ERI Waverley Street Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar 2025-2026
Pronouns: she/her
Email: enwankwo@usc.edu

PhD, Community Health Sciences, University of California Los Angeles
MPH, Health Behavior and Health Education, University of Michigan
BS, Health Education, San Francisco State University

Headshot of USC Equity Research Institute's 2023 National Equity Atlas Postdoctoral Scholar Dr. Ezinne Nwankwo, a Black woman with braided hair tied half-up, wearing a dark blazer, smiling

Dr. Ezinne Nwankwo is ERI’s Waverley Street Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar 2025-2026. She was previously ERI’s National Equity Atlas Postdoctoral Fellow 2023 and a graduate of UCLA with her doctorate in Community Health Sciences. Ezinne’s research examines how systemic exclusions and structural inequities shape health outcomes across populations and places. Her recent work includes an analysis of health insurance coverage among Black immigrant adults and an examination of how county-level sociopolitical contexts influence population health, including birth outcomes.

As the National Equity Atlas Postdoctoral Fellow at ERI, Ezinne contributed to the Black in the Bay research series and led a timely publication on workforce equity among Black workers in the Bay Area. In her new role, she will support ERI’s community-engaged research, conduct quantitative analyses on climate equity, and translate her research into academic papers and reports. Ezinne has experience working on interdisciplinary teams and will draw on her public health, sociology, and demography training to focus on environmental and climate justice issues. She believes her work will show that climate equity and immigrant inclusion are essential to population health.

Research Interests:
Structural determinants of health; Immigrant inclusion; Climate equity.

Publications:

  1. Nwankwo E and Sudhinaraset, M. The influence of county contexts on preterm births among Latina mothers in the US. Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, 2025, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40615-025-02400-1.

 

  1. Nwankwo, E and Pastor, M. When the color line meets the borderline: Health insurance coverage among Black immigrant adults in the US. Health Affairs, 2025, 44(3), pp.296-303. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2024.00672.

 

  1. Nwankwo E and Sudhinaraset, M. Context matters: Placing the sociopolitical context into research on enclave-health effects and immigration enforcement. Social Science & Medicine, 2024 Dec 21:117653. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.117653.

 

  1. Nwankwo E, Choi HY, Li S, Sudhinaraset, M. Everyday violence: Immigration enforcement, COVID-19, and depression among undocumented young adults in California. Ethnicity & Disease, 2024; 34(2): 84–92. https://doi.org/10.18865/ed.34.2.84.

 

  1. Nwankwo E, Choi HY, Ro A, Sudhinaraset M. A rapid assessment of the health, social, economic, and legal risks and potential socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19 on undocumented young adults in California. AAPI Nexus. 2023;20(1). https://bit.ly/FA2023_Nwankwo_etal.