Five Los Angeles community health projects led by Dr. Bowen Chung, Dr. Maria Garcia, Dr. Gilberto Granados, Audra Langley and Dr. Jyoti Puvvula were selected by a panel of judges as well as voters from throughout the community to receive funding of $20,000 each.
The funding was provided through the Helping U Help the Community competition, sponsored by UCLA Health and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, to advance collaboration between UCLA faculty and community partners to improve the health and quality of life for residents of Los Angeles and beyond.
Chung is an assistant professor-in-resident in the psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and an attending physician in the department of psychiatry at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. He leads the project Community Partners in Care (CPIC), which has demonstrated that partnered depression care across health and community agencies improves the mental-health quality of life for its clients and reduces the risk factors for homelessness and behavioral-health hospitalizations..
Garcia is an assistant clinical professor of pediatric immunology, allergy and rheumatology and a member of the Immunology Clinic at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and Mattel Children’s Hospital at UCLA. She heads the UCLA Breathmobile, an asthma clinic on wheels that serves public schools in high-risk, urban communities where barriers to specialty asthma care exist. Missed school days and missed work days due to asthma are minimized by treating children at the school site.
Granados, an assistant clinical professor of family medicine at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, leads the Summer Urban Health Fellowship, a health-professional pipeline program that engages family medicine residents and medical, college and high school students to work to improve health and well-being through community-based research, health fairs, shadowing physicians and forming long-term mentorship relationships.
Langley is an a assistant professor in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the UCLA Semel Institute, director of training for the Center for Resiliency, Hope, and Wellness in Schools and chair of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network School Committee. Her program, UCLA Ties for Families, works to reduce barriers to successful adoption of children in foster care who have special needs. UCLA TIES provides pre-placement education and state-of-the-art multidisciplinary services and support for these children and their resource parents.
Puvvula, an associate clinical professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, leads Youth Opportunities for Life Options (YOLO), a comprehensive intervention targeting obesity among inner-city youth. It brings youth, families, schools, academic institutions and community partners together to address the epidemic at the individual level, while advocating for healthier environments.
To learn more about the winners and the competition, go to changemakers.com/ucla.
