Iris Eileen Coloma-Gaines joined MLRI in May 2018 as the attorney for the Health Starts at Home Project, a collaborative research initiative of immigrant families served by Boston Children’s Hospital’s Martha Eliot Health Clinic. In May 2019, she became MLRI’s statewide Language Access Attorney. She has practiced poverty law for over 25 years in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.

Ms. Coloma-Gaines began her career at Southeastern Massachusetts Legal Assistance Corporation (now, South Coastal Counties Legal Services) primarily practicing family law and landlord-tenant law. After relocating to Philadelphia, she joined Philadelphia Legal Assistance where she launched and led a migrant farmworker practice. There she litigated individual and multi-plaintiff cases in federal agencies and courts. She also partnered with Philadelphia area law schools and directed a longstanding immigrant-focused tax law clinic.

After assisting Pennsylvania’s farm workers for seventeen years, Ms. Coloma-Gaines returned to her native Massachusetts and joined Greater Boston Legal Services’ Employment Law Unit, representing low wage immigrant workers in tax matters. Ms. Coloma-Gaines has presented numerous times on farmworker law as well as tax law issues specific to low wage immigrant workers. She completed her undergraduate degree at Boston College and earned her J.D. from Suffolk University Law School in 1991.