Anu Manchikanti Gómez, Ph.D. is associate professor in the School of Social Welfare and director of the Sexual Health and Reproductive Equity (SHARE) program at UC Berkeley.
For nearly 20 years, Gómez has worked as a health equity researcher with a focus on reproduction and sexuality throughout the life course. She has conducted research both in the U.S. and globally on diverse topics, including contraceptive use, abortion, HIV prevention, gender equity, transgender health and violence against women and children. Gómez's current research focuses on three areas:
- the measurement and meaning of pregnancy planning;
- understanding contraceptive decision-making within social, relational and structural contexts;
- and evaluating the impact of and evidence base for policies related to reproductive health.
Gómez's work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Society for Family Planning Research Fund, the Berkeley Population Center, the Institute for Research on Labor and Education at UCB, the Resource Allocation Program of UCSF, Gilead Sciences and the UC Noyce Initiative.
In 2017, she was named a winner of 120 Under 40, a global initiative to identify the next generation of family planning leaders. She is also the recipient of the 2017 Outstanding Young Professional Award from the Sexual and Reproductive Health Section of the American Public Health Association. Since 2012, Gómez has served on the Board of Directors of the National Women's Health Network.
Gómez earned her Ph.D. in Maternal and Child Health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010. She also received an MSc in Health, Population and Society from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA in Journalism and Mass Communications from New York University.
Many of Gómez's full-text publications can be found on the University of California's eScholarship platform.
She is part of the UC Noyce Initiative project, “Computational Approaches for Understanding and Intervening Upon Misinformation About Contraception and Abortion on Social Media,” along with Coye Cheshire from UC Berkeley and Katrina Kimport from UCSF.