo.

Prior to joining CHCF, Dalma was the strategic initiatives manager for the Home For Good initiative launched by United Way of Greater LA in 2010 to end homelessness in Los Angeles County. Most recently, her work at United Way focused on supporting cross-sector collaboration at the intersection of health and homelessness. She began her career focused on the education sector and later made homelessness her central focus. Dalma received a bachelor’s degree in political science from UCLA and a master’s degree in urban education policy from Brown University."

Jesica has experience with low-barrier shelters, harm reduction services, political action, national housing collaboration and awareness steps, regular local letters to the editor and OpEds, participation in multi-platform media interviews, and more. She attends regular City and County meetings to help bring awareness to local needs and to encourage the role of policymakers in helping mitigate unintentional enabling circumstances brought on by poor policy. Recent run for City Council in 2022.

She considers herself to be a Bridge Builder between people of differing values who hold various interpretations of current needs regarding housing access and policies, causes of homelessness and contributing factors, and deficits in essential resources. She offers and considers ideas around addressing these common concerns.

Jesica strongly believes that common concerns are experienced by the majority, and a redirect and reframing of needs vs problem-solving steps will benefit everyone in the end. With narrative change and shared information, we can unite as a nation to greatly reduce homelessness occurrences universally. 

Prior to joining BHHI, Kara worked as an Assistant Professor at Ohio State University, where she conducted research on how race and neighborhood affect people’s daily lived experiences of food access in urban cities. An educator and social justice practitioner, Kara has taught in college, high school, prison, transitional living facilities, and drug recovery centers. She holds master’s and doctoral degrees in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Brown University.

Maria Raven, MD, MPH (she/her), is a Professor of Clinical Emergency Medicine, the Chief of Emergency Medicine at UCSF Medical Center, and a Vice Chair of the Emergency Medicine Department at UCSF. She is an Associate Director at the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative (BHHI), where she co-directs COORDINATE HOME, BHHI’s quantitative data arm, and is an Affiliate Faculty at the UCSF Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies. Prior to joining the UCSF faculty in 2011, Dr. Raven completed her residency and a CDC-funded research fellowship at NYU/Bellevue Hospital Center. There, she worked on projects with the New York State Department of Homeless Services and State Medicaid.

In addition to working clinically in the Emergency Department at UCSF, Maria speaks locally and nationally about caring for complex populations, frequent emergency department users, and the link between homelessness and health. She has published and peer-reviewed extensively on these and other topics. Dr. Raven was the Co-Principal Investigator for the San Francisco Whole Person Care Pilot evaluation, which focused on improving care for chronically homeless high users of health and social care services. She was also the lead evaluator for a Santa Clara County Pay for Success program providing permanent supportive housing for chronically homeless frequent users of the County health system and jail. She is co-editor of the first Social Emergency Medicine textbook and is currently working on multiple funded initiatives to improve care for individuals with substance use disorders in emergency departments, including the use of naltrexone for alcohol use disorder.

Her lived experience of homelessness makes her a subject matter expert intent on building compassion, disrupting status-quo systems, and helping sector leaders clarify our local community’s understanding of the root causes and scope of homelessness. She is an active advocate for ending homelessness and is passionate about improving the quality of life for unsheltered individuals. Claudine serves on the Santa Clara County Continuum of Care (CoC) Governance Board, the Santa Clara County Lived Experience Advisory Board, and as the Northern California Co-Chairman of the Statewide Lived Expertise Advisory Board. 

In her spare time, Claudine enjoys drinking locally roasted coffee and being out in nature, whether off-roading or overlanding in her Jeep.

Dr. Smith-Bernardin holds a doctorate from the University of California-San Francisco School of Nursing, a Master’s from Western University of Health Sciences, and a Bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College. 

Leslie W. Suen, MD, MAS (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the UCSF Division of General Internal Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH), where she works as a primary care and addiction medicine physician and health services/policy researcher. Her research focuses on using mixed methods research and implementation science to improve health systems, policies, and outcomes for people who use drugs. She completed medical school, Primary Care Internal Medicine (UCPC) residency training, and the National Clinician Scholars Program research fellowship at UCSF. In 2022, she was selected as a UCSF Learning Health Systems K12 Scholar, a highly prestigious and competitive early career grant, to support her work in evaluating health outcomes for people using fentanyl and initiating buprenorphine treatment. In her clinical time, she works as a primary care physician at the SFGH Richard Fine People’s Clinic and as an addiction treatment clinician at the Outpatient Buprenorphine Induction Clinic and the SFGH Addiction Care Team.