Elizabeth Barnert

Associate Professor-in-Residence
Department: Pediatrics
ebarnert@mednet.ucla.edu
Website
Keywords: Human Rights, El Salvador, Immigration

Dr. Elizabeth Barnert, MD, MPH, MS is a board-certified pediatrician and associate professor of pediatrics at UCLA. She provides pediatric care to youth detained in the juvenile legal system. Her research, grounded in human rights and social action, examines children affected by violence, family separation, and incarceration. She is author of Reunion: Finding the Disappeared Children of El Salvador.

Through the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program, Dr. Barnert received her medical degree from UCSF and earned a Master's of Science degree from the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. Her public health Master's thesis, now available as the ethnographic book Reunion, examines separation and reunification experiences of families torn apart in the 1980s Salvadoran Civil War who, decades later, were reunited through a DNA bank she helped develop in partnership with the Salvadoran human rights organization Pro-Búsqueda. Reunion illuminates the cycles of poverty and violence driving immigration and ongoing separations around the world. Her work is relevant to migrant children separated at U.S. borders, Ukrainian children taken from their parents by Russia, and countless others undergoing forced family separation.