Introducing the 2023 Public Voices Fellows

Jason Bae, MD MBA, is a board-certified internal medicine physician. He practices urgent care at Palo Alto Medical Foundation in Northern California. He is a Senior Scholar at the Stanford University Clinical Excellence Research Center. His writing and work have been featured in STAT, The San Francisco Chronicle, the MIT Technology Review, BBC World Service, America Dissected Podcast, and Wisconsin Public Radio. Dr. Bae received his BA in economics and MBA from Harvard, and his MD from Yale. He completed his internal medicine residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

Sava Berhané is an innovator in home and community-based care, and an educator on leadership and business topics as a Senior Lecturer at Brandeis International Business School. Most recently, Sava was the SVP of Customer Success at AlayaCare, an enterprise B2B SaaS company serving 500+ home health companies in the United States and Canada. Previously, Sava served as the founding CEO of eCaring, an early stage software company tied to a private-equity backed home care agency, where she led the design of a caregiver management platform and mobile app that enables caregivers to track patient care and trigger interventions that improve health outcomes. Her passion comes from her mother’s experience as an immigrant care worker and her desire to see done for care workers what Starbucks did for baristas – putting the employee at the center to support a double bottom line. Prior to beginning this journey in healthcare, she worked in M&A at GE and had the privilege of working on the first Obama for America campaign on the national policy team. She has a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College and a J.D. from Yale Law School. Her recent awards include a Pinnacle Award from the Chamber of Commerce and a distinction as a Young American Leader from Harvard Business School.

Kartik Chandra is a PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL). His award-winning research spans AI, visual computing systems, and the computational study of human perception and cognition. Kartik graduated Phi Beta Kappa and with honors from Stanford University, earning degrees in English literature and computer science. His work is supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the Hertz Foundation, and the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.

Aadel Chaudhuri, MD, PhD, is a physician-scientist and assistant professor of radiation oncology, genetics, biomedical engineering, and computer science at the Washington University in St. Louis. He is also leader of the Liquid Biopsy Working Group at the Washington University Siteman Cancer Center. He additionally serves as co-chair of the Liquid Biopsy Interest Group within the National Institutes of Health. 

Aadel completed his MD at Stanford, PhD at Caltech, and BS degrees in biology and computer science at MIT where he was also a Goldwater Scholar. He completed his PhD in biology under the mentorship of Nobel Laureate David Baltimore focusing on microRNAs in cancer, and his residency at Stanford University, where he did postdoctoral work with National Academy of Medicine member Maximilian Diehn demonstrating that circulating tumor DNA serves as a powerful biomarker for molecular residual disease (MRD) after curative-intent localized lung cancer treatment. Aadel has been awarded the Roentgen Research Award from the Radiological Society of North America, the Michael Fry Award by the Radiation Research Society, and is also a V Foundation V Scholar. Aadel’s laboratory at Washington University focuses on the development and application of liquid biopsy cancer diagnostic technologies with the goal of more precisely personalizing solid tumor malignancy treatment. His laboratory is funded by the National Institutes of Health, the V Foundation, the Cancer Research Foundation, the Children’s Discovery Institute, the Children’s Tumor Foundation, the Alvin Siteman Cancer Research Fund, and the Melanoma Research Alliance.

Aadel is also an entrepreneur in the liquid biopsy space. He co-founded Droplet Biosciences, a venture-backed startup company focused on detecting MRD after cancer surgery from lymphatic fluid. Droplet Biosciences raised $8 million in seed-stage funding and is based at the MIT Engine in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Aadel additionally serves on several advisory boards for biotechnology companies including Illumina, AstraZeneca, Daiichi Sankyo, and Roche.

Ming Hsu Chen is a professor of law at UC Law San Francisco (formerly UC Hastings) and faculty-director of the Race, Immigration, Citizenship, and Equality Program (RICE). Ming brings an interdisciplinary perspective to the study of race, immigration, and the administrative state. She teaches courses and publishes scholarship on civil rights and racial inequality in the US. She is author of Pursuing Citizenship in the Enforcement Era (Stanford University Press 2020), on which she gave a TEDx Talk in 2020. In addition to her academic publications, she serves as co-editor for the Immigration Prof blog (@immprof) and has contributed to The Conversation, Scholar Strategy Network, and the Monkeycage at the Washington Post. She is chair-elect for the Association of American Law Schools Immigration Section and previously served on the Colorado State Advisory Council to the US Commission on Civil Rights.

