KEYNOTE speakers
.jpg)
Rhea Boyd, MD, MPH, FAAP | COVID-19 & Health Equity Moderator
Rhea Boyd is a a pediatrician, public health advocate, and scholar. She works clinically at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and serves as the Chief Medical Officer of San Diego 211 and the Director of Strategy, Equity and Justice for The California Children's Trust. She writes and teaches on the relationship between structural racism, inequity and health. She works clinically and has a scholarly focus on the child and public health impacts of harmful policing practices and policies.
​
Ayanna Bennett, MD, MPH, FAAP | Public Health Response to COVID-19 & Advocacy
Dr. Bennett is one of three Incident Commanders at the San Francisco COVID Command Center, the Emergency Operations Center for the city. Dr. Bennett leads the efforts from the Health Department, alongside the Departments of Human Services and Emergency Management. In the Pre-COVID world, Dr. Bennett is the Director of the Office of Health Equity, developing and monitoring programming that improves the health outcomes of groups with long-standing health disparities, improving the welcome and mobility of staff of color, and implementing strategies that remove systemic barriers to equity within DPH policies and structures. Dr. Bennett has been working with DPH as a part-time clinician since 2001, while maintaining a private pediatric practice in the East Bay. In 2005 Dr Bennett partnered with residents of San Francisco to found the 3rd St Youth Center & Clinic in Bayview, a non-profit youth center, beginning her public service career.
​
​
​
​
Tiffani J. Johnson, MD, MSc, FAAP | Health Equity & Structural Racism and Injustices
Dr. Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of California, Davis School of Medicine. Dr. Johnson’s research portfolio reflects her commitment to improving the quality of care for underserved children. Her interdisciplinary research program is focused on race and racism and its impact on child health. She is currently exploring root causes of inequities in the healthcare and early childhood education settings, including research on racism and bias and its impact on the health and well-being of children. Her research has been funded by AHRQ, the RWJ Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program, and the NIH. She is partnering with Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) to investigate disparities within the multisite PECARN Electronic Health Record Data Registry. Her leadership in PECARN includes serving as Chair of the Disparities Working Group, Disparities Consultant to the PRIME Node, and Co-Chair for the Protocol Review and Development subcommittee. Her research expertise has led to roles as Co-Chair of the Race in Medicine Special Interest Group of the Academic Pediatric Association, and extensive leadership in the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) serving on the Taskforce on Addressing Bias and Discrimination (2017-2019), the Committee on the Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health (2019-present), and the National Advisory Board for Addressing Social Health and Early Childhood Wellness (2019-present).
​
Todd Wolynn, MD, MMM, FAAP | Combatting Anti-Science in Child Health Advocacy
Dr. Todd Wolynn is President, CEO, and co-owner of Kids Plus Pediatrics — a cutting edge, independent practice in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He also serves as Advisory Board President of Shots Heard Round the World, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting, defending, empowering and galvanizing vaccine advocates. An active member and fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Dr. Wolynn is a nationally recognized expert on vaccine communication and the use of social media in pediatrics.
Stephanie Y. Fong Gomez, MD, MS, PL-3 | Virtual Advocacy Action #Votekids
Dr. Fong Gomez was born and raised in the Bay Area and has spent over a decade serving its youth and families through schools, nonprofit spaces, collaborative research efforts, and clinical care. A child advocate working at the intersection of pediatrics, community engagement, and urban health equity, she is invested in upstream solutions to address a broad range of child health issues, including racial justice, immigration, education, and health care access. She is an active member of AAP SOPT and AAP-CA1 Advocacy Committee and recently co-chaired the inaugural Advocating for Children Together Conference. She is an alumnus of Johns Hopkins University and the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program and a pediatric resident at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland. Dr. Fong Gomez is the cofounder of the VOICE Project, which supports adolescents and families in developing the healthy habit of voting through nonpartisan outreach, capacity-building, and research in pediatric spaces serving communities disenfranchised by political systems.
Noor Chadha, JMP3 | Virtual Advocacy Action #Votekids
Noor Kaur Chadha is a medical student and graduate student at the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program who strives to integrate compassion, justice, joy, and community throughout her life and medical career. She is also the cofounder of the VOICE Project, through which pediatricians and youth leaders team up to support teen patients and families in developing the healthy habit of voting.
