About

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Lucia Vitale is an interdisciplinary political scientist who uses comparative, mixed methods to study the politics of primary healthcare access in border spaces. ​She is a PhD candidate in the Politics Department at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and an adjunct professor in Georgetown's Science, Technology, and International Affairs (STIA) program, and at the Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM). Her broader work has engaged topics of intellectual property rights in health and medicine, and the promises and pitfalls of artificial intelligence for global health. She is an active member of the International Studies Association’s (ISA) Global Health Section, and the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Health Politics and Policy, and Migration and Citizenship Sections.

​Lucia was a Fulbright Scholar to the Dominican Republic from 2022-2023 working alongside migrant rights organization, Caribbean Migrants Observatory (OBMICA). Her work has appeared in Social Science and Medicine, the Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law, and Politics, and she has spoken at venues including Kaiser Permanente's Grand Rounds in California, and at the Dartmouth School of Medicine in New Hampshire. She has held research residencies at the APSA Centennial Center in Washington, DC; the Brocher Foundation in Geneva, Switzerland; and at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS) in Berlin, Germany. 

Research Interests

Global Health
Borders 
Migration
Latin America
Social policy (primary health care)
Subnational comparative methods
Mixed methods
Artificial Intelligence

Dissertation Work

​Vitale’s dissertation project, entitled "Assembled (In)access: the borderlands of health care between Haiti and the Dominican Republic," compares four rural border sites—two Haitian communities and two Dominican communities—to show how individuals residing on either side of the border navigate across the border, and between the fragmented landscape of state and non-state health services in order to piece together some semblance of primary healthcare for themselves and their families. The project uses the term “Assembled Access” to explain a new era of health care in which those on the margins, with varying levels of success, assemble health services in a way that comprises a bottom-up access to health care. 

Pre-PhD

Prior to commencing dissertation fieldwork, Vitale was a recipient of pre-dissertation fieldwork grant from the Tinker Foundation and worked with the Foundation for International Medical Relief of Children (FIMRC) along the Costa Rica-Nicaragua border. Before beginning her PhD at UCSC, Vitale was a contractor for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) where she headed a research project on a citizenship and documentation along the DR-Haitian border; a research lead for medical mission Waves of Health where she investigated medication rationing; a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic; an English teacher in Honduras; and a development associate at a US-based immigration non-profit. Vitale received her BA in international studies from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.