Ways of Knowing Culminating Event

Antwi Akom Ph.D. is a Distinguished Professor and Founding Director of the University of California, San Francisco, and SFSU SOUL Lab and Founder & CEO of DOPE Labs, which stands for Digital Organizing Power Building & Engagement Labs. DOPE Labs is one of the leading community-based research organizations in the world where Equity meets Data, Digital, and Design transformation with BIPOC, Rural, and disability/accessibility populations. Dr. Akom’s work examines the relationship between Community Informatics, Big Data, Asset Based Community Design (ABCD), Decolonizing Design, AI, Race, Power, Public Health, and Social Justice. As a Transdisciplinary Professor of African American Studies, Community-Powered Design, AI, Data Science, and Health Innovation Dr. Akom writes, teaches, and speaks widely about Democratizing Data and Design, Community-Centric Design, Algorithmic Justice, Equitable AI, and prototyping and testing new ways that BIPOC and Rural Populations can co-design with cities, communities, hospitals and health care providers to build power and self-determination, reduce disparities, create healthier neighborhoods, increase health/climate equity, and use the power of real-time data, community/patient-driven data, Big Data, and predictive analytics to create local knowledge ecosystems that improve the Public Health Data Infrastructure, share data across social systems, and lift the voices, priorities, and needs of communities from the margins to the epic-center.

Dr. Belcourt (Otter Woman) is an American Indian Professor in the College of Health at the University of Montana’s School of Public and Community Health Sciences Departments and Chair of the Native American Studies Department (she is an enrolled tribal member of the Three Affiliated Tribes: Mandan, Hidatsa, Blackfeet, and Chippewa descent). She completed her doctoral and professional studies in at an APA accredited program in clinical psychology with advanced postdoctoral science training completed at the Centers for American Indian and Alaska Native Health. She has worked clinically with diverse populations focusing on Indigenous populations specializing in posttraumatic stress reactions and multiple psychiatric conditions. Her research and clinical priorities include mental health disparities, posttraumatic stress reactions, risk, resiliency, psychiatric disorder, ethics, and environmental public health within the cultural context of American Indian communities. She has worked in mixed methodological analytic research teams at the University of Montana, University of Colorado at Denver, Black Hills State University, and the University of Washington using both qualitative, quantitative, social, and biomedical approaches. She currently teaches American Indian public health courses at the undergraduate and graduate level. She was selected by the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health to serve as a JPB Environmental Health Fellow 2014-2018 and is now a Senior fellow to new scholars selected to advance science and scholarship in the field. She has served as a co-lead investigator of two NIH RO1 5-year intervention grants aimed at improving indoor air quality within both Native and non-Native homes that rely upon wood stoves for heating. She has developed community based participatory efforts with communities using ethnographic digital storytelling and culturally grounded analytic techniques to advance effective scientific knowledge to indigenous communities. Community collaborators include tribal communities in Montana, Washington, New Mexico, Arizona, and Alaska. Dr. Belcourt serves as a Faculty Senator for the University of Montana, reviews for the National Institute of Health, has chaired the Ford Foundation Psychology Fellowship review panel guided by the National Academy of Sciences, and is a member of the University of Montana Executive Committee of the Senate. She graduated from Browning High School on the Blackfeet Reservation and has three children.

Claire Gibbons, PhD, MPH, who joined the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2007, is a senior program officer dedicated to understanding and measuring key health and healthcare issues and analyzing programs that seek to improve the value of the nation’s healthcare and public health systems. She views the Foundation as a “unique organization dedicated to building a national Culture of Health, now and for generations to come. Claire has authored numerous papers and presented widely in the areas of healthcare quality, disparities, evaluation and research methods and approaches, child welfare services, substance abuse, child victimization, diabetes, and end of life care. She earned a PhD from the School of Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an MPH from the University of Rochester, New York, and two BA degrees, in Economics and in Health and Society, from the University of Rochester.

Chien-Chi Huang is the founder of Asian Breast Cancer Project and the founder/former Executive Director of Asian Women for Health, a nonprofit organization providing culturally responsive health education and peer support for Asian women and their loved ones. An immigrant from Taiwan and a breast cancer survivor turned advocate, Ms. Huang has spearheaded several health initiatives in Massachusetts. The Workforce Development Initiative trains those who are under-served and under-resourced and finds them jobs as community health workers, providing an upstream solution to address the unique challenges facing the Asian community. Both mainstream and Asian media outlets have featured Ms. Huang’s efforts and culturally responsive approach to reducing health disparities related to gambling addiction, mental health, women’s health, and cancers. Motivated to lead through her cancer experience, Ms. Huang continues to participate in local, regional, and national efforts on health policy and research impacting the Asian community. Her passion for health equity and women empowerment has changed the healthcare landscape and created a pipeline of future Asian women leaders and peer health educators.

Fiona Kanagasingam joined the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF, the Foundation) in 2022 as the Foundation’s first vice president, equity, and culture. She is a key member of the Foundation’s leadership team, responsible for internally advancing RWJF's mission and vision by building the strategy for and operationalizing equity, diversity, and inclusion Foundation-wide.

