By Cortney Fielding
USC Provost Professor William Vega, one of the nation’s leading experts on health disparities affecting ethnic minority groups, has received the 2010 Research and Advocacy Award from the National Resource Center for Hispanic Mental Health.
Vega, the executive director of the USC Roybal Institute on Aging at the School of Social Work, was honored for a distinguished research career that has contributed to improved mental-health outcomes for Latinos, organization officials said.
An elected member of the National Institute of Medicine, Vega has spent the past four decades studying the negative effects of poverty on human development. And as a vocal leader in the public policy arena, he frequently has testified before government agencies and professional panels concerning the need for more culturally and linguistically competent health services for the nation’s increasingly foreign-born residents.