Staff Spotlight: Kenny Perez, MPH
Kenny Perez is the Co-Director of Research Operations at the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative (BHHI). He began working at UCSF in 2013 as an intern while attending UC Berkeley for his bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Peace and Conflict Studies, and has since served as Clinical Research Coordinator, Project Manager, and Senior Project Manager. Kenny’s primary professional and academic interests focus on using research methods to work with and for homeless populations and groups facing longstanding obstacles within the San Francisco Bay Area.
You began at UCSF in 2013 as an intern while attending UC Berkeley—what first drew you here, and how did you find your way to ARC and BHHI?
Kenny Perez: In 2013, I was a case manager at a student-run clinic for people experiencing homelessness in Berkeley. I actually heard about the internship position at Hope Home through a person I volunteered with. At that time, the role at Hope Home was just a single day a week, helping the team track and manage the study's cohort. From there, I became an assistant Clinical Research Coordinator (CRC) and then a CRC before I got to manage a small project myself. It would not be completely correct to say that I found my way to ARC or BHHI because I haven't moved much at all. It is more like BHHI and ARC grew around me, and the work I was doing changed to fit the growth that BHHI and ARC provided to our project portfolio and team.
How did your academic background, your studies in Public Health—lend itself to guiding research and steering BHHI’s efforts to address issues around homelessness?
KP: My training in Public Health is paramount to my ability to contribute to the work that we do. A lot of what we do is study the intersection of homelessness and health. Homelessness is a public health issue, and the methodological tools that public health uses translate directly to understanding housing as a critical component of health. It has provided me with the methodological foundation needed to think about how to approach questions, gather and analyze data, and interpret findings.
My public health training has also been important to my understanding of the many other social determinants of health that impact the health of our community. In other words, what I studied is what I do pretty much 1 to 1.
As Director of Research Operations at BHHI, what are you currently working on?
KP: Some of the key things that I have on my plate at BHHI include supporting our project managers and their teams for the existing research projects that we have ongoing. I am also doing a lot of work to find us a place in a number of state and local data projects that have launched in recent years.
These are particularly interesting to me because historically we have specialized in primary data collection, but we began exploring more state and local partnerships in the deployment of administrative data-based projects several years ago. Now, in the current federal landscape, I think that these efforts are more important than ever to diversify our work and hedge against some of the ebbs and flows that come with the sector.
Right now, the group of us that works on these administrative data projects is small, so I am focusing on getting these projects running smoothly and also thinking about the scalability of this type of work, building relationships with State and local agencies, and finding ways to leverage our skills in places where they provide the most value. In fewer words, I am focusing on sustainability, efficiency, and diversification of our work.
How has BHHI’s biggest primary data collection project to date, the California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness (CASPAH), impacted your work since its publication in 2023?
KP: CASPEH has had and will have immense value in this space. It has really highlighted the need for more data to work on the issues surrounding the prevalence of people experiencing homelessness. CASPEH has also targeted data that is not available in any other data set. That said, doing a primary data collection effort at the scale of CASPEH is a major undertaking that takes a lot of funding and time to pull off. That is why these secondary data efforts are so important. They can be a lot more nimble than a primary data collection effort, although the insights they provide are a lot less specialized to the questions folks have. There is a very important bidirectional relationship between primary and secondary data efforts, with both needing the other to be most effective and often linking primary and secondary data is the secret to really understanding the problems at hand.