Efren Aguilar

efren aguilar serves as the Director of the Early Childhood Ecosystems Transformation Accelerator Lab at UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families & Communities (CHCFC). His work emphasizes the democratization of data and inclusion of local residents in developing: 1) community-based planning efforts; 2) actionable research; and 3) place-based funding decisions as core strategies to achieve health equity. His professional experience runs a broad range of issues including social justice, homelessness, supporting displaced political refugees, domestic violence, education, public health, and life course development. He is an autodidact and polymath with over 25 years of field work experience.
 
efren also serves a role at the Center providing technical assistance on population measures and their community contexts through the development of whole-child equity measurement systems. Integrating valid population measures with ecosystem contextual data, efren has pioneered new measurement approaches. His innovations have identified ethnoracial equity gaps that start in the earliest periods of human development, and have also quantified and revealed population level resilience patterns at the neighborhood level. He has served as a technical advisor to the New York Academy of Medicine East Harlem Action Collaborative for Child Health and Well-being Initiative and supported the UCLA Iris Cantor Women’s Center’s Reproductive Health and Environment Mapping Assessment Project (RHE-MAP).