Dr. Lucero is the Associate Dean for Equity, Diversity & Inclusion. A full Professor, Dr. Lucero is also the Inaugural Adrienne H. Moseley Endowed Chair in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the UCLA School of Nursing and maintains a Courtesy Faculty Appointment at the University of Florida College of Nursing. He a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and Co-Chair of the American Medical Informatics Association’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee.
As the Associate Dean for EDI, he is the Chief Diversity Officer representing the School of Nursing at UCLA as well as within the University of California system. He is responsible for leading the school in their vision to be a beacon of creating innovative, impactful, and sustainable individual and organizational strategies and solutions that promote a diverse, equitable and respectful environment for faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community partners through interdisciplinary research, scholarship, clinical care, and community engagement.
As a scientist, Dr. Lucero’s program of research focuses on improving health outcomes of vulnerable populations using innovative health systems and informatics approaches. Two prominent themes of his work are: enhancing the quality of care for hospitalized older adults and improving self-management of chronic health conditions among Hispanic, African American and LGBTQ+ populations. Dr. Lucero’s research is leading the way to inform infrastructure development for data-driven knowledge generation that serves as a model for organizations across the United States to improve the quality of care for hospitalized older adults. He is leveraging electronic patient, clinical, and administrative data and data science methods to identify valid, modifiable factors that predict hospital-acquired falls (HAF) and hospital-induced delirium, which affect annually millions of US hospitalized patients. The other cornerstone of his research program is developing health information technology (HIT) to promote chronic disease self-management. His research is currently funded by the National Institute on Aging, and he has received funding from the National Institutes of Nursing Research, Minority Health and Health Disparities, and Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism; the National Cancer Institute; the National Center for Advancing Translational Science; the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality; the Health Resources & Services Agency; the Florida Department of Public Health, and the California Department of Healthcare Access and Information. The findings from Dr. Lucero’s research can be found in nursing as well as multidisciplinary clinical and informatics journals.