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be bold
Payton Huse assisted with Orange County’s 2019 point in time count of people experiencing homelessness.
RESEARCH
inspired by a harsh reality Spurred by personal experience, UCI graduate student Payton Huse researches gender and homelessness
P
ayton Huse moved from the Midwest to California planning to help elementary school students in immigrant communities succeed. What she got was an up-close look at California’s affordable housing crisis, and her own experience with unstable housing. “No one is safe when they are homeless, but women are especially vulnerable,” says Huse, a first-generation graduate student in UCI’s sociology Ph.D. program. Her experience shifted her interest from immigration to research on homelessness and, in particular, the ways that gender plays into the homeless experience. And the National Science Foundation is now supporting her work with a competitive Graduate Research Fellowship Program award. An eye-opening experience Huse joined AmeriCorps after finishing her bachelor’s degree at the University of Missouri and moved to San Jose to run after
