Fabiola Perez-Lua, MSPH is a Public Health Ph.D. student at UC Merced and coordinates the CLIMA Study. She grew up in an immigrant farmworker household in the Central Valley before heading to the University of California, Santa Barbara to complete her undergraduate studies in Biological Anthropology. After graduating, Fabiola worked at UCSB supporting pre-dominantly students of color and their academic and mental wellbeing, where she gained a birds-eye view of the omnipresent impacts of citizenship and immigration status on these students and their families. Later, she worked in an ophthalmology department, where, again, she noticed the overarching impacts of citizenship status on immigrants' access to eye care. Fabiola made the decision to attend UC Merced with the goal of merging her interests in disease outcomes and her passion for social justice to center the health of marginalized communities in public health research. More specifically, Fabiola is interested in exploring how the intersection of workplace conditions (exposures, injuries), policy (regulatory agencies; labor protections; immigration policy), and citizenship status shape farmworker health and the health of their families.

Kesia Garibay, MSP is a Public Health Ph.D. student at UC Merced who focuses on health policy. She received her B.A. in Public Health from UC Merced. Her research interests include the impact of health policy on underserved communities and understanding how policy addresses health disparities. She is currently a part of the Community Health and Innovative Policy (CHIP) Lab, where she is understanding how to advance telehealth implementation for low-income Californians in response to COVID-19. Kesia is a Graduate Student researcher for the Aliados Por La Salud Study, where she is evaluating what community-level supports and resources are needed to promote COVID-19 testing in rural and urban Latinx communities.

Sharon Tafolla, MPH, is a doctoral student in the Public Health Ph.D. program at UC Merced. Her research focuses on public health policy and the role of immigration policy on Latinx and immigrant health. As a graduate student researcher working under her advisor Maria-Elena De Trinidad Young, Sharon focuses on analyzing the impact of local, state, and federal policies, such as immigration enforcement, on Asian and Latinx immigrant health. Current projects include describing immigration policy implementation in rural and underserved areas and also analyzing the role of immigration policy climates on distrust.

Prior to joining the program, Sharon was a policy and budget specialist at the California Department of Public Health Center for Healthy Communities. She earned her undergraduate degree in Exercise Biology and minored in Spanish at UC Davis. She also obtained a Master of Public Health with a concentration in Health Policy and Leadership at the University of San Francisco where she has also served as an adjunct faculty member.