Fiona comes to RWJF with more than 20 years of organizational development and equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) experience, and has managed change and scaled impact across multiple sectors as both a consultant and executive leader. In her previous role, she served as the chief equity and learning officer at Planned Parenthood of Greater New York, where she designed and operationalized a rigorous and measurable strategy for the organization’s transformation process to center equity, especially racial equity, across all operations, programs, and services.

Fiona consulted and advised numerous nonprofits, foundations, and funder collaboratives looking to build the will, skill, and alignment for organizational change and social justice. She has partnered with these organizations through the BIPOC Project, an organization she co-founded in 2016 to build authentic and lasting solidarity among Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), to undo Native erasure and anti-Black racism, and to ensure these focus areas are conditions for sustainable racial justice work within organizations and movement spaces.

Fiona received her Executive Certificate in Nonprofit Management from Georgetown University, her master’s degree in Counseling from Monash University, Victoria, Australia, and her bachelor’s degree in Comparative Politics, with a concentration in Women’s and Gender Studies, from Columbia University.

jaboa lake (she/her), Senior Director of Impact Evaluation, Learning, and Research at Race Forward, a national racial justice organization, is a sister, auntie, organizer, and liberation researcher based in DC. As an anti-oppressive methodologist, jaboa has worked with nonprofits, grassroots organizations, city and county governments, school districts, labor unions, and academic research centers to provide research guidance and support. jaboa serves on the board of the Community Legal, Education, and Referral (CLEAR) Clinic, chairs the Policy Committee for the international Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI), was a founding organizer for the Black Lives Matter PDX (Oregon) chapter, and is a SPSSI, APA, and MFP Fellow. jaboa has a MS in Applied Psychology and is (very close, she promises) to completing her PhD in Applied Social and Community Psychology, with a focus on mixed research methods. You can find jaboa outside somewhere, learning a new craft, and at the next rally.

Thomas LaVeist is dean of the Tulane University School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine and Principal Investigator for Partners for Advancing Health Equity. His career has been dedicated to understanding the causes of inequity in health and its potential solutions. He has an extensive record of publication in scientific journals as well as numerous mass media outlets and is director and executive producer of “The Skin You’re In,” a documentary series about racial inequalities in health. He is also author of six books including “Minority Population and Health: An introduction to health disparities in the United States” (the first textbook on health disparities). An award-winning research scientist, Dr. LaVeist has received the “Innovation Award” from National Institutes of Health, the “Knowledge Award” from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2013.

Amani M. Nuru-Jeter is the director of Evidence for Action. She is also Professor of Community Health Sciences and Epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health, where her research focuses on race and socioeconomic health disparities and the measurement and study of racism as a social determinant of health. Her broad research interest is to integrate concepts, theories and methods from epidemiology and the social and biomedical sciences to examine racial inequalities in health as they exist across populations, across place and over the life-course. Dr. Nuru-Jeter considers herself to be more “exposure” than “outcomes” focused, which is consistent with her interests in examining social factors such as “race” and “socioeconomic position” as exposures that serve as the foundation for the creation and preservation of health disparities across a number of outcomes.

Greta Cappelmann (she/her) comes to this work from experience in non-profit, private and public organizations in the American South. She previously worked to improve healthcare access for people living in Louisiana and worked in food access policy in South Carolina. Currently working as Special Projects Administrator at Partners for Advancing Health Equity, she aims to forward the priorities of the organization through collaborations and learning opportunities. Greta also serves on the Board of Directors for a non-profit organization focusing on transportation equity and education in New Orleans. She is an avid cyclist and believes in the power of the bicycle to change how we interact with our built environment and each other. She received her MPH from Tulane University, and her BS in Public Health from the College of Charleston.

Omar A. Dauhajre is the Administrative Director for Partners for Advancing Health Equity (P4HE Collaborative) at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. At P4HE he oversees administration, programming, partnerships, and membership. Prior to Tulane, he was Assistant Director at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at NYU. He is originally from Puerto Rico and has two decades of professional experience in the nonprofit world, both academia and community-based organizations. He holds an MS in Mass Communication from Florida International University, and a BA in History of the Americas from the University of Puerto Rico. Omar is also a musician, a DJ, and a podcast producer.

Natalie DiRocco (she/her) is the Strategic Initiatives Manager at Evidence for Action, where she oversees the execution of large-scale projects such as the Ways of Knowing Symposia. She also plays a key role in crafting and launching calls for proposals. For over a decade she’s been providing strategy and program management services for the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors in the social impact space. She holds an MPH from Boston University School of Public Health and a BS in BioBehavioral Health from Pennsylvania State University.

Erin has worked across the non-profit, academic, and public sectors. Her experience spans social justice and health equity advocacy, public policy, business, and research. Prior to joining Evidence for Action, Dr. Hagan was the acting Director of Policy and Government Affairs for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. She also previously worked for PolicyLink – a national research and action institute advancing racial and economic equity. She has served as a Commissioner on the Alameda County Public Health Commission, and as co-chair of the Commission’s Health Equity in All Policies sub-committee. Erin received her PhD in Kinesiology from the University of Connecticut, her MBA from Seton Hall University, and her B.S. in Nutrition and Fitness from the University of Missouri. When not working, she can usually be found surfing near her home on the North Shore of Oahu, HI.