Director’s Message

Dear friends and supporters,

Welcome to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research website. 

As we enter a new year, we do so with clarity about who we are and what we stand for. Continuing the vision of our founder Dr. E. Richard “Rick” Brown, our work has always been rooted in the belief that data should be accessible to everyone and never left to “sit on a shelf.” In an uncertain moment like now, that’s never been more relevant. 

It’s hard to look forward without acknowledging how much 2025 tested us: wildfires destroyed homes and neighborhoods across southern California; immigration enforcement tactics caused widespread fear across our cities, states, and country; federal research funding suspensions threatened universities, including UCLA, and disrupted advancements in science; and federal data disappeared from public websites, reminding us how fragile public knowledge can be. These events underscored something essential: when the world around us shifts, our foundations endure.

At the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research (CHPR), we’ve built those foundations on three pillars — democratizing data, producing trustworthy evidence, and strengthening community capacity. These principles have guided us for decades, and they will continue to serve as our north star as we adapt to new challenges and expand the ways we make data meaningful and usable for every community. 

Rick Brown was a fierce advocate for health care reform who founded the CHPR in 1994. He spent many sleepless nights frustrated by the lack of reliable and representative local-level data available to community organizers and advocates working to address the health challenges they witnessed every day. So he dedicated the rest of his career to helping make sure data was used to drive understanding, action, and change. Data don’t belong to institutions — data belong to the people.

More than three decades later, democratizing knowledge is the most powerful way to ensure that information serves everyone, not only those with the resources to access it. It is one of the things that makes the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) so special: When data are open, understandable, and truly accessible, they become tools for advocacy, planning, and community resilience.

But access is not enough. Our second pillar is to produce evidence that is absolutely trustworthy. These evidence-backed insights generated by state-of-the-art methodology help policymakers and advocates in California understand not only the current situation, but more importantly how to improve it. 

And our third pillar — community- and capacity‑building — connects us to the experiences people live through in communities across California every single day. We build capacity through data, tools, and evidence — but none of that is possible without people: our partners, including advocates and community, who bring frontline knowledge of what they are experiencing and what they need, and how we can work together.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) — a milestone that invites us not only to reflect on the strong foundation we’ve built together, but to imagine what comes next for public health data and community partnership in California.

We remain committed to what we do and expanding what we can offer, whether it’s adding new survey questions, oversampling underrepresented communities, conducting follow‑on studies, or supporting reporters, advocates, and policymakers with timely data. If you are considering developing a local or state health survey, please reach out. We are in this together.

CHIS is one cornerstone of the CHPR’s broader work — a wide‑ranging set of research programs, data tools, and community‑driven initiatives that together strengthen the evidence base for decision makers and changemakers across public and private sectors in California and beyond.

I invite you to explore our website to learn more about our programs and growing projects, including the: Health Economics and Evaluation Research Program, Health Equity Program, Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Program, Data Equity Center, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) Data Policy Lab, California Elder Index™, Health Equity Challenge, Long-Term Services and Supports Study, CalSIM, and many more. 

We are standing strong today because of the people who make this work possible — our dedicated staff, our funders and community partners, our advisory boards, our data users and data sharers, the tens of thousands of Californians who take the survey each year. You represent every corner of the state, every culture, every language, every lived experience, and we thank you for sharing your time and your truths.

With gratitude for your partnership and optimism for the years ahead, 

Ninez A. Ponce, PhD, MPP

Director, UCLA Center for Health Policy Research 
Principal Investigator, California Health Interview Survey 
Professor and Fred W. and Pamela K. Wasserman Endowed Chair, Department of Health Policy and Management, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health