Brown Bag: PhD Candidates Michelle Livings and Mengya Xu

Michelle Livings, Ph.D. candidate, Population, Health and Place
Contextual influences on adolescent mental health: Stressors and coping factors

Adolescents’ mental health has worsened in recent decades, raising questions of the societal forces related to this trend. My dissertation seeks to offer a contextualized understanding of the seemingly individualized experiences of adolescent depressive and anxiety symptoms. Specifically, I use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine how adolescents’ neighborhood, school and family contexts intersect to influence adolescent mental health over time, and whether individual characteristics influence these processes.

Mengya Xu, Ph.D. candidate, Population, Health and Place
Food Access in Los Angeles County: The Role of the Food environment, Transportation Modalities, Activity Space and Time

My dissertation aims to map food access and understand the complexity of the food environment in Los Angeles County more comprehensively using the concept of a ‘’15-minute city’’ as the basic geographic unit of analysis. This work also seeks to highlight food access challenges in terms of different transportation modalities (e.g., walking, public transit and driving) and mobility that affects which types of stores people actually visit to access food.