Interdisciplinary project co-led by Associate Vice Chancellor Aldana receives grant

A $25,000 grant has been awarded to an ongoing UC Davis interdisciplinary refugee law-health project led by Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Diversity and Professor of Law Raquel Aldana and Dr. Patrick Marius Koga of UC Davis Health.

The UC Davis Academic Senate’s Committee on Research awarded the project, an ongoing collaboration between the UC Davis law and medical schools titled “Transforming Refugee Mental Health: Improving Legal Assessment of Credibility through Science,” a New Research Initiatives and Interdisciplinary Research grant.  

The grant follows two interdisciplinary symposia that brought together more than 70 professionals, including lawyers, mental health providers, researchers and academics, refugee resettlement specialists, and medical professionals, from more than 20 countries. This project led to the publication of the report “Stakeholder Perspectives Report: Focus Group Findings on Migrant Legal-Mental Health Intersectionality.” The grant will support the implementation of some of the most important recommendations from the findings.

Raquel E. Aldana joined UC Davis in 2017. She was a professor at the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, before joining the McGeorge School of Law faculty in 2009. Her scholarship has focused on transitional justice, criminal justice reforms, and sustainable development in Latin America, as well as immigrant rights in the United States. She founded and directed the McGeorge School of Law’s Inter-American Program, which trained bilingual and bicultural lawyers for transnational careers or to work with the growing Latino population in the United States. She served as the school’s associate dean for faculty scholarship, 2013-17.