2020-2021 COE Ambassadors

The Student Ambassador Program is a leadership opportunity for students to serve and represent the Women’s Health, Gender and Empowerment (WHGE) COE among the student population and larger community. Specific roles of Student Ambassadors include identifying and raising awareness about events related to WHGE on campus and in the community, participating in monthly webinar meetings, working with COE Faculty Ambassadors on campus and supporting COE programs to address campus-based sexual assault and dating violence.

2020-2021 Women's Health, Gender and Empowerment Student Ambassadors

Alia Cornell

UC Los Angeles
Human Biology and Society

Alia is passionate about contributing to global efforts of women’s empowerment through inclusive sexual health education and access to family planning resources. She has worked with the UCLA Sex Squad curating a performance art-based sexual health education curriculum for 9th graders in LA public high schools. She also conducts research on barriers to abortion access in LA.

Ana Isabel Flores

UC Berkeley
Public Health and Psychology

Ana is passionate about advocating for women’s rights, health, and education and hopes to empower women from all backgrounds. She is conducting research with her colleagues on the impact of air bound travel on COVID-19 and aims to publish her research. Ana’s career interests focus on combining public health principles with psychology in her future career as a nurse practitioner and she is determined to advocate for equal and accessible health care for everyone.

Anne Huynh

UC Irvine
Psychological Science and Education Sciences

Anne is passionate about mental health, social justice, the empowerment and healing of marginalized communities, and diversity/inclusivity. She is a UC Irvine Upward Bound academic tutor and mentor for high school students. Anne is a volunteer research assistant in both Dr. Campos's Culture, Relationships, and Health Lab & Dr. Castellanos's Lab, studying the psychosocial and health outcomes of underrepresented populations. She is a research fellow and trainee with SPSP, the world's largest society for Personality/Social Psychology. Future career goals include becoming a social psychologist and professor.

Anvita Kulshrestha

UC Berkeley
Molecular & Cell Biology; Nutritional Sciences & Toxicology; Minor in Global Public Health

Anvita is double majoring in Molecular & Cell Biology and Nutritional Sciences & Toxicology at UC Berkeley. She has also completed a minor in Global Public Health. Anvita is currently investigating the molecular mechanism underlying RNA packaging and sorting into exosomes in the Schekman Lab at UC Berkeley. She wishes to pursue research using computational genetic approaches to advance the current therapeutic landscape. Anvita is also interested in working on initiatives related to women’s health and education in India.

Catthi Ly

UC Irvine
Human Biology and Anthropology

Catthi is a Human Biology and Anthropology major at UCI and is serving as a Learning Assistant for the Human Biology series. She is conducting research in the Departments of Neurological Surgery and Public Health. In the latter, she serves as the student director of Global Health Research Education and Translation. She is serving as a mentor for the Diversity, Inclusion, and Racial Healing Ambassadors program.

Cieara Simmons

UC San Diego
Global Health

Cieara is passionate about social justice centered work and served as an intern at UC San Diego Women's Center where I planned events surrounded around education, equity and inclusion. For over a year, she has served as a Basic Needs Assistant at UC San Diego's Basic Needs Center. After graduation, Cieara would like to pursue a masters in social work.

Claire Amabile

UC Los Angeles
Masters in Public Health

Claire Amabile, BA, is a Masters student and Graduate Student Researcher at the Fielding School of Public Health in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work primarily revolves around sexual assault prevention and intervention in college and university populations, both nationally and internationally. She currently coordinated UC Speaks Up, a study addressing sexual violence across the UC system, and manages the Global Campus Violence Prevention Network, a web of indiviudals and organizations devoted to ending sexual violence on college campuses across the globe. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Global Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with minors in English and Feminist Studies, where she was also a UC GHI WHGE Student Ambassador. Her research interests include sexual violence, violence against animals, and intersectional approaches to public health.