Roxana Daneshjou received her undergraduate degree at Rice University in bioengineering, where she was recognized as a Goldwater Scholar for her research. She completed her MD/PhD at Stanford, where she worked in the lab of Professor Russ Altman. During this time, she was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Medical Scholar and a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans Fellow.  She completed dermatology residency at Stanford in the research track and now practices dermatology as a clinical scholar in Stanford’s Department of Dermatology while also conducting artificial intelligence research with Professor James Zou as a postdoc in biomedical data science. Her research interests are in developing diverse datasets and fair algorithms for applications in precision medicine. She will be an incoming assistant professor of biomedical data science and dermatology at Stanford in Fall of 2023.

Wendy De La Rosa is an Assistant Professor at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She focuses on using behavioral science to improve consumers’ financial well-being. She is interested in how people think and allocate their resources, and how these thoughts and judgments influence their behavior. Her award-winning research has been published in the Journal for Consumer Research and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Her work has been featured in top media outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, CNBC, Forbes, Scientific American, NPR, PBS Newshour, and TechCrunch.

De La Rosa is also the co-creator and host of TED’s “Your Money and Your Mind” series, the co-founder of the Common Cents Lab, a Forbes 30 under 30 Finance honoree, and a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow. Her TED talks have been viewed over 7 million times. She serves on the board of Code for America and Propel. Prior to joining Wharton, Wendy received her Ph.D. from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and helped start Google’s first behavioral economics unit. She was also a private equity investor at Goldman Sachs.

Deisy Del Real and her family migrated from Mexico to Los Angeles when she was six. Awaiting action on green card applications, she and her family were undocumented for 16 years. She was admitted with a full scholarship to Grinnell College, where she organized events promoting the DREAM Act and highlighted problems facing undocumented students. She learned that she would age out of the family’s green card application when she turned 21, be deported, and banned from returning to the United States for ten years. She appealed her case to the media, prompting a New Mexico priest to start a Saving Miss Deisy campaign and a lawyer to present her case successfully to immigration authorities.

Deisy received her Bachelor of Arts from Grinnell College and a PhD in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Southern California.

Broadly, her award-winning research examines how immigration policies—from restrictive to welcoming—are negotiated and affect immigrants’ lives. One study shows that the violence of the US’s restrictive immigration is reproduced within undocumented immigrants’ interpersonal relationships, generating psychological distress.

Her book manuscript, Documenting the Undocumented, identifies how officials and activists in six South America secured the implementation of the Mercosur Residency Agreement (MRA). This treaty makes states responsible for legalizing immigrants. Finally, another study examines Venezuelan migrants’ legal status acquisition and livelihoods in Argentina (where they can access the MRA) versus Chile and Colombia (where they cannot access the MRA).

Mill Etienne is a neurologist and epileptologist with additional specialization in brain injury medicine. Mill is a fellow in the American Academy of Neurology and the American Epilepsy Society. He currently works for Bon Secours Neurology Group which is part of the WMCHealth network. He is associate professor of neurology and medicine at New York Medical College, where he is also vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion and associate dean for student affairs. He is also a visiting scholar at the National Center for bioethics in research and health care at Tuskegee University. Mill is a captain in the United States Navy and he is the chief medical officer for Navy Reserve Navy Medicine Readiness and Training Command Bethesda. He served as president of the New York State Neurological Society from 2020-2022.

Mill was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and came to the United States at age five, settling in Spring Valley, NY. Mill did his undergraduate studies at Yale University. Throughout high school and college, Mill hosted a local television program that focused on presenting positive role models to the youth in Rockland County. Upon graduating from Yale University, Mill moved on to New York Medical College where he received the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship, served as an officer in the student senate, and served as an instructor and coordinator of the Science and Technology Enrichment program for underprivileged high school students. While in medical school, Mill also served as the national speaker of the House of Delegates and National Parliamentarian for the Student National Medical Association. Mill completed his neurology residency, epilepsy fellowship, clinical neurophysiology and neuroepidemiology fellowships at Columbia University’s Neurological Institute of New York. While at Columbia he also completed coursework to obtain a master’s in public health from Columbia’s Mailman school of public health.

