Dr. Ayanna Bennett is the Founding Director of the Office of Health Equity and Chief Health Equity Officer at the San Francisco Department of Public Health. In 2004, Dr. Bennett co-founded a non-profit in the San Francisco Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood called the 3rd Street Youth Center and Clinic, co-designed with community members to serve Bayview youth who had less access to care than youth in any other neighborhood. Dr. Bennett led 3rd St as its Medical Director and then Executive Director for 12 years, while also working as a practicing pediatrician in the East Bay.

In 2015, Dr. Bennett joined the leadership team at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, where she established the Office of Health Equity in 2019. The Office of Health Equity works to make lasting systemic changes in the way public health and health care serve marginalized communities, and to directly eliminate racially and socially mediated health disparities.

Dr. Michele DiTomas is the Chief Medical Executive over the Palliative Care Initiative with the California Correctional Healthcare Services. Since 2007 she has served as Chief Physician and Hospice Medical Director at the California Medical Facility which provides end of life care to men incarcerated in the California Department of Corrections.

Dr. DiTomas has spent over 15 years working for prison reform from the inside by advocating for positive changes from both custody and medical staff as well as through collaboration with outside organizations.

As Hospice Medical Director she works with the hospice team to create an environment where patients can live their final days with dignity, respect and comfort despite their incarceration. The hospice team supports the patients and their families in achieving compassionate release and, when this is not possible, provides a setting where they are able to have meaningful visits and often find reconciliation and closure at the end of life.

Dr. Rita Hamad is a social epidemiologist and family physician in the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies and the Department of Family & Community Medicine at UCSF. She is the director of the Social Policies for Health Equity Research Program (https://sphere.ucsf.edu). Her research focuses on the pathways linking social factors like poverty and education with racial and socioeconomic disparities in health across the life course.

Dr. Hamad is the Associate Director of the Center for Health Equity. She previously served as the Policy Lead of the UCSF Preterm Birth Initiative, spearheading an agenda to reduce racial and socioeconomic disparities in preterm birth by addressing its upstream determinants.Dr. Hamad mentors trainees at all levels in population health and health equity research, and lectures in several courses about the effects of social policies on health inequities. She saw patients for 10 years in safety net clinics throughout the San Francisco Bay Area

Dr. Christine Henneberg is a family physician and a writer who has dedicated her career to the care and trust of pregnant women, specifically through the provision of conscientious, compassionate abortion care.

After college, Dr. Henneberg decided to pursue a career as a medical doctor alongside a life and career as a writer. While at the Joint Medical Program she received a Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship in Hindi language from the US Department of State. She was also selected for the prestigious Fellowship at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics.

Currently Dr. Henneberg provides first- and second-trimester abortions for Planned Parenthood of Northern California and trains UCSF-affiliated residents in abortion care through the TEACH program. Alongside her clinical practice, she continues to write about medical ethics and abortion, with recent essays appearing in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Millions, Slate, Huffington Post, and elsewhere. In September of this year she published her first book, Boundless: An Abortion Doctor Becomes a Mother, a memoir and a manifesto that draws on her medical training and early practice, as well as her first pregnancy, to illustrate the complexity, nuance, and necessity of abortion care.

Dr. Lu is the dean of the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. Prior to coming to this, he served as director of the federal Maternal and Child Health Bureau under the Obama Administration. There, he transformed key federal programs in maternal and child health, and launched major initiatives to reduce maternal, infant, and child mortality across the nation, and was awarded the prestigious Hubert H. Humphrey Service to America Award.

Prior to his public service, Dr. Lu was a professor of obstetrics-gynecology and public health at UCLA, where his research focused on racial-ethnic disparities in birth outcomes from a life-course perspective. As a practicing obstetrician for nearly two decades, he has attended more than 1000 births. Dr. Lu has served on three National Academy of Medicine Committees, and co-authored the report Vibrant and Healthy Kids: Aligning Science, Practice, and Policy to Advance Health Equity.

Dr. Rohan Radhakrishna was appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom and confirmed by the California Senate to lead the Office of Health Equity (OHE). He serves as a Deputy Director, Chief Equity Officer, and Tribal Liaison for the California Department of Public Health (CDPH). He aims to advance partnerships to change narratives and power structures to help create a California for All.

Dr. Radhakrishna supports California’s COVID-19 equity work and leads OHE’s broad portfolio: advancing anti-racism through a Racial Health Equity Initiative, advancing Health in All Policies by serving on the Strategic Growth Council and leading the Climate Change and Health Equity Section,

Rohan has 20 years of experience learning from and working with impacted communities. His local experience responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, power shutoffs, wildfire smoke, and heat emergencies has solidified his commitment to addressing the overlapping public health crises of climate change and structural racism.

He believes that inequity in a world of abundance is morally and socially unacceptable.