Colette Kirkpatrick

UC San Diego
Global Health and Communication

Colette is President of Students for Global Health, which hosts the Quarterly Conversations in Global Health to facilitate campus wide discussions about various issues like refugee health, maternal health, and COVID-19. She is founder and President of Gift of Life at UCSD, which finds matches for patients with blood cancer through swab drives and awareness campaigns. Colette has experience conducting interviews at the Madre Asunta shelter to gather ethnographic data about the experiences of asylum seeking women and children.

Deandra Lee

UC San Francisco
Masters of Global Health Sciences

Deandra is passionate about providing health, gender, racial, and ethical equity, with special interests in low-income, underserved, and immigrant populations. Her current masters capstone/thesis is on migrant womxn's health at the US-Mexico border, during the COVID-19 pandemic and has previous research experience with Latinx farmworker health. Deandra also volunteered in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic as a medical assistant, teaching health promotion classes in local elementary schools, advocating for womxn's health and helping provide free healthcare. She also volunteered locally as a medical scribe and tutor, working with homeless/unstably housed, low-income, and underserved populations.

Donna Pham

UC San Diego
Public Health and Biology

Donna is interested in women's health, education, and community engagement so that women can feel empowered to make informed decisions about their health. She is a perinatal clinical research assistant at UCSD Health, where she recruits women with high-risk pregnancies for placenta clinical studies to better understand how to manage these pregnancies from a pathology standpoint. Donna's future career plans include going to medical school to become an OB/GYN to specialize in maternal fetal medicine.

Eniola Owoyele

UC Berkeley
Human Biology and Global Poverty & Practice

Eniola is passionate about womxn’s health and reproductive rights, especially within bipoc communities and hopes to become an ObGyn. She is a part of an organization called generation flow, which seeks to bring awareness to period poverty and menstrual rights and has partnered with several organizations to ensure that girls in our local community as well as various low income countries have access to sanitary products. Eniola has worked to bring awareness to gender based violence on the African continent with the UC Berkeley Nigerian Student Association chapter.

Gayane Kechechyan

UC San Diego
Pharmacy

Gayane is a second-year pharmacy student interested in women’s access to quality reproductive healthcare. During her summer internship with the Birth Control Pharmacist project, she developed an appreciation for pharmacists’ roles in prescribing birth control. She also discovered the concept of reproductive justice and studied its relevance to contraceptive access among low-income women of color. Through UCGHI, she hopes to spread awareness of reproductive justice and learn even more.

Geremy Lowe

UC Berkeley
Ethnic Studies

Geremy is interested in exploring the health disparities within the global Black community, particularly in Brazil, as he enters his doctoral program in the Fall of 2021. As a Mellon Mays Research Fellow, he is seeking to diversify the professoriate within disciplines of global health, history, and sociology through his lived-experiences and the narratives of other underserved communities in global health. Geremy is currently looking to explore more about health among Afro-Brazilian women and their households living in the favelas.

Grace Nguyen

UC Los Angeles
Biology

Grace is interested in preventing social determinants of health including advocacy and education around how heteropatriarchy and gender stereotyping decrease a woman’s likelihood to receive healthcare, increase a woman’s likelihood to experience intimate partner violence, and create sex-based discrimination. She is passionate about increasing quality and access to healthcare in historically marginalized but resilient communities. Grace has conducted research on the landscape of domestic violence restraining orders and firearm relinquishment in Los Angeles County.

Habiba Naqvi

UC Riverside
Public Policy

Habiba's interests include international affairs/foreign policy, social justice/ politics, and education.

Jackqueline Gonzalez

UC Merced
Public Health

Jackqueline is Secretary of UNICEF at UC Merced and lead the development of fundraisers for donations and organized community service opportunities. She is a member of the Public Health Society focused on spreading awareness on public health issues and community service. Jackqueline has completed professional and tobacco control policy leadership development programs. She is interested in health policy, community health sciences, and bio-behavioral research.

