Esmeralda Melgoza
Esmeralda Melgoza is a Senior Research Fellow at the Latino Policy and Politics Institute. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, a former trainee of the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, and a fellow at the Yale Ciencia Academy. Her research interests are at the intersection of emergency medical services (EMS), aging, and Latinx health. The first study in her dissertation explores the facilitators and barriers to the provision of EMS care to Latinx older adults in the U.S. across several phases, including 9-1-1 activation, dispatch of personnel and resources, on-scene care, ambulance transports to an emergency department (ED), and EMS-ED handoff prior to ED admission. The second and third studies in her dissertation assess the individual and neighborhood-level factors that impact the provision of EMS for high and low-acuity 9-1-1 calls among Latinx older adults in San Francisco County, California.
Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including Medical Care, Frontiers in Public Health, and Prehospital and Disaster Medicine. Esmeralda is also a member of the American Public Health Association (APHA), Gerontological Society of America (GSA) and the National Association of Emergency Medical Physicians. She has presented her research at several conferences, including APHA, GSA, Society for Academic Emergency Medicine, and the International Conference of Aging in the Americas. Esmeralda’s research has also been featured in policy briefs and media coverage from Voz de America, Association of Schools & Programs of Public Health, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, L.A. Progressive, Visalia Times Delta, and Capital & Main.
