Kristina Lovato

Director

Kristina Lovato, PhD, MSW is an Assistant Professor of Social Welfare and serves as the incoming Director of the Center on Immigration and Child Welfare in the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a member of the UC Berkeley Cluster on Latinxs and Democracy.

Dr Lovato’s scholarly work is directly informed by her dedication to community-engaged social justice. She has spent the past 20 years working at the intersection of child wellbeing and immigration issues as a child welfare practitioner, child welfare social work education administrator, and researcher. Her research centers around the impact of immigration policy on Latinx and immigrant child and family wellbeing particularly for families at risk of child welfare involvement, enhancing culturally responsive maltreatment prevention strategies, and improving child welfare system responses to meet the needs of immigrant youth and families.

Dr. Lovato earned a doctorate in Social Welfare from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), an MSW from San Francisco State University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology/Anthropology from St. Mary’s College of California.  She arrives at UC Berkeley Social Welfare, after holding a tenure-track faculty appointment in the School of Social Work at California State University, Long Beach (2017-2022).