Josephine Tai

UC Berkeley
Molecular and Cell Biology & Economics

Josephine is passionate about healthcare accessibility, especially with regards to women's health, reproductive health, and gender inequality within healthcare. She serves as the Director of Operations and Development at Free The Period, a statewide student-led health policy organization that is fighting to end period poverty and secure free provision of menstrual products on public school campuses. Josephine is also an intern for a women's health tech company that aspires to combat menstrual inequities. She intends to pursue an MD/MBA in the future to address health inequalities through health innovation.

Juan Carlos Ruiz Malagon

UC San Diego
Masters of Global Health

Juan Carlos previously interned in Clinica Tepati; Clínica Tepati provides basic healthcare services and health education to the underserved Latinx community. He served as a Research Coordinator for the Mental Health Advocacy Group under the Knights Landing Environmental Health Project. His clinical and research experience allowed him to gain greater awareness and knowledge about the systemic injustices minoritized groups face such as the LGBTQIA+ community and female-identifying folks from the Latinx and Black community. For my graduate thesis, Juan Carlos will focus on the impact that the Trump Administration's Immigration Policies had on LGBTQIA+ refugees.

Kalani Phillips

UC Irvine
Masters of Public Health - Sociocultural Diversity & Health

Kalani interned with Puspadi Bali, the only NGO that provides rehabilitation, education, and training & advocacy programs for people with disabilities in Bali and East Indonesia during undergraduate studies. She is currently researching the cultural contexts behind use of electronic nicotine delivery systems among young adults. Kalani is currently interning with UCI HR Wellness & Engagement to create an employee wellness guide so that UCI can cultivate a culture of whole person wellness to all employees.

Katherine Morales

UC Los Angeles
Masters of Public Health

Katherine has addressed sexual violence on college campuses as a trauma-informed survivor advocate at the University of Southern California. She has served as a crisis counselor for predominately Spanish-speaking first generation and immigrant communities at the East Los Angeles Women’s Center and staffed their domestic violence shelter. She will continue to focus on violence prevention through a public health lens and is interested in addressing transnational generational trauma in Latin American populations.

Maite Delneuville

UC San Diego
International Studies, Sociology & Global Health

Maite is interested in fighting for social justice for all women and children in and outside of the United States. To achieve this goal, she seeks to become a social worker, specifically for marginalized or/and struggling women and children. Maite has participated in a student run organization at UCSD called Coalition for Abolition Medicine - an organization committed to centering the intersectional experiences of marginalized patients and communities while deconstructing the racist and colonial foundations of dominant healthcare models and the medical industrial complex.

Manju Cheenath

UC Santa Barbara
Microbiology, Biological Anthropology

Manju is Students Against Sexual Assault publicity coordinator at UCSB. She is volunteer crisis counselor for Crisis Text Line. Manju wants to be an emergency medicine physician.

Mary Padilla

UC Davis
Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies; International Relations

Mary is passionate about supporting and centering LGBTQIA+ experiences and advocating for intersectional feminist issues in the legal/medical sectors as well as in daily lived experiences. She is current Social Media Director for the ASUCD Gender and Sexuality Commission where we work on legislation, advocacy, and support for BIPOC LGBTQIA+ students at UCD. Mary is a First-Gen, queer, Filipinx striving to address the nuances in gender/sexuality in the healthcare experience.

Neha Pondicherry

UC San Francisco
Professional Studies, Medicine

Neha Pondicherry is a first-year medical student at UCSF. She is very passionate about women's health and reproductive rights! Her childhood experiences in South Asia have motivated her to involve herself in global health and public policy in LMICs in the future. She is currently the coordinator for the MedStudents4Choice elective at UCSF, and is also involved in Médecins Sans Frontières in UCSF as well.

