Leadership
Julianna Deardorff, PhD
Dr. Deardorff is Associate Professor and Program Head of the Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health program at the Berkeley School of Public Health and the King Sweesy and Robert Womack Endowed Chair in Medical Science and Public Health. She is project director for the HRSA-funded MCH Center of Excellence at UC Berkeley. An adolescent psychologist by training, her research focuses on sexuality, culture, and adolescent reproductive health, including health outcomes in adolescence and adulthood. She leads a longitudinal study of young Mexican Americans’ health and mental health in an agricultural setting in California and is currently examining the contribution of family contextual factors, cultural context and girls’ sexual and mental health outcomes.
Erin Murphy-Graham, EdD, MSc
Dr. Murphy-Graham is Associate Adjunct Professor of the Berkeley Graduate School of Education. She leads research on an alternative rural education program (the Sistema de Aprendizaje Tutorial) in Honduras; the links between schooling, agency, and child marriage; and on the question of what kind of education can contribute toward girls’ and women’s empowerment. Her book, Opening Minds, Improving Lives: Women’s Empowerment in Honduras and research of over twelve years in Honduras brought her to begin studying child marriage. Her most recent work in Honduras has also included design-based research on an intervention to address child marriage and adolescent pregnancy.
Ndola Prata, MD, MSc
Dr. Prata is the Director of the Bixby Center for Population, Health & Sustainability, Co-Director of Center of Expertise on Women’s Health, Gender, and Empowerment, a Professor in Residence in Maternal and Child Health and the second holder of the Fred H. Bixby Endowed Chair in Population and Family Planning in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. She is a physician and medical demographer from Angola. She earned her medical degree from the University of Angola and an MSc in medical demography from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She practiced medicine in Angola for 10 years and served as head of the Social Statistics Department at the National Institute of Statistics of Angola. Shortly after moving to the US to begin her tenure as a researcher and lecturer at UC Berkeley, she also served as a demographer/analyst for the Centers for Disease Control's Division of Reproductive Health for six years, a role she resumed briefly from 2010 to 2011.
Her research focuses on the design, implementation, and evaluation of maternal, sexual and reproductive health interventions that maximize distribution and financing to increase access to care, contraceptives and abortion in developing countries, particularly for underserved populations. Her projects investigate strategies for harnessing existing resources, including human capacity and health care infrastructure while also gathering evidence for setting priorities on national health agendas. She leads research and programs for youth that seek to understand how interventions influence adolescent girls’ outcomes and to empower girls to make healthy choices. In addition to her current research in sub-Saharan Africa, Dr. Prata has conducted projects in Latin America and Central and South Asia.