PROJECT: Develop a community-level patient education approach to educate immigrant women about their rights to high-quality care and empower them in their own care, and a health care systems audit and feedback approach aimed at designing a quality improvement program within the health care system.

Michelle K. Nakphong is a PhD candidate in Community Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Prior to UCLA, Nakphong’s decade-long work with low-income, marginalized communities in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Bangkok, and on the Thai-Myanmar border showed her the real-life consequences of structural inequities on health. Her research examines how social disparities translate to poorer health care access and lower quality of care with a focus on women and children, particularly immigrants.
As a student, Nakphong has worked on the Research on Immigrant Health and State Policy (RIGHTS) study at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, investigating Latinx and Asian immigrants’ experience of maternity care as well as how they navigate complex intersections of immigration, employment, and health care policies.

Beginning summer 2022, she will be a post-doctoral scholar at UCSF, working on a guaranteed income study for low-income, emerging Black adults.