Ngoc-Thanh Tieu

UC Berkeley
Molecular Environmental Biology

Thanh analyzes research on the connection between child obesity and malnutrition in Vietnam and the implications of socioeconomic and cultural determinants of health, viewing data from mothers, educators, doctors, and shopkeepers. Thanh volunteers at Berkeley Free Clinic Dental section (BFCD) and Volunteer Health Interpreters Organization (VHIO) as Internal Director—a clinic providing patients care without charge and UC Berkeley student-run organization linguistically bridging the language gap in healthcare. She is interested in global maternal and children's health, specifically in nutrition and hopes to contribute toward purposeful change for a more equitable world.

Noorhan Amani

UC San Diego
Human Biology

Noorhan is a volunteer for the UCSD Student-Run Free Clinic's food prescription project, which addresses food insecurity in underserved communities in San Diego. She currently leads a student organization at UCSD called The Beautiful Mind Project, which seeks to destigmatize mental health in the Muslim community and improve access to mental health resources tailored to the unique needs of Muslim students. Noorhan is a research assistant studying how delirium in the ICU can be prevented and evaluating the effectiveness of a novel restraint for use in the ICU. She is interested in global mental health and maternal health.

Raiza Arias

Charles Drew University
Masters of Public Health

Raiza's research interests include: sexual orientation and gender identity and expression as it relates to sex workers' holistic well being, trans national immigration as a human right, policies, praxis and weaponization of borders. Raiza is also interested in integrating a pedagogy of communal learning in conversation with the effects and resistance of capitalism.

Rhea-Comfort Addo

UC San Diego
Doctoral Studies in Cell & Developmental; Biology

Rhea-Comfort has experience in basic science, where she has studied cardiac development, ovarian development, and hormonal regulation in infertile women. Currently, she is a 4th year Ph.D. student in biology at UCSD, studying the genetic mechanisms regulating proper development during embryonic stages. After her Ph.D. she plans on applying to medical school to obtain her DO in obstetrics & gynecology. Rhea-Comfort's career goals include increasing access to reliable and affordable prenatal care to expecting mothers of color. She is very passionate about mentoring future generations of scientists and academics by sharing her personal experiences with imposter syndrome, ADHD, and sexual violence.

Roshni Desai

UC Davis
Global Disease Biology and Public Health

Roshni is currently a Mental Well-Being student coordinator at Health Education and Promotion, within Student Health & Counseling Services. She serves as a campus representative for the UC Speaks Up & Courage First Partnership: Preventing Abuse through Film. Roshni conducted outreach for 'At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal' documentary screening & panel discussion. She is interested in the One Health approach, along with the intersection of evidence-based public health and sustainable policies that reduce global health inequities.

Salina Isaq

UC Hastings School of Law
Law

Salina’s interests include: women’s health and gender justice in the law, intersectional feminism, and critical race theory. She intends to work at the intersection of civil and human rights law to represent survivors of gender-based violence and discrimination with a focus on defending women and diverse genders’ access to education, healthcare, and work. She’s a board-member for her school’s Women of Color Collective, Women’s Law Journal, and a CARE advocate for student-survivors of violence.

Samantha Gonzalez

UC Santa Cruz
Legal Studies and Psychology

In the Fall 2020 quarter Samantha was able to take a class on Global Health Politics and completely fell in love with the subject. Finding solutions to global health problems has become one of her new passions. Samantha enjoys reading autobiographies about leaders that have found innovative ways to help people, and learning from them. She is currently working as a registered behavioral technician for children with Autism at Santa Cruz ABA.

Sarai Acosta

UC Davis
International Agricultural Development

Sarai is interested in social equity and gender empowerment, sustainable resource management and advocacy of marginalized populations.

Sean Sugai

UC Los Angeles
Human Biology and Society & Anthropology with Public Health minor

Sean is interested in integrating medical anthropological techniques into public health approaches centered around reproductive rights, LGBTQIA+ sexual health (queer and trans health care, in particular), and gender disparities within at-risk populations. He is interested in forging more intersectional health care practices that destabilizes the ways in which barriers work in concert with structural forces and relate to issues of biopower to produce health inequities. Sean is researching sexual violence on college campuses through UC Speaks Up to implement structural changes to de-stigmatize seeking care, educate communities beyond the UC campuses about violence prevention strategies, and ultimately implementing more trauma-informed, survivor-centered approaches to healing.

