Sharon Tafolla, MPH, MSPH, is a doctoral student in the Public Health graduate program at UC Merced. Her research focuses on understanding the role of immigration policies, such as immigration enforcement and the U visa, on Latino and immigrant health. Most of the projects she has worked on use either or both quantitative and qualitative approaches to assess the impacts of policy to health. For her dissertation, Sharon will be examining the relationship between organization capacity and quality and health care access among victims of intimate partner violence and will assess differences across health disparity populations.
She is currently the study coordinator for the Policies Influencing Rural Latino Health (PIRLH) study. Prior to joining the program, Sharon was a policy and budget specialist at the California Department of Public Health. She earned her bachelor's degree in exercise biology and minored in Spanish at UC Davis. She also obtained a Master of Public Health with a concentration in health policy and leadership at the University of San Francisco where she has also served as an adjunct faculty member.
