INRICH Member Profile Card
Neal Halfon
The Feilding School of Public Health and the David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA
Neal Halfon, MD, MPH is founding director of the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families and Communities, and also directs the Child and Family Health Leadership and Training Program in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Dr. Halfon is professor of pediatrics in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA; health policy and management in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health; and public policy in the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.
For more than two decades Dr. Halfon has been instrumental in advancing research, policy and systems innovations focused on the healthy development of children at local, national and international levels. The Center for Healthier Children, Families and Communities has created a new interdisciplinary platform at UCLA to pursue trans-disciplinary research, provided a mechanism to launch significant community-based research, and has spearheaded service and training initiatives. (source: Faculty profile, Feilding School of Public Health, UCLA)
Type of member: Regular
Telephone: 3107940967
Email Address: nhalfon@ucla.edu
Website Address: https://ph.ucla.edu/faculty/halfon
Mailing Address: 10960 Wilshire Blvd Ste 960, Los Angeles, CA 90024
Current research interests
Lifecourse trajectories of inequality, equity from the start, measuring health development and wellbeing at population level,
Research priorities
Pathways and mechanisms: Cumulative and additive social risk exposures (e.g. transient v. persistent poverty). Stress and allostatic load. Social into the biological and epigenetic. | Methodological issues: Need to study social gradients as well as poverty. Multi-level studies - Society, Family & Individual. Which indicators? for example, perception of health vs. objective measures of health (these may be more reliable in studying mechanisms). Root cause analysis to inform policy change.
Selected publications
Schickedanz, A., & Halfon, N. (2020). Evolving Roles for Health Care in Supporting Healthy Child Development. Future of Children, 30(2).
Halfon, N., Aguilar, E., Stanley, L., Hotez, E., Block, E., & Janus, M. (2020). Measuring Equity From The Start: Disparities In The Health Development Of US Kindergartners: Study examines disparities in the health development of US kindergartners. Health Affairs, 39(10), 1702-1709. – Full Text PDF
Halfon, N., Larson, K., Son, J., Lu, M., & Bethell, C. (2017). Income inequality and the differential effect of adverse childhood experiences in US children. Academic Pediatrics, 17(7), S70-S78. – Full Text PDF
Halfon, N., Forrest, C. B., Lerner, R. M., & Faustman, E. M. (2018). Handbook of life course health development. Springer Nature.
profile updated: 11/03/2022