Julci Areza

Julci started her career working with grassroots activist organizations in Philadelphia while completing her undergraduate education at the University of Pennsylvania. While in college, she majored in Health & Societies and concentrated in Race, Gender, and Health. Her background in the social sciences and interest in the health and well-being impacts of the systems of oppression prompted her to pursue population-based approaches to health. Julci recently graduated with her MPH from UNC-Chapel Hill, where she took courses in health equity and community-based participatory research and received a certificate in Total Worker Health®. Her passion for public health stems from her interest in advancing the health of low-wage, BIPOC, immigrant communities like those she grew up in.

During her MPH training, Julci conducted qualitative research with grassroots organizations in North Carolina and beyond. She completed her practicum with the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, where she researched alternative labor models to lift working conditions and developed workplace violence prevention training for nail salon workers. In Spring 2023, Julci interned at the CDC Injury Center in the Division of Violence Prevention, where she researched programs that disrupted developmental pathways to violence. Most recently, she finished an internship with NIOSH, where she researched work-family supports for low-wage workers and gained experience in writing and conducting literature reviews. During her ASPPH fellowship, she is excited to build knowledge in public health infrastructure, develop skills in health equity evaluation, and learn effective strategies for engaging STLT partners and other CIOs.

Julci will be working with OHE on projects relating to capacity building for health equity in STLT government agencies. She will work with STLT partners and CIOs and review the published and grey literature to define and establish the components for health equity infrastructure, develop a framework and tools to explain key components, factors, and linkages needed for advancing health equity at the STLT levels, and assess the landscape of health equity infrastructure within these agencies. Additionally, Julci will be working with NCSTLTPHIW to design and conduct a mixed-methods evaluation of the 2103 COVID-19 Health Disparities Grant. She will develop instruments and analyses plans and use these to assess the policies, practices, and infrastructure that recipients put in place to accelerate and sustain health equity efforts.