Quiana Lewis Wallace, PhD, MPH, is a research scientist II in the youth development area at Child Trends. She is driven by her desire to realize a world in which all youth have a fair chance to live their healthiest lives. As a child and adolescent health scholar, Quiana uses mixed methods to examine system change approaches to enhance the well-being of all children. With over a decade of experience in community-based research and grant-making, Quiana brings a wealth of knowledge to her role.

During her time at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (Hopkins), Quiana worked with the B Lab to design and implement comprehensive sexual health and substance use prevention curricula for middle and high school students. She also led the development of research partnerships with local community organizations. She recently completed her doctoral training at Hopkins; her dissertation examined the economic well-being and health outcomes of children in grandparent-headed households. The findings from this research led her to focus on exploring ways in which policies and programs can strengthen nontraditional household structures.

Prior to Hopkins, Quiana was a grantmaker at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), where she supported strategic grant-making initiatives that fostered collaboration across sectors—including government, business, health care, and social services—to improve health outcomes across the nation. Notably, she pioneered a funding initiative that provided grants to youth-led organizations and initiated strategic learning on how RWJF could integrate youth leadership across funding areas.

Quiana is an emerging thought leader, with publications in leading journals such as Health Affairs, the Journal of Pediatrics, and Child Abuse and Neglect. She holds a PhD in Population, Family, and Reproductive Health from Johns Hopkins University, an MPH from Yale University, and a BA from Fisk University.