Seerat Chawla

UC Los Angeles
Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology

Seerat is passionate about housing insecurity and intersectionality. She is interested in promoting sexual and reproductive autonomy and reducing gender disparities in healthcare. She serves on board for Bruin Shelter, a shelter for students in the LA area. She advocates for ethical service through the Community Service Commission and improved sexual health outreach to under resourced communities as a HIV counselor. Seerat conducts research on the role of intersectionality in the clinical treatment of trauma.

Shirelle Mizrahi

UC Los Angeles
Masters of Public Health

Shirelle's research interests surround reproductive and mental health, particularly as it relates to marginalized populations. Additionally, she is interested in the ways that gender and sexuality create barriers to health access and quality of care. She is currently a sexual violence Research Assistant at the U.C. San Diego Center for Gender Equity and Health (GEH). Shirelle is excited to begin an internship this Winter at the Public Goods Projects, analyzing the role of media in promoting vaccine misinformation.

Stephanie Johnson

Charles R. Drew University
Masters of Biomedical Sciences

Stephanie is interested in providing sustenance to underserved elderly at home to ensure they are exposed to less risk. She is passionate about learning/ aiding in the advancement of women’s, LGBT+, and underrepresented community rights/representation in healthcare. Stephanie is interested in research regarding stem cell damage caused by type 2 diabetes and its effects on female stress urinary incontinence.

Sydney Adams

UC Merced
Public Health

Sydney is a research intern for the Nicotine and Cannabis Policy Center and for UCSF's ICAN project. She is a volunteer for the domestic violence project, "Breaking the Silence: Survivors Speak." Sydney created a women's health blog called Glow From Here that is intended to educate people on global women's health issues.

Taryn D'Amore

UC Santa Cruz
Politics, Community Studies, and Literature Minor

Taryn's experience has consisted of political campaigns and legislative advocacy on the state and local level that focus on increasing equal health access for all, and supporting women's health and autonomy. She is very interested in supporting the UC community in building spaces that are inclusive and disseminate resources regarding mental health, sexual health, and equal access to health. Taryn aims to create a space that empowers women to be their own advocates.

Veronica Varner

UC Santa Barbara
Global Studies, Psychology & Brain Sciences

Veronica is interested in researching how student sex workers exercise agency. She is also interested in how denial of the narrative of victimization can combat stigma of the industry of commodified sexuality. During COVID-19 pandemic, Veronica has been teaching yoga classes over Zoom to previously incarcerated women with Prison Yoga Santa Barbara. She is applying to Master’s in Social Work programs to pursue a career working with undocumented womxn and sex worker populations, increasing access to healthcare and advocating for well-being.

Willow Bowers

UC Irvine
Anthropology

Willow takes a holistic approach to understand their own as well as others' experiences with gender, ability, health, and inclusivity. They advocate mindfully with particular attention to disparities regarding race, class, citizenship, and accessibility. Willow co-authored case-studies on multiple counties within California, researching stakeholders, compounding variables, and many injustices such as racial, sex, gender, health, reproductive, procedural, media, data, and economic disparities.

Zainab Apalara

UC Davis
Biological Sciences; Minors: Computer Science, Entrepreneurship, and Arabic Language

Zainab is an intern and volunteer who works alongside a Healthcare Executive focused on Performance Excellence(Baldrige-based). She learned relevant skills in using several programs/applications and in evidence-based medical practice, digital healthcare management, data analysis, bioinformatics, machine learning, and entrepreneurship. Zainab performed disease-focused analytics the during COVID-19 pandemic by developing presentations on the pandemic’s spread. She hopes to be an OBGYN and to mitigate the effects of disparities.