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Christina E. Miyawaki, PhD, MSW, MA, FGSA (she/her/hers)

Associate Professor
University of Houston
Houston, Texas, United States

Christina E. Miyawaki, PhD, MSW, MA, FGSA is an Associate Professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. Dr. Miyawaki’s overall research has centered on the health and well-being of older adults of color and their family caregivers. Trained as a bilingual geriatric social worker, Dr. Miyawaki has first-hand working experience with older adults and their family caregivers from a variety of racial and ethnic groups. As a gerontologist, she developed a strong foundation in health disparities research, especially focusing on Asian American populations. She has investigated how Asian American family caregivers’ physical and mental challenges are associated with care recipients’ health conditions including Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. For the past 10 years, she has focused on health disparities among older Vietnamese immigrants and refugees and their family caregivers based on their adverse life experiences in Vietnam as well as in the United States. She surveyed their comprehensive health data in Houston, Texas in 2018 and 2021, the Vietnamese Aging and Care Survey (VACS). Based on these data, she has been working with Vietnamese university students and healthcare professionals and offering free cognitive assessments to mono-lingual Vietnamese older immigrants and refugees to improve their health literacy in the community. She also developed a nonpharmaceutical depression intervention, Caregiver-Provided Life Review (C-PLR), and implemented it with older adults and their caregivers nationwide. She and her team plan a larger RCT with a comparison group as the next step. She is a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, the Council on Social Work Education, and the Society for Social Work and Research and an elected member of the Phi Alpha Honor Society.

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