Leadership
Colette (Coco) Auerswald, MD, MS (Co-Director)
Dr. Auerswald is a pediatrician and associate professor in Community Health Sciences in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley and is the director of the Masters program for the UCSF-UC Berkeley Joint Medical Program. She has over 20 years’ experience in the clinical care of marginalized youth in San Francisco. She combines ethnographic and social epidemiologic methods to describe the social determinants of the health of marginalized youth to inform structural interventions. She has also developed methodological expertise on the sampling of marginalized populations and in the use of biological outcomes in the study of the social determinants of adolescent health. She has focused her work primarily on the study of homeless youth in the US, street children in East Africa, low-income youth of color, and LGBTQ youth.
Prudence L. Carter, PhD
Dr. Carter is Dean of the Graduate School of Education at Berkeley. As a sociologist, her primary research and teaching agenda focuses on causes of and solutions to enduring social and cultural inequalities in schools and education. Dean Carter’s expertise ranges from issues of youth identity and race, class, and gender, urban poverty, social and cultural inequality, the sociology of education and mixed research methods. Specifically, she examines academic and mobility differences shaped by the effects of race, ethnicity, class, and gender in the United States and global society.
Emily Ozer, PhD (Co-Director)
Dr. Ozer is a clinical psychologist and professor in Community Health Sciences in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. She has extensive experience in multi-disciplinary collaborations to promote positive adolescent development, particularly in youth-led participatory action research (YPAR), civic engagement, violence prevention, and school-based interventions. Dr. Ozer is particularly focused on the promotion of adolescent health through interdisciplinary and multi-method research. Recent efforts involved a multi-method study of an empowerment-oriented participatory research intervention on adolescents attending San Francisco public schools. In her work, she seeks to bridge collaborative-participatory approaches with traditional scientific designs by testing the impact of intentional variation in collaborative processes.