Fabiola Moncerrat Perez-Lua, MSPH, PhD, is a public health researcher at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, Division of Environmental Health Sciences and a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, Department of Health Policy and Management. Dr. Perez-Lua earned her PhD in Public Health from University of California, Merced in 2025. Raised in California’s San Joaquin Valley as the daughter of immigrant farmworkers, her lived experiences drive her commitment to advancing health equity for Latino, farmworker, and immigrant communities. Her hobbies outside of academia include hiking with her partner and pup, reading with her book club, exploring new coffee shops, snowboarding, running, and playing pickleball!

At UC Berkeley, Dr. Perez-Lua is examining the structural- and workplace-level factors shaping exposure to extreme heat among farmworkers in California and developing workplace interventions to mitigate the health impacts of extreme heat on farmworkers. Dr. Perez-Lua also examines how federal immigration policy, local policy contexts, and the political economy agriculture shape the health and healthcare access of Latinos, farmworkers, and immigrants in the United States through mechanisms of structural racism and racial capitalism. Her current work is focused on constructing novel measures of federal immigration policy, local immigration policy contexts, and political and economic power in agriculture at the county level to study their effects on Latino and farmworker health outcomes. She is also examining the role of the agriculture industry in shaping healthcare insurance coverage and access to dental care among agricultural laborers using data from the California Health Interview Survey. Her previous work has demonstrated how federal immigration policy experiences and local immigration policy contexts influence access to healthcare insurance, healthcare services, safety net resources among Latinos; how restrictive federal immigration policy undermines the intended effects of local inclusive policies on Latino and immigrant populations; and how agricultural industry interests intersect with immigration policy and other social inequities to normalize unsafe labor conditions in agriculture that maintain farmworker health inequities. Ultimately, Dr. Perez-Lua aims to inform policies and interventions that advance health equity for farmworkers, Latino communities, and immigrants across the United States.