MEET OUR
TEAM.
Students vs. Pandemics at LA is an interdisciplinary group of UCLA undergraduate and graduate students aiming to make a positive impact on health and overall wellness during times of crisis. Our three primary goals are to improve transparency and communication, build community at UCLA, and identify needs and innovate solutions.
MEET OUR LEADERSHIP TEAM.
Chantal Barksdale
President, Co-Founder
Winnie Liu
Internal Chair
Apsara Chopra
Recruitment Chair
Evan Patel
Financial Chair
Lauren Kim
Publicity Chair
MEET OUR
TEAM.
Students vs. Pandemics at LA is an interdisciplinary group of UCLA undergraduate and graduate students aiming to make a positive impact on health and overall wellness during times of crisis. Our three primary goals are to improve transparency and communication, build community at UCLA, and identify needs and innovate solutions.
MEET OUR LEADERSHIP TEAM.
Chantal Barksdale
President, Co-Founder
Winnie Liu
Internal Chair
Apsara Chopra
Recruitment Chair
Evan Patel
Financial Chair
Lauren Kim
Publicity Chair
Alumni Leadership Advisory Council
Co-President
Hannah Ryu
Hannah Ryu is a senior at Wellesley College, majoring in Biochemistry and English, and pursuing the pre-med track. She has been the Founder and President of the Wellesley SvP chapter since May 2020. By being more involved in the National SvP, Hannah envisions expanding the SvP organization's definition of “pandemics” as we move beyond COVID-19, and empower students to tackle existing and rising global issues through interdisciplinary collaboration.
Co-President
Courtney Coleman
Courtney Coleman is a graduate student at Harvard University studying Biology with a specific interest in investigating the pathological roles of mast cells. She has been involved in SvP since November 2020, and she became a part of the National Team in July 2021 where she has enjoyed being the social media manager, blog writer, and supervising editor. Courtney looks forward to helping SvP expand its focus to a variety of additional global issues through innovative collaboration.
Vice President
Han Trieu
Han Trieu is a junior at UC San Diego, majoring in Psychology with an emphasis in Human Health and minoring in Biology. She is currently the mental health lead at the UCSD chapter and will be a co-president at the start of next year. Han wishes to expand SvP’s reach among more chapters and address our society’s real-world issues through integrative collaboration.
Board of Directors
Co-Founder
& Member of Board of Directors
Gwendolyn Lee
Gwendolyn Lee is an internal medicine resident at UCSF whose work centers on providing holistic healthcare to her patients, with a focus on preventive and lifestyle medicine in primary care. She is passionate about improving health equity and working at the intersection of healthcare, business, and government.
Prior to residency, Gwendolyn worked in state government at the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission, where she researched pharmaceutical pricing policies, and at the Massachusetts eHealth Institute, where she developed a government grant program for digital health startups. She also sourced startups for venture capital firms advancing health technology (Flare Capital Partners) and artificial intelligence (Innospark Ventures).
Gwendolyn received her M.D. from the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and her M.P.P. from Harvard Kennedy School. She received her A.B. from Princeton University, where she majored in Public & International Affairs and minored in Global Health and Health Policy.
Co-Founder
& Member of Board of Directors
Alexandria Lee
Alexandria is a law student at UC Irvine. She is interested in the bridging law and legal ethics with biotech innovation and health equity.
Previously, she worked at the LA County Department of Public Health on the Outbreak Management Branch’s rapid response COVID team. She also conducted research on reproductive epidemiology with the Massachusetts General Hospital, and on safe home water and childhood obesity interventions with the Prevention Research Center at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Alexandria earned her B.S. in Anthropology and minored in Evolutionary Medicine, UCLA (2018); M.S. in Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health (2020).
Oluwatumise (Tumise) Asebiomo
Oluwatumise Asebiomo received her J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she earned James Kent and Harlan Fisk Stone academic honors. She was also the recipient of the Pauline Berman Heller Prize, awarded annually to Columbia Law School’s graduating student who has displayed the most outstanding record of academic achievement in the service of gender equality in law. While earning her degree, Tumise served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Law Review. In addition, she was a member of the Advanced Mediation Clinic under Professor Alexandra Carter and served as a research assistant to Professor Kathryn Judge.
Prior to attending law school, Tumise was an analyst at Barclays in New York City. Tumise received her A.B. degree cum laude from Princeton University, where she concentrated in comparative politics.
Leo Celi
As clinical research director and principal research scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Computational Physiology (LCP), and as a practicing intensive care unit (ICU) physician at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), Leo brings together clinicians and data scientists to support research using data routinely collected in the process of care. His group built and maintains the publicly-available Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC) database and the Philips-MIT eICU Collaborative Research Database, with more than 30,000 users from around the world. In addition, Leo is one of the course directors for HST.936 – global health informatics to improve quality of care, and HST.953 – collaborative data science in medicine, both at MIT. He is an editor of the textbook for each course, both released under an open access license. "Secondary Analysis of Electronic Health Records" has been downloaded more than a million times, and has been translated to Mandarin, Spanish, Korean and Portuguese. He is the inaugural editor of PLOS Digital Health.
Nat Pedley
Dr. Nathaniel Pedley, MD/MBA is a Health Sciences Clinical Instructor in the Division of Primary Care at Olive View - UCLA Medical Center. He provides holistic primary care in a safety-net hospital with an emphasis on identifying and overcoming psychosocial barriers to optimal health and well-being.