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Abraham Renteria-Ramirez, BA
Prior to joining BHHI, Abraham worked as a legal intern with Sin Fronteras, an organization based in Mexico City providing legal assistance to migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, and their families as well as helping individuals secure access to medical, educational, employment, and housing resources. He has also worked providing nutritional resources to underserved communities in his hometown of Watsonville, California. He graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a BA in Sociology. Today, he continues to work as a volunteer translator for the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project.
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Angelica DeGaetano, LLM
Angelica is a researcher with an interdisciplinary background in anthropology, sociology, international relations, and law. After working in direct service for many years, she worked in multiple research settings before joining CVP/BHHI—including three years conducting public opinion research to advance policy on a range of issues. She looks forward to continue informing policy and practice recommendations as a researcher with CVP/BHHI. Angelica holds an LL.M from the University of Essex and an M.Phil from the University of Oxford.
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Corbin Platamone, MPH
Prior to joining BHHI, Corbin served as an IQ shelter supervisor for the Santa Cruz County Health and Human Services Department, and as an EMT in the Bay Area. Corbin recently graduated from UCLA with a Master of Public Health in Epidemiology, where he spent considerable time studying the relationship between maternal health and child outcomes. He looks forward to applying his experiences in epidemiology and emergency medicine to improve health outcomes within vulnerable populations and to promote sustainable housing for all.
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Gina Sakoda, BS
Gina is a research data analyst with BHHI. Previously conducting interviews and managing data quality for the CA Statewide Study of Homelessness (CASPEH), Gina now works as a quantitative researcher on a CDSS Home Safe program evaluation, and co-coordinates the statistics and data science team at BHHI. Gina spent over 5 years in direct service provision for folks who are unhoused in the East Bay, most recently as a street outreach worker in Downtown Oakland, and is interested in the intersections of structural inequity, the environment, and homelessness. Gina graduated from UC Berkeley with a BS in Bioengineering and a
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Kim Nguyen, ScD, MPH
Dr. Nguyen is an epidemiologist and health services research scientist with 12+ years of experience in academic and healthcare settings, with expertise in health equity, population health/chronic disease prevention, and digital health/informatics. Her research focuses on the influence of social, structural, and geographic determinants on chronic disease and other health outcomes among vulnerable populations and their contribution to health inequities. She is particularly interested in leveraging electronic health records for health equity and place-based research. In collaboration with academic researchers and clinical leaders, Kim uses both qualitative and quantitative methods to better understand and address inequities in critical public health
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Layan Kaileh, MSW
Layan Kaileh is a Project Manager for the Advance Care Planning in Permanent Supportive Housing Project (ACP-PSH) at BHHI and was previously the Operations Manager for the California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness (CASPEH). Prior to joining BHHI, Layan led various research projects including the Demographic Survey as part of the PIT Count in LA County. Layan has a passion for our unhoused neighbors across the nation and strives to understand the barriers and solutions. Working with many populations, she believes that housing is a human right, and hopes to capture individual's voices through research to inform best policies
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Margaret Handley, PhD, MPH
Dr. Margaret Handley is a public heath-trained epidemiologist in the Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and Medicine. She is core faculty at the Center for Vulnerable Populations and at the Benioff Housing and Homelessness Initiative. Dr. Handley’s research focuses on bridging the fields of primary care, public health, and health communication for improving health outcomes and equity. She co-directs the UCSF PRISE Center, Partnerships for Research in Implementation Science for Equity) which focuses on applying implementation science methods to meet the challenges of inequitable health and health care. At BHHI she is one of the Principal Investigators along with Drs
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Margot Kushel, MD
Margot Kushel, MD, is Professor of Medicine at UCSF, Division Chief of the Center for Vulnerable Populations, and Director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center (ZSFG). Her research focuses on reducing the burden of homelessness on health through examining efforts to prevent and end homelessness and mitigating its effects on health care outcomes. Margot is a primary care physician at ZSFG’s Richard H. Fine People's Clinic. A leading homelessness researcher, her research has been funded by the NIH, government, and foundations. Margot is quoted frequently in the press. She provides
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Sara Colom Brana, PhD
Prior to accepting the role with BHHI, Sara worked as a data scientist/statistician at Methods Consultants of Ann Arbor where she performed data/statistical analysis for various clinical research studies. She also worked as a research coordinator at Michigan Medicine where she contributed to the Infant Driven Feeding initiative aimed at improving the quality and quantity of oral feeds in premature babies. Sara obtained her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and certificate in Data Science at the University of Michigan, where she gained expertise in statistical programming, inferential/descriptive statistics, research design, data wrangling/transformation, data visualization, and machine learning techniques.