Kimberly Narain, MD, PhD, MPH

Assistant Professor-in-Residence, UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine
Nonresident Fellow, USC Schaeffer Center

Kimberly Narain, MD, PhD, MPH's Bio

Dr. Kimberly Narain’s primary research focus involves investigating the implications of social, economic and health policies for health equity among women, individuals with low socioeconomic status and racial/ethnic minorities. During her Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar fellowship, she conducted the first study to examine the perspectives of single mothers who lost access to welfare cash transfer benefits as a consequence of exceeding time limits or failure to meet work requirements regarding their experiences with health and health care. Her dissertation work produced the first study to find a positive relationship between more stringent eligibility requirements for the receipt of welfare cash transfer benefits and worse self-reported health and disability among single mothers with a high school diploma or less and the first study to directly link time limits for welfare cash transfer benefits with decreased access to health care in this same population. Her post-doctoral work yielded the first studies to document the prevalence of food insufficiency (inadequate food intake due to lack of money or resources) among Women Veterans and the association of food insufficiency with worse self-reported access to health care and health outcomes among this population. As a faculty member, she led one of the few studies to examine the impact of state-level minimum wage increases on access to health care, health behavior and health outcomes, across racial/ethnic and gender groups. She has also collaborated with the Center for Health Advancement in the Fielding School of Public Health to investigate the scientific evidence needs of public health organizations desiring to advance health equity.

Dr. Narain received dual B.S. degrees in Microbiology and African-American studies from UCLA and an M.D. from Morehouse School of Medicine. She completed her residency in Primary Care Internal Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Following residency, she completed a California Endowment Minority Health Policy Fellowship at Harvard Medical School. After leaving Harvard, she completed a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar Fellowship at UCLA. Upon completion of this fellowship, Dr. Narain stayed on at UCLA as a Specialty Training Advanced Research Fellow in the Department of General Internal Medicine & Health Services Research and earned a Ph.D. in Health Services from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Prior to joining the faculty in the Department of General Internal Medicine & Health Services Research at UCLA, Dr. Narain was a post-doctoral fellow in the West Los Angeles VA Center for the Study of Healthcare Innovation, Implementation & Policy.

Recent Work