Introducing the 2026 public voices fellows

Alex-Handrah Aimé is a vice president at Meta, where she leads the global organization responsible for designing, delivering, and deploying the subsea and terrestrial fiber networks that connect Meta’s data centers and support its family of apps and 3+ billion users. She oversees a capital investment portfolio spanning multi-decade infrastructure commitments across five continents. Under her leadership, Meta deployed 2Africa—the world’s longest subsea cable at 45,000 km—connecting 33 countries across Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. She and her team are currently leading Meta’s terrestrial fiber strategy to support next-generation AI data center infrastructure.

Alex has over 20 years of global and emerging markets experience spanning technology, infrastructure, private equity, corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, and management consulting. She has sourced, structured, negotiated and managed more than $1 billion of growth capital investments.

Cherline Bazile is an award-winning fiction writer. Born in Florida to Haitian immigrants, Cherline learned strength and defiance from her mother who raised five children on her own despite financial difficulties. 

Cherline graduated from Harvard University and received her MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan. Her writing explores power dynamics in intimate relationships, how race and money undergird environmental disaster, and the quest for joy in bleak times. 

Cherline’s writing has been featured in NPR’s Selected Shorts, The Sewanee Review, Symphony Space Theater, TIME, the Best American Short Stories, and more. Cherline has received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Mass Cultural Council, among others.

Amit Bouri is the CEO of the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), which he co-founded. Amit is a leader in the impact investing field. Previously, he was a consultant at the Monitor Institute, a Boston-based strategy consulting organization serving the social sector.

Amit was born in California and raised by a single mother from India. Amit graduated with an MPA/MBA joint-degree at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where he led global health and corporate social responsibility initiatives.

He received his BA in sociology and anthropology from Swarthmore College. While there, he studied traditional Chinese medicine in Shanghai, China, and co-founded a mentoring program for underprivileged immigrant children in Philadelphia’s Chinatown.

Katherine Fang was born in Houston, Texas, where she was raised by parents and grandparents from China. Because of her family’s background, Katherine has long been dedicated to understanding issues of citizenship and political participation. 

After graduating with a degree in global affairs and modern Middle East studies from Yale College, Katherine spent a year teaching English and working on refugee policy at the United Nations Development Program’s Middle East Regional Office in Amman, Jordan, as a Fulbright Scholar.  

She has also served as a speechwriter at the International Organization for Migration headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Before entering law school, Katherine was an economics research associate at Harvard Business School, where she investigated issues of gender equity in the labor market. 

Suzanne Goh is a pediatric neurologist, board-certified behavior analyst, and neuroscience researcher. She is the author of Magnificent Minds: The New Whole-Child Approach to Autism and the founder of Cortica – a health services organization with medical and behavioral health centers across the country that provide a comprehensive whole-child approach to autism care.

Suzanne is a graduate of Harvard Medical School; she attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar; and she completed her neurology residency training at the University of California, San Francisco.

She has served on the faculty of Columbia University where she was Co-Director of Columbia’s Developmental Neuropsychiatry Clinic for Autism. Her research has focused on the biological causes of autism and the use of brain imaging to identify patterns of neural circuitry and brain chemistry in autism.

Tiffanie is an award-winning filmmaker. As an MFA candidate at UCLA, she makes films that incorporate her unique outsider perspective and expand the breadth of the American experience represented in film. 

Tiffanie was born in Wisconsin to a mother who fled from civil war in China at the age of three and a Taiwanese father who overcame profound poverty to earn a doctorate in chemical engineering in the United States.

Tiffanie’s fascination with narrative blossomed at Harvard University where she directed several films, one of which, “Three Beauties”, was awarded the prestigious Thomas T. Hoopes Prize. After Harvard, Tiffanie worked closely with director Ang Lee for three years on “Life of Pi”. Tiffanie has also worked extensively with Leehom Wang, a popular musician in Asia.

