UC Davis hosts second refugee law/health interdisciplinary forum

On Oct. 25, Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Diversity and Professor of Law Raquel E. Aldana and Dr. Patrick Marius Koga of UC Davis Health hosted a second law-health interdisciplinary forum of “Transforming Refugee Mental Health: Improving the Legal Treatment of Refugees and Asylum Seekers through Science.”

The inaugural forum was held in November 2018. Associate Vice Chancellor Aldana and Dr. Koga compiled findings from eight focus groups from last year to present to the 2019 forum participants.

These discussions identify ways in which legal treatment of (re) traumatized refugees and asylum seekers could improve through greater interprofessional knowledge and collaboration among legal and health practitioners and researchers.

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.