Cancer Legal Resource Center (CLRC) Advisory Committee member Deborah Lefkowitz, PhD, has just been awarded a 2024-25 Extramural Mentored Fellowship on Poverty, Retirement, and Disability Research from the University of Wisconsin’s Retirement and Disability Research Center and Institute for Research on Poverty, supported by the Social Security Administration (SSA). This fellowship enables her to embark on a new research project on “Long COVID as Disability: Barriers to Workplace Accommodations and SSA Benefits.”
Although long COVID symptoms can meet the definition of disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), people with long COVID face significant challenges obtaining disability accommodations in the workplace or, if unable to continue working, SSA disability benefits. Rather than focusing only on individual-level challenges, Deborah’s interview-based research examines workplace, policy, and SSA challenges to defining long COVID as a disability.
Deborah’s interest in the intersection of disability, employment, and poverty grew out of her previous research on breast cancer survivorship and her 10-year involvement with the Cancer Legal Resource Center, a program of the Disability Rights Legal Center. She became familiar with ADA workplace accommodations and SSA disability benefits through volunteering on the CLRC’s telephone assistance line. In her subsequent analysis of CLRC de-identified data, she observed that cancer survivors who become ineligible for patient financial assistance end up in a Goldilocks dilemma: too sick to work, but not sick enough to qualify for long-term disability.
Deborah is currently an Assistant Professional Researcher in the School of Public Policy at the University of California, Riverside and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing at the University of Victoria, Canada. Her research focuses on the downstream consequences of health policies, particularly for individuals disadvantaged by U.S. healthcare delivery systems.
Learn more about Deborah and her work at profiles.ucr.edu/app/home/profile/deborahl.
