Bio
Chelsea L. Shover is an epidemiologist and Assistant Professor-in-Residence at the University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research. She completed her PhD in Epidemiology at the University of California Los Angeles and a postdoctoral fellowship in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Her research focuses on substance use, infectious disease, and their shared social and structural risk factors.
Alongside her academic work, she has served as an epidemiologist in government and non-profit positions, most recently as Supervising Epidemiologist for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health’s COVID-19 response in homeless shelters and encampments. Supported by grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, her lab’s current projects include methods to use rapidly available overdose data to inform public health policy, as well as community-based implementation of harm reduction strategies. Using medical examiner data, her team has identified key local drug supply changes (i.e., fentanyl’s westward spread; xylazine’s increasing presence in various markets) and then worked with state and local policymakers and community organizations to improve on-the-ground overdose prevention.