Paulette Cha, PhD

Paulette Cha, PhD, is an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality postdoctoral fellow at the USC Schaeffer Center and the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.

Her research focuses on immigrant families with children and their engagement with the social safety net, especially Medicaid. She is also interested in the health of low-income children and other disadvantaged groups in the United States. Prior to her doctoral studies, she managed field evaluations of social policy programs at the nonprofit research organization MDRC and at Innovations for Poverty Action.

Cha earned a BA at Oberlin College, a master’s degree at the University of California, San Diego, and a PhD in health policy, specializing in health economics, at University of California, Berkeley, where she was also a National Institute on Aging-funded trainee in the Department of Demography.