William Vega, PhD, holds USC appointments in social work, preventive medicine, psychiatry and family medicine. He is also emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley and co-directs the Network for Multicultural Research on Health and Healthcare at UCLA.
An elected member of the Institute of Medicine, Vega has conducted community and clinical research projects on health, mental health and substance abuse throughout the United States and Latin America. His specialty is multi-cultural epidemiologic and services research with adolescents and adults — work that has been funded by multiple public and private sources. He has published more than 170 articles and chapters, in addition to several books. The 2006 ISI Web of Science listed him in the top half of 1 percent of the most highly cited researchers worldwide in social science literature over the past 20 years.
Prior to joining the Roybal Institute, Vega was director of the Luskin Center on Innovation at UCLA. In 2002, he received the Society for Prevention Research’s Community, Culture and Prevention Science Award and the National Hispanic Science Network on Drug Abuse’s National Award of Excellence in Research by a Senior Scientist.
Vega has served on numerous boards and task forces, including health disparities work groups of the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Attorney General’s Task Force on Methamphetamine, the Institute of Medicine Board on Population Health, the Committee on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Treatment Effectiveness and the Institute of Medicine Health Disparities Roundtable. He is also a member of the National Institutes of Health Fogarty International Center and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research advisory committees.