FOCUS GROUP speakers
Edith Bracho-Sanchez, MD | Immigrant Health
Dr. Edith Bracho-Sanchez is a primary care pediatrician and the medical director of pediatric telemedicine at Columbia University-New York Presbyterian Hospital. Edith is from Caracas, Venezuela, she obtained her medical degree from New York University School of Medicine, followed by residency training in pediatrics at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a fellowship in global health and journalism at Stanford University, in partnership with CNN and the International Rescue Committee. Edith continues to write for CNN and makes frequent expert appearances in both English and Spanish-language networks. She also hosts a weekly podcast for Latino parents titled “Las Doctoras Recomiendan” that has received several child advocacy awards. She hopes to empower parents and humanize the experiences of disadvantaged children through the media, while continuing to serve her patients on the ground in New York City.
Diane Dooley, MD, MHS, FAAP | Mental Health
Diane Dooley is a pediatrician and chairperson of the AAP Chapter 1 Mental Health Committee. As a co-founder and chair of this committee, she has led a remarkably talented group of pediatricians to advocate for enhanced mental health access for children and teens, develop a survey of child and teen mental health access, and train pediatricians in providing mental health care in their practices. She recently retired from Contra Costa Health Services after a 38-year career as a pediatrician with leadership positions in clinical services, public health and Contra Costa Health Plan. She has published and presented at statewide conferences on mental health access, as well as pediatric obesity and oral health. She is presently an Associate Clinical Professor of Family and Community Medicine at UCSF and a co-leader of the Chapter 1 ACEs Aware Communications grant.
Hop Hopkins | Equity in Climate Change and Health
Mr. Hopkins is the Director of Strategic Partnerships for the Sierra Club, where he works to ensure that Sierra Club campaigns and programs protect those most affected by climate change and environmental degradation and promote economic justice. Born in Dallas, Texas to working class parents, Hop sharpened his intersectional analysis organizing as an HIV/AIDS organizer and anti-globalization activist during the World Trade Organization uprising. In the years since, he has worked in the labor movement, the climate justice movement and the housing justice movement. Hop is also a certified Arborist, a Master Gardener, has his Permaculture Design Certificate and is a certified Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) instructor. Hop works in his community outside of Los Angeles to create a network of residential food forests in order to support the development of stable, human-scale solar self-reliant neighborhood communities integrated with cooperative local economies. Alongside his wife of seventeen years, Hop homeschools their two daughters and maintains a food forest inhabited by their pet Australian shepherds, chickens, honey bees, fruit trees and multiple compost piles.
Read Hop Hopkin's recent piece to learn more about the links between climate change and racism: How Racism is Killing the Plant
Joan Jeung, MD, MPH, FAAP | Mental Health
Joan Jeung MD MPH is an HS Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). Dr. Jeung is engaged in multiple projects to deepen behavioral healthcare capacity and trauma-informed practice in pediatric primary care. She serves on the executive committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)’s’ Section on Minority Health Equity and Inclusion (MHEI), and is a member of AAP Chapter 1’s mental health access committee.
Renee C. Wachtel MD | School Health
Dr. Wachtel is a board-certified Developmental-Behavioral and Neurodevelopmental Disabilities Pediatrician. She has a private practice in San
Leandro CA for the evaluation and treatment of children with developmental and
behavioral problems, including autistic spectrum disorders. Dr. Wachtel is one of
the founding members of the Bay Area Autism Consortium (the BAAC) and is
currently the President of the Board of Directors. She is a Clinical Professor of
Pediatrics at UCSF School of Medicine and is on the Medical Staff of UCSF Benioff
Children’s Hospital Oakland. She is active in advocacy efforts for children with
special needs, and chairs the California Chapter 1 American Academy of Pediatrics Committees on Development and Behavior and School Health. She also chairs the Mental Health Committee for the Alameda and Contra Costa Medical Association. She was a member of the State of CA Autism Task Force for SB 946, and has served as an autism expert consultant for the CA Health Policy Center and the US Department of Defense autism grant review program.