Transitions -- Oct. 28, 2008
Dr. William A. Vega has been appointed the founding director of the Luskin Center for Innovation. The Luskin Center will conduct world-class
research on major urban issues in Los Angeles. Through the center, faculty and students will participate in civic engagement partnerships, generating new knowledge for social action and problem resolution and transferring it to local communities. The center is named for Meyer Luskin, whose vision and generosity make its launch possible.
Dr. Vega’s academic focus is comparative, multi-ethnic research in adolescent and adult health. A Los Angeles native, he joined the UCLA faculty as a professor of family medicine in 2007 and co-founded with Dr. Michael Rodriguez the national Multicultural Research Network on Health and Healthcare to improve quality of care for chronic disease among underserved populations.
Before joining UCLA, he was a professor of psychiatry at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and research director of University Behavioral HealthCare, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. From 1990 to 1999, he was a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, where he pioneered the building of community-based research partnerships, served as head of social and behavioral science and was the founding director of the U.C. Berkeley Center for Community Health in East Oakland. During this time, he also launched a 10-year city-wide study of child-adolescent development in Miami.
Dr. Vega was recently elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine. The 2006 ISI Web of Science listed him in the top half of one percent of cited authors worldwide in the social sciences. He sits on the board of the NIH Fogarty International Center and the advisory board of the Robert Wood Johnson Health Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research. He has served on numerous boards and task forces, including NIH health disparities work groups, the U.S. Attorney General’s Task Force on Methamphetamine, the Institute of Medicine Board on Population Health, the Committee on PTSD Treatment Effectiveness and the IOM Health Disparities Roundtable.