After completing his fellowship training, Mill did a voluntary recall to active duty and was stationed at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. There he was the founding director of Walter Reed’s comprehensive epilepsy center. In January 2010, Mill was deployed on the USNS Comfort as part of Operation Unified Response which provided relief to the people of Haiti following a catastrophic earthquake. While on board the Comfort, Mill served as chief ethicist. Mill’s work in Haiti resulted in cover page articles in the Baltimore Sun, USA Today.as well as numerous additional articles in major newspapers around the world. Mill has over 50 publications which span peer reviewed journals, invited articles, and book chapters. Mill is a member of the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society and was the 2021 New York Medical College recipient of the Leonard Tow Award for Humanism in Medicine from the Gold Humanism Honor Society.

Robert W. Fernandez is a junior Simons fellow at Columbia University in the lab of Professor Oliver Hobert studying how neural circuits develop in the male C. elegans nervous system. He was born in Lima, Peru and grew up in NJ where he attended community college at Union County College where he majored in business administration. He received his bachelor’s of science degree in biotechnology at York College, City University of New York. As a former undocumented immigrant for 20 years, mentors played a vital role in navigating his undergraduate and doctoral studies and he believes in pushing it forward. He received his PhD in molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale where he mapped neurotransmitter GPCRs in the C. elegans egg-laying circuit. He is the co-founder of Científico Latino, a science organization that works to improve the pipeline of minoritized students in higher education in the sciences. Robert received awards for his work such as the PD Soros Fellowship, selected as one of the 100 inspiring Hispanic/Latinx scientists in America, Science Sandbox awardee and featured in Forbes. 

Maribel Hernández Rivera is a deputy national political director and the director of the Equality Division at the American Civil Liberties Union. She previously served as district director for Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and executive director of legal initiatives for the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs. Maribel has also served as supervising attorney at Immigrant Justice Corps and as a Fried Frank/ MALDEF fellow. With the support of the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship, Maribel received her JD from New York University School of Law and her Masters in Public Affairs from Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. She received her AB from Harvard University. Upon law school graduation, Maribel served as law clerk to the Honorable Mary M. Schroeder in the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Renee Hsia is professor of emergency medicine and health policy at the University of California San Francisco. She is associate chair of health services research in the department of emergency medicine, and a member of the Philip R. Lee Institute of Health Policy Studies. Renee is a national leader in research focusing on access to emergency care, especially for vulnerable populations; emergency department and trauma center utilization; the effect of service availability on patient outcomes; regionalization of care; and the wide variation in the costs and charges in healthcare. She has had over 180 publications in peer-reviewed journals, and her pioneering work has been highlighted in print media such as the New York Times, national radio such as NPR, and network television. She was the first emergency physician elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 2019 and is also a member of the National Academy of Medicine. Renee works clinically at the San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, and speaks Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish, and French. She received her undergraduate degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University; her medical degree from Harvard Medical School; her master’s training in health policy, planning, and financing at the London School of Economics and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; and her residency training in emergency medicine at Stanford University.

Going from union organizer to law school, 2010 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow Jonah Lalas is now a partner at the labor law firm Rothner, Segall & Greenstone in Pasadena, California, where he represents workers and public and private sector unions. After graduating from UCLA, Jonah, the child of Filipino immigrants, joined the Service Employees International Union in Los Angeles, where he organized private sector healthcare workers across Southern California. He then moved to Texas where, as organizing director of a joint SEIU/AFSCME local, he led a campaign to organize 13,000 City of Houston public sector employees, which resulted in a historic first contract that included improved wages and benefits, and a strengthened voice on the job for city employees. The Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA) recognized the work he and the team accomplished in Houston with the Philip Vera Cruz Award, which is given to outstanding AAPI union organizers whose work honors the memory of Filipino labor leader and farmworker Philip Vera Cruz. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law in 2012 and went on to work as an attorney representing whistleblowers. He then served as a law clerk for three federal judges at the Northern and Central District Courts in California and at the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Jonah recently represented a United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) local in federal district court and defeated a company’s effort to block sugar factory workers from exercising their right to strike.

