Alana LeBrón (she/her), Ph.D., M.Sc., is Associate Professor in the Department of Health, Society, and Behavior in the Wen School of Population and Public Health and the Department of Chicano/Latino Studies in the School of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. 

She earned her A.B. in Gender and Women’s Studies with a minor in Biology from Bowdoin College, her Master of Science in Public Health (with a concentration in Maternal and Child Health) from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and her Ph.D. in Public Health from the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan, where she collaborated with scholars at the School of Social Work. Currently, she is a Maternal and Child Health Faculty Development Fellow with the National Maternal and Child Health Workforce Development Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a Spark Scholars Fellow with the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.

Dr. LeBrón is a public health scholar with expertise in the health of Latino/Latiné communities. She brings over 18 years of experience working alongside low-income communities of color to understand how policy, systems, and environmental factors shape population and community health. She also partners with communities to identify, implement, and evaluate community-led interventions to promote health. 

Dr. LeBrón’s research has focuses on the environmental health, community-led interventions, Community Health Worker models, and capacity-building and coalition approaches.

Much of Dr. LeBrón’s work is informed by the principles of community-based participatory research (CBPR), which she has learned under the mentorship of her teachers at the Detroit Community-Academic Urban Research Center and Healthy Environments Partnership based in Detroit, Michigan and the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

A third-generation Boricua, Dr. LeBrón enjoys hanging out at the beach, reading, and writing. She lives in Orange County, CA, with her family.