Bianca D. Wilson

Bianca D.M. Wilson, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Welfare at the Luskin School of Public Affairs and an affiliate faculty member of the California Center for Population Research at UCLA. Her research explores the relationships between culture, oppression, and health. Bianca examines LGBTQ economic instabilities and involvement with systems of care and criminalization, with a focus on the ways racialization, sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression play a role in creating disproportionality and disparities. Notably, she was the lead investigator on the first study to establish population estimates of how many LGBTQ youth are in foster care and has led similar work in juvenile criminalization. Similarly, she was the PI for a large-scale qualitative study of the life and needs of LGBTQ people experiencing economic insecurity. Underlying her substantive works on social status and wellbeing is her focus on SOGIE data policies. She has conducted SOGIE measurement research among youth and adults and continues to work collaboratively on efforts to increase and improve LGBTQ inclusive data collection. To that end, she served on the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) Consensus Panel on the Measurement of Sex, Gender and Sexual Orientation.