Young was formerly the project director of the NIH-funded Research on Immigrant Health and State Policy (RIGHTS) Study which seeks to understand the experiences of Latino and Asian immigrants in California in the areas of health care, social services, employment, education, and law enforcement and how these experiences have had an impact on their health and access to health care. Young was also the Chancellor’s postdoctoral fellow at UC Merced where she lead a study to examine how media coverage of immigration policy may influence immigrant well-being.
Young earned her PhD in community health sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, where she was a graduate student researcher at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and contributed to the Remaining Uninsured Access to Community Health Centers (REACH) Project. She received a master's degree in public health with an emphasis on maternal and child health from UC Berkeley School of Public Health and an undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.
But studies show that, for immigrant families, the presence of policing, arrests and deportations in their communities does not go hand-in-hand with good physical or mental health. It is destructive to their well-being.