Please join us for our second seminar of the Spring 2026 Public Health Speaker Series! Dr. Alina Schnake-Mahl will present on "Policy as context: complicating and clarifying policy exposures and their effects on health and health equity."
Light refreshments will be provided!
- Date: Wednesday, March 4
- Time: 12:00pm - 1:30pm
- Location: COB2 - 392
- (Zoom available upon request. Please email Stephanie Lopez, slopez146@ucmerced.edu for zoom link)
About the Speaker
- Assistant Professor, Urban Health Collaborative & Department of Health Policy and Management, Dornsife School of Public Health, Drexel University
Alina Schnake-Mahl, ScD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor in the Urban Health Collaborative and the Department of Health Policy and Management at Drexel's Dornsife School of Public Health. She is a social epidemiologist and health services researcher, and her primary research interest is in the social and political determinants of health inequities. Her current work aims to identify the compositional and contextual features of places — including neighborhood factors, social policies, and governance structures — that are associated with health disparities. Her policy work focuses on social (e.g immigration ) and occupational (e.g. paid leave, heat safety) policies. She uses a combination of descriptive and causal methods to identify and inform policies and interventions that can mitigate health inequity. Recent key projects include using policy surveillance methods to map sanctuary policies and 287g agreements at the state and local level and estimate impacts on safety-net program enrollment and birth outcomes; advancing methods for rigorous policy measurement and causal inference, and integrating consideration of state preemption in quasi-experimental analysis; examining effects of paid leave on hospitalization outcomes.
Dr. Schnake-Mahl earned a ScD and MPH in social epidemiology from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Before joining the faculty, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Drexel Urban Health Collaborative and previously worked in applied population health research and evaluation.
