William A. Vega is a Professor of Family Medicine, UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, and received his B.A. in sociology, and masters and doctoral degree in Criminology from U.C. Berkeley in 1971. Currently Dr. Vega is Director of the Luskin Center on Innovation at UCLA, and Co-Director of the Network for Multicultural Research on Health and Healthcare-UCLA. He is Emeritus Professor of Public Health, U.C. Berkeley, and an elected member of the Institute of Medicine, National Academies of Science. Dr. Vega has conducted community and clinical research projects on health, mental health, and substance abuse in various regions of the United States and Latin America. His specialty is comparative epidemiologic and clinical services research with adolescents and adults. He has published over 170 articles and chapters on these topics, in addition to several books. Dr. Vega was cited in ISIHighlyCited.com Web of Science in 2006 in the top one-half of one percent of most highly cited researchers in the social science literature world-wide in the past 20 years. In 2002, Dr. Vega was awarded the Culture, Community, and Prevention Science Award by the Society for Prevention Research, and the National Award for Excellence in Research by a Senior Scientist by the National Hispanic Science Network. Dr. Vega is past president of the National Latino Council on Tobacco and Alcohol Prevention, and a founding member of the International Consortium of Psychiatry Epidemiology of the World Health Organization, and a member of the Institute of Medicine- Board of Population Health and Publich Health Practice and the IOM Ethnic Health Disparities Roundtable, a Council Member of the Fogarty International Center -NIH, a member of the National Advisory Committee for Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research, RWJ Foundation, and was Director of the Scientific Advisory Board for the RWJF-PEW 2007-2008 National Latino Health Survey.
