Public Health Grad Student Selected for Prestigious Award

Second-year public health Ph.D. student Sarina Rodriguez was named as a Health Policy Research Scholar by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The HPRS program supports doctoral students from underserved and underrepresented demographics and brings together students from various fields to apply their expertise to policies that advance equity and health. According to the foundation’s website, the leadership program connects “changemakers across the country — from diverse professions and fields — to learn from and work with one another in creating more just and thriving communities.”

Rodriguez, who works with Professor Maria-Elena Young, is studying how various sectors of policy and systemic oppression impact the health and safety of farmworkers and farmworker communities.

Rodriguez plans to focus on the health of Indigenous farmworkers in the Central Valley. She will study patterns of settler colonialism and racialized capitalism in labor, economic, environmental and immigration policy sectors. By working alongside Indigenous farmworkers and farmworker organizations, she hopes to provide a conceptual framework that builds on work within the public health field theorizing these modes of systemic oppression as determinants of health.

“I feel honored to be receiving this award. As the second student at UC Merced to receive it, I see an opportunity for our university be a leader in equitable health policy research that can promote and serve our communities,” Rodriguez said.