board of directors

BOARD PRESIDENT, Candy Liang, is a biotech strategy and operations leader. She has extensive experience in leading corporate and commercial strategy development and transformational projects such as merger integration.  She currently leads Commercial Effectiveness at Akebia Therapeutics, a biotech focuses on bettering the lives of patients with kidney disease. As a first-generation immigrant and an Asian woman, she has experienced health inequality and misinformation first hand, that's why she is an advocate for health education and equality and a believer in the power of peer-led, community based initiatives in advancing overall health for Asian women. 

BOARD VICE-PRESIDENT, Ling-Mei Wong, is a writer and former editor of Sampan, the only bilingual Chinese-English newspaper in New England. She is an immigrant from Taiwan and has been practicing as a journalist for 16 years. Ling-Mei speaks Mandarin and Cantonese, along with English, so she reports sensitively on diverse Chinese experiences. She joined the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Boston to support media affairs. Read her work here.

CLERK, Jenny Yuan, has joined AWFH board since 2019. She oversees AWFH's donor recruitment and retention. Jenny was a manager at Massachusetts Nonprofit Network and she holds dual Bachelors’ degrees in Business Management and Administration and Art History from Boston University. She has been involved in the Boston nonprofit community for more than 4 years and saw the power of peer-led organizations. Jenny believes by increasing health literacy, advocating equity, and creating a warm and collaborative environment, we could foster a systemic change to the healthy and well-being of Asian Women nationally.

TREASURER, Mahati Mukkamala, is a talented Senior Financial Professional with wide and deep experience in evaluating systems, Financial planning and Analysis and developing clear, cogent models that drive effective business decisions. He combines an obsessive attention to detail with a far-sighted view of the future, develop processes that significantly improve the bottom line. Mahati collaborates closely with Executive Teams to ensure founders’ vision is fully implemented.

BOARD MEMBER-AT-LARGE, Neha Bhagat, has been a member of AWFH since 2018 when she joined the planning committee for the 10th Annual Asian American Mental Health Forum. She has since been involved with AWFH’s CelebrASIANS event and is chair of Program Committee for the 2020 11th Annual Asian American Mental Health Forum. Neha holds a B.S. in Behavioral Neuroscience from Northeastern University and is a lab manager in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School.
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​Her passion for mental health advocacy, particularly in suicide prevention, has led her to serve on the Massachusetts Department of Public Health’s Community Advisory Board for Suicide Prevention in addition to being a volunteer at Samaritans. Neha is proud to serve on the board for AWFH and continue their efforts improving the health and lives of Asian women in the community.

BOARD MEMBER-AT-LARGE, Marilyn Gardner, is a public health nurse consultant and writer who lives in Boston, Massachusetts. She is the Director of Clinical/Community Operations at the Center for Health Impact in Worcester, MA.. Prior to this position, she worked for 10 years as the manager of the Women's Health Network at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. She has worked in women's health internationally in Pakistan, Egypt, and Northern Iraq as well as in three states - Illinois, Arizona, and Massachusetts. She is a certified cultural competency trainer and the author of two books - Between Worlds: Essays on Culture and Belonging and Worlds Apart - A Third Culture Kid's Journey. Marilyn is passionate about communicating across cultural boundaries and making space for all voices in the health care conversation. You can find her books wherever books are sold and her writing at Communicating Across Boundaries.

BOARD MEMBER-AT-LARGE, Dr. Laurie A. Nsiah Jefferson, is the interim director for the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy at UMass Boston, and interim graduate program director for the Gender Leadership and Public Policy (GLPP) program in the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies. In 2018 she was a Visiting Professor in the same program. For over 10 years she held faculty and senior scientist positions at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. Furthermore, she has an extensive background and over 30 years of experience in health and health care program development, policy, research and administration.

BOARD MEMBER-AT-LARGE, Dr. Mabel Lam, is a Chinese-American, Clinical, and Police and Public Safety Psychologist in Private Practice.  Her work experiences have been very diverse ranging from clinical to administration.  She has worked for many years nationally and in the state’s under-served and disenfranchised communities by providing mental health services, advocacy, and consultation; and she has also taught and done research in the areas of minority mental and physical health.  The population that she has worked with is also very diverse in socio-economics, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age.  As a Police and Public Safety Psychologist, she provides psychological evaluations, screenings and fitness for duty evaluations with emphasis on assessing the individual’s capacities to develop culturally competent responses to diverse populations served by law enforcement.  She is the Clinical Coordinator with the Metro Boston Critical Incident Stress Management Team providing services to first responders.  Dr. Lam also teaches at Salem State University as a Visiting Assistant Professor in their Mental Health Counseling graduate program.
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​Dr. Lam serves on numerous boards of community non-profits, such as Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center, and co-founded the Jasmine Asian Women Giving Circle, which fundraises to provide programming grants for Asian women and girls in Massachusetts.  Dr. Lam is the first ethnic minority to be elected as President of the Massachusetts Psychological Association, and Chair to the American Psychological Association’s Committee on State Leaders.  As a member of MPA, she has provided testimonies for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ Health Disparity Bill, especially advocating for culturally appropriate services.  Along with the MPA delegations, she has also advocated numerous times at the U.S. Capitol Hill.

BOARD MEMBER-AT-LARGE, Dr. Namrata Sengupta, is a trained scientist, science communicator, career coach, and STEM equity advocate. She is a Science Communications Officer and a science museum professional at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Namrata volunteers her time as a STEM career coach and mentor for early career professionals and speaks at a variety of panels and lectures in the higher education community. She is deeply passionate about science and health equity-related advocacy work and facilitates dialogues around issues that disproportionately affect communities of color.