Nina Mulia, DrPH
Senior Scientist and Center Associate Director
- nmulia@arg.org 510-898-5850
EDUCATION
Nina Mulia received her BA in Behavioral Biology from Johns Hopkins University and her MPH in Public Health Policy and Administration from the University of Michigan. Her DrPH is from the University of California, Berkeley, where she specialized in Community Health Sciences and then went on to postdoctoral training in alcohol studies at ARG/UC Berkeley School of Public Health. Her academic training includes qualitative and quantitative methods, social theory, population health, and access to care.RESEARCH FOCUS
Nina’s long-term interest has been in US population-level patterns of drinking, risk for alcohol-related problems, access to and utilization of behavioral health services, and demographic variation in these outcomes. Her research is motivated by the need to understand factors influencing the health of all Americans to help ensure that all Americans have the promise of good health and benefit from programmatic and policy strategies to improve US population health. Nina’s work is informed by a multilevel theoretical framework that considers risk and health-promoting factors at macro, meso, and individual levels. Her studies also recognize the importance of personal histories and the need to understand current outcomes in the context of antecedent exposures and outcomes, and life course changes. Nina has utilized retrospective as well as prospective longitudinal data in quantitative investigations and has also examined individual trajectories and contextual factors in qualitative studies. Her most recent grants have investigated young adult alcohol and cannabis use in relation to exposures and outcomes from birth onwards, alcohol services use in the context of health policies and by high-need groups such as people with chronic conditions. Her current collaborations with research organizations and universities include simulation studies of population-level alcohol outcomes under hypothetical policy contexts, differing pathways to recovery from alcohol use disorder, and aging women’s excessive alcohol use and alcohol services utilization.
Nina Mulia is a senior scientist at the Alcohol Research Group with over 35 years of experience in public health research and behavioral health, specifically. At ARG, Nina has led a range of projects focused on alcohol epidemiology and alcohol services access and utilization with attention to life course, non-medical influences, community context, and health care policy. Prior to joining ARG, she worked on community-based HIV prevention and intervention research with out-of-treatment drug users, evaluation of youth substance use prevention programs, and studies of access to health care.
Given her commitment to the next generation of scientists, Nina plays an active role in mentoring early-career scientists and trainees and leads ARG’s grant writing seminar for early investigators. She is deeply committed to building research environments that reflect varied, lived experiences and conducting research that brings to bear.
IN THE NEWS
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