Eva M. Luo, MD, MBA is a physician leader. She is a board certified obstetrician gynecologist and is director of care innovation and clinical informatics at Cityblock Health. While maintaining a clinical practice, Eva’s role at Cityblock is dedicated to improving service delivery for the underserved and identifying opportunities for future design and investment. 

Eva holds a faculty appointment at Harvard Medical School. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard College, an MD from the University of Michigan Medical School, and MBA from Harvard Business School. She completed OBGYN residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and was a health policy and management fellow at Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians. Her prior roles include working as special assistant to Doctor Donald Berwick, then CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and Clinical Lead for Value in Healthcare at BIDMC’s Center for Healthcare Delivery Science. She also serves as an advisor to start-ups in the women’s health space.

Eva was born in Florida to parents who had only the year before reached this country in the aftermath of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Their struggles against adversity and successful transition in the United States inspired Eva’s commitment to medicine and improving health care systems, particularly for those who need it most.

Arun Mohan is a physician, serial entrepreneur, and investor. He was previously co-founder and CEO at Radix Health, a SaaS company that partners with leading medical groups to improve patient access and engagement. Under Arun’s leadership, Radix achieved > 3,500% revenue growth from 2017-2021 while maintaining > 100% net retention, leading to recognition as #52 on the Inc5000, among other honors. Arun led the sale of Radix Health to Relatient in 2021, which he joined as president.

Arun serves on the boards of Relatient, Transitional Care Physicians of America, Aidin, and Liine. He also advises digital health companies, Inflo Health and Exer Health.

Earlier in his career, Arun was the founding president and chief medical officer of Hospital Medicine and Population Health for ApolloMD, where he built and led one of the largest hospitalist groups in the country. Prior to that, he served as medical director of Care Coordination at Emory University Hospital and associate vice-chair for IT for the department of medicine at Emory School of Medicine.

A serial entrepreneur, Arun founded PictureRx to simplify medication information, improve adherence, and increase medication safety. The company was acquired in 2014 by Bioscape Digital. As a student, Arun was co-founder of HealthSTAT, an advocacy organization focused on expanding access to care.

Arun received his BA from Swarthmore College and his MD/MBA from Emory University where he was a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow. He completed his residency in internal medicine at Cambridge Health Alliance and Harvard Medical School.

Gautam Mukunda is an internationally recognized expert in leadership and  innovation. He is a  research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership, senior advisor to America’s Frontier Fund, the author of Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012) and Picking Presidents: How To Make The Most Consequential Decision in the World (University of California Press, 2022), and the host of Nasdaq’s World Reimagined with Gautam Mukunda.  

Gautam has been a professor at Harvard Business School and distinguished visiting professor at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University. He was head of research at Rose Park Advisors, a $1BB+  

AUM specialized investment firm. He has published articles in Harvard Business Review, Foreign Policy, Slate, and Fast Company, among others. His work has been profiled in the New York Times, Atlantic, New Yorker, Economist, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and on All Things Considered. He received a Carnegie Endowment Biosecurity Fellowship and a Nuclear Security Fellowship from the Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation and a Derek Bok Award for Teaching Excellence from Harvard. 

Gautam is a member of the board of directors and chair of the Mentorship Committee of The Upakar  Foundation, a national non-profit devoted to providing college scholarships to underprivileged students  of South Asian descent. He is on the advisory boards of Bionic Solutions and Fount.Bio. Gautam was also a Jeopardy! champion.

Saúl Ramírez is a Southern Californian, the son of Mexican immigrants, and a first-generation, low-income student pursuing a PhD in Sociology at Harvard University. Saúl graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2016. He double majored in Chicano studies and ethnic studies, double minored in education and global poverty and practice, and was awarded High Honors and Distinction in General Scholarship. Saúl earned a JD from Yale Law School in 2019. He received the C. LaRue Munson Prize for his advocacy in criminal and immigrant defense clinics; he also served as the Latinx Law Students Association’s vice president, First Generation Professionals’ alumni chair, and Rebellious Lawyering Conference’s co-director. Saúl was a recipient of The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans in 2020. And he received an AM in sociology from Harvard in 2022. In graduate school, he has earned a Certification of Distinction in Teaching, has been a graduate student affiliate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Center for American Political Studies, and has served as co-coordinator of the Migration and Immigrant Incorporation Workshop. Saúl is zealously pursuing his research interests in crimmigration—the intersection of immigration and criminal legal systems—through his dissertation. Drawing on interview data, he will fill empirical, methodological, and theoretical lacunae in the assimilation, deportation, and international migration scholarship. Saúl ultimately hopes to educate, mentor, and support future generations of students.