Sergio Infante was born in Bogotá, Colombia and moved with his parents to Houston, Texas at the age of five. He is a PhD candidate in global history at Yale University. His research examines the relationships between the social sciences, economic development, and antipoverty programs, with a special focus on twentieth-century South America. He is writing a history of the “informal sector” and “informal economy” as concepts. His work touches on several themes that concern historians of the recent past, such as transnational migration, gig work, population growth, technocracy, democracy, and the Cold War. Sergio received a BA in history from Yale College in 2018 and an MPhil in modern South Asian studies from the University of Cambridge in 2019. He is a recipient of the PD Soros “New Americans” Fellowship, the Beinecke Fellowship of the Sperry Fund, the Charles and Julia Henry Fellowship, and most recently, the History of Economics Society’s Young Scholars Award. Before enrolling at Yale, Sergio was an editor at Foreign Affairs Magazine.

Philsan Isaak was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Yosseph Isaak and Nimo Ahmed—immigrants from Hargeisa, Somalia. In 1988, both of Philsan’s parents fled Somalia due to the escalating civil war and Isaaq Genocide. After over a decade apart, they reunited in Minnesota, where they married and settled down. Inspired by her parents’ determination to create a better life for their children, Philsan became committed to using the law as an instrument to create further positive change for future generations. 

From a young age, Philsan found community with her multicultural peers. She completed her early years of schooling at an Islamic school where nearly the entire student body was made up of New Americans from different regions.

Stephen Narain is a PhD student in English and Creative Writing at the University of Miami, where he concentrates in Caribbean Studies under the supervision of Patricia Saunders. His debut novel, The Church of Mastery, a coming-of-age story about artistic formation set against the backdrop of West Indian independence and the rise of the Civil Rights movement, will be published by Restless Books in 2027.

Born and raised in Freeport, Bahamas to Guyanese parents, Stephen immigrated to Florida at sixteen. He earned an AB in English from Harvard College and an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His essay “Superpositional Minds: Multilocal Consciousness, AI, and the Posthuman Turn” was shortlisted for the 2025 Berggruen Institute Essay Competition. His current academic project applies concepts from quantum mechanics to Caribbean literature with a focus on contemplation, walking, humor, and carnival as sites of self-construction.

Anna Neimark is a founding partner of First Office Architecture. She is also a faculty at Southern California Institute of Architecture.

A naturalized citizen, she was born in Moscow to a Russian mother and Jewish-Ukrainian father, and moved to the United States at the age of 14. Her family now lives in Los Angeles, California. She is married to Michael Osman.

Anna completed her architecture master’s program at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. In 2003, she received a BA degree with high honors in architecture from Princeton University, and was awarded the Haarlow Prize for the best paper in humanistic studies, the Joseph Shanley Travel Prize for architectural design, and the Art and Archaeology Frederick Barnard White Prize for the best thesis in architectural theory.

Patricia understands deeply how trauma is inherited and has committed her life’s work to cultivating spaces for healing and political empowerment. Versed in transnational feminist studies, Black feminist and women of color feminist theory, political philosophy, and the performing arts, she has used art to heal psychic wounds and navigate across political barriers.

Growing up in Chicago, Patricia listened to stories of her parent’s life before and after the war in Vietnam, where her family ultimately escaped as boat refugees to Malaysia and Indonesia and resettled in the United States in the 1980s.

After she received a BA in sociology from Pomona College, Patricia went to Vietnam on a journey of healing and reparation. I

Helen O’Reilly was appointed SCO’s Chief Legal Officer in April 2024, where she represents SCO in all legal matters, provides legal guidance to the President, Executive Council, and staff, and acts in an advisory capacity on major projects. As Chief Legal Counsel, Helen leads SCO’s in-house legal services department, reviews contractual agreements, and serves as the liaison for outside legal counsel to ensure that SCO complies with all applicable laws and regulations.

Helen joins SCO with over twelve years of legal experience in both the private and nonprofit sectors. She served as the inaugural General Counsel at the Fresh Air Fund where she provided legal and business advice on a wide range of matters, and was previously a Litigation Attorney at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler, a global legal practice that advises corporate, foundation, and not-for-profit clients.

Uzoma Orchingwa is a Nigerian-American technologist and the cofounder and CEO of Ameelio, a prize-winning nonprofit technology company that builds free technology to disrupt the predatory prison telecom industry, and accelerate the creation of a more humane and rehabilitative justice system for the 113 million Americans it impacts. Ameelio transforms America’s correctional system with technology by connecting incarcerated people with support networks; they cut recidivism and sustainably reduce prison populations. Ameelio’s ecosystem of products helps everyone — from families to corrections officials to service providers — empowering successful reentry from day one.

