PROJECT: Implementation of a novel tax filing app, Let’s Get Set, to increase receipt of direct cash payments via tax credits for low-income families in community and health care settings.

Cecile Yama is a pediatrician in the UCLA National Clinician Scholars Program and an MSHPM student at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Dr. Yama specializes in caring for children with complex developmental and social needs. She is dedicated to building capacity for financial security in low-income families and children in early childhood, addressing racial and ethnic disparities in health and wealth across the life course.

Dr. Yama’s research focuses on how the economic and built environment shape child health and development. She is interested in how policy approaches, such as cash transfers and tax credits, can reduce structural inequities that drive child health disparities. Dr. Yama’s current projects involve expanding access to tax credits, addressing mortgage discrimination, and supporting safe housing through medico-socio-legal partnerships.

Dr. Yama’s work is motivated in part by her personal and family history. As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who immigrated to the United States through mutual aid, she has firsthand knowledge of how financial support can result in transcendent intergenerational change and upward mobility. Living and training in the immigrant communities of the Bronx has further shaped this lens. Dr. Yama’s history inspires her to study how to scale interventions that meet material needs of families who have been marginalized and position them for intergenerational well-being.