Aisha Saad is a Dickerson Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School. Her research concerns private law and private ordering solutions to public sustainability challenges. She writes in tort and environmental law, and in corporate law and governance. In environmental and tort law, her recent research has examined obstacles to the success of causation arguments in climate litigation. In corporate law, she is interested in the contemporary treatment of corporate purpose, most prominently captured by the Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) agenda, and in understanding how this notion allocates decision-making power. Aisha is also an honorary research fellow at Oxford University and directs executive education for the Sustainable Law Program.

Prior to joining the University of Chicago, Aisha was a Fellow at the Harvard Law School Program on corporate governance and editor of the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance. She was previously the inaugural Bartlett Fellow at Yale Law School. Aisha has externed for Judge William Fletcher on the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Judge Edward Chen on the US District Court for the Northern District of California. She holds a JD from Yale Law School, a DPhil in geography from Oxford University, and a BS in environmental health science from UNC Chapel Hill.

Aisha’s work has been published or is forthcoming in the Boston College Law Review, Nature Climate Change, the Berkeley Business Law Journal, the New England Law Review, and the Berkeley Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Law.

Wazhma Sadat is an attorney and the first Afghan woman to graduate from Yale College and Yale Law School.

Wazhma was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in a setting where her educational opportunities were severely limited by the Taliban’s ban on girls’ education. When the Taliban’s stringent policies threatened the lives of Afghan civilians, Wazhma’s family joined the millions of displaced Afghans who crossed multiple borders in search of peace and education. As a refugee in Pakistan, Wazhma attended a school for displaced Afghans during the day and wove carpets with her six siblings at night.

After the fall of the Taliban, Wazhma’s family returned to Kabul permanently where she finished high school and travelled to the United States for the first time as a high school exchange student. Upon her return to Afghanistan, Wazhma worked on various development initiatives across the country that focused on education and economic empowerment of Afghan women. Prior to the collapse of the Afghan Republic, Wazhma co-founded and led an online education and leadership startup that operated in Afghanistan.

Ultimately, Wazhma’s work in Afghanistan would lead her to become an immigrant in the United States, where she practices law. Wazhma believes her life’s work will be to prevent wars and help in post-war peace building and development efforts in the Muslim world.   

Hari Srinivasan was diagnosed with autism and ADHD as a toddler. While his spontaneous talking skills are a work in progress and continue to improve, he primarily uses alternative technology to communicate. He also has numerous other autism related challenges that do present significant obstacles to his daily living.

Hari is currently a PhD Neuroscience student at Vanderbilt, a PD Soros Fellow and a NISE (Neurodiversity Inspired Science & Engineering) Fellow at the Frist Center for Autism and Innovation at Vanderbilt. His graduate school research will focus on the autism space.

Hari graduated from UC Berkeley as University Medal Finalist, along with Highest Distinction, Highest Honors, Departmental Citation Award, Phi Beta Kappa and Psi Chi. He carried out research on awe and empathy in autism and was also lead student instructor for a weekly class on autism at Berkeley, creating and teaching content that covered a myriad of issues across the lifespan. As a student journalist at The Daily Californian, he has written over 50 articles, many centered around disability. He headed Team Propaganda at the UC Berkeley Disability Lab, which hacks low cost solutions for a wide range of disabilities. He has been a research assistant at the Berkeley Psychology Labs for research related to mental health, ADHD, and sleep.

Hari’s nonacademic affiliations include IACC member, DREDF Secy of Board, ASAN Vice Chair of Board, ASA Council of Autistic Advisors, INSAR Autistic Researcher’s Committee, Brain Foundation Community Advisory Board, and Duke University’s ACE Advisory Board.