Shivani Radhakrishnan is an assistant professor in philosophy and women, feminist, and queer studies at Vassar College. She’s also a writer, with essays and criticism in n+1, The Washington Post, The Baffler, The Believer, Paris Review Daily, BOMB, The Georgia Review, Threepenny Review, frieze and many others. She’s at work on a debut essay collection about copies, doubles, and mimicry tentatively titled Original Copy. She was a former Fulbright to Vladivostok, Russia.

She was raised in New York by Indian immigrant parents, and holds a PhD in philosophy from Columbia, a BPhil in philosophy from Oxford and a BA from Princeton University. 

Ankur Shah is a strategic advisor and Board Director for startups, venture funds and non profits with a focus on emerging markets. Relationships include marketplaces, healthcare and software startups. Non profits include Prosperiti, an analysis & advocacy group working to liberalize labour policy in India and Lend a Hand, a non-profit catalysing life-skills training in state public schools in India.

In his recent full time roles, Ankur was Chief Finance Officer for Weee!, America’s largest ethnic e-grocer. Weee! raised over $750M and is supported by marquee investors including Softbank, DST Global and Blackstone Growth.

Stephanie was born in Hawaii to a father who was adopted from China and a mother who emigrated from Korea to the United States. Stephanie’s mother escaped an abusive marriage and raised her three kids alone. She instilled in Stephanie a reverence for hard work, and Stephanie threw herself into school and jobs to help pay for expenses at home.

Stephanie went on to receive a bachelor’s degree from Yale University, a master’s degree in public affairs with distinction from Princeton University, and an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management with a certificate in Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Stephanie’s education and career have been guided by a belief in the power of community to drive progress. 

Diana was born in Tehran, Iran and immigrated to California with her family at age 15.

Diana completed her medical studies at Touro University College of Osteopathic Medicine in California and is currently a clinical faculty in Family Medicine and Preventive Medicine at Loma Linda University. She holds an MPH and an MA in medical anthropology from Case Western Reserve University. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude in 2002 from Bates College with degrees in mathematics, biology, and a secondary concentration in Spanish.

Winning the Phillips and Thomas J. Watson Fellowships, Diana has traveled to South America and Asia conducting comparative field research projects on indigenous medicine and is keenly interested in understanding how a marginalized system of folk medicine could develop into an accredited and widely used alternative.

Born in South Central Los Angeles, Katherine is the daughter of immigrants from Mexico and Honduras. Katherine’s mother, a refugee from El Salvador, and her father, an economic migrant, sacrificed to no end to provide her with an education. Their tireless work ethic inspires Katherine’s commitment to advancing opportunities for others.

Growing up in a community rich in diversity yet marred by violence, Katherine learned to navigate contentious spaces with empathy and diplomacy. At UC Berkeley, Katherine grew fascinated by shared experiences of resilience across cultures.

She assisted refugees with asylum cases, mentored at-risk youth, and empowered Latinas to pursue academic excellence.  

Antonina Vykhrest immigrated to the United States with her mother when she was eight. Leaving Ukraine during a period of post-Soviet chaos, she was marked by the social and political upheaval of her birth country. Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, she was exposed to both the opportunities and obstacles immigrants face in pursuit of the American dream. Inspired by this experience and her grandparents’ stories of Soviet and Nazi oppression, Antonina was drawn to understanding social change across communities and countries. 

At Duke University she studied human rights movements, obtaining degrees in political science and international comparative studies. With the Center for Race Relations, she supported the undergraduate community in exploring issues of gender, race, and sexuality.

Vijay Yanamadala is a neurosurgeon and healthcare executive at Hartford HealthCare, where he serves as Vice Chairman of Neurosurgery and System Medical Director of Quality, Innovation & Research at the Ayer Neuroscience Institute. He specializes in complex and revision spine surgery and pioneered awake spinal fusion in Connecticut.

Beyond the operating room, Vijay works at the intersection of clinical medicine, health systems leadership, and emerging technology. He writes and speaks widely on how artificial intelligence, incentive structures, and institutional culture shape the care patients receive — and the care they don’t. His work spans the design of safer, more equitable healthcare systems; the responsible adoption of AI in clinical settings; and the obligation of physicians to engage public discourse rather than retreat into the clinic.