Our Board

Dr. Christine Petrin is a primary care physician at an FQHC in the East Harlem community of New York City, where she also serves as faculty at Mount Sinai Hospital. She joined DFA as a medical student, and after rising through various committees and Board roles, she now leads the organization as Board Chair. She attended Barnard College, the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, and Tulane University School of Medicine. She completed her Internal Medicine & Pediatrics Residency at Georgetown University Hospital where she also served as Chief Resident. She is passionate about primary care, improving our public health infrastructure, and demanding equity and justice throughout the health care system.

Dr. Meenakshi Bewtra is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine; and a Senior Scholar in the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania, with a focus on inflammatory bowel disease including natural history; outcomes of disease and medication safety using observational data and statistical modeling; measures of risk and risk tolerance for therapies using discrete choice experiment; and clinical trials for educational interventions and novel therapies. Dr. Bewtra’s work has been funded by the NIH, Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation, AGA, PCORI, pharmaceutical industries, and private philanthropy. While in medical school, Dr. Bewtra experienced first-hand the discrimination and difficulties of healthcare before the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act and became dedicated to expanding healthcare. She is also dedicated to increasing both physicians and scientists voices in reducing gun violence; protecting women’s reproductive rights; and expanding and protecting healthcare services such as Medicaid, preventative care (vaccines), and CHIP. She speaks on-air and in-person about these issues and hopes to inspire more healthcare professionals to stand up and speak out because “facts are voiceless.”

Kate Kelley, MD, MPH is a family medicine physician and Addiction Medicine fellow at MetroHealth Medical Center, the county safety-net hospital in Cleveland, Ohio. Prior to