Irene Yen is the principal investigator and director of the HOPe Lab. She received her B.A. from Stanford University and her MPH and PhD from UC Berkeley. She is a social epidemiologist, a public health professor at the University of California Merced and a Robert Wood Johnson Interdisciplinary Research Leadership fellow. Irene's current research is centered on the question of how place influences health. That is, how things like transportation, walkability, the food environment, and socioeconomic status influence health. She is also interested in social policy-health connections and would like to study the role of K-12 education in addressing public health outcomes. You can reach her at iyen@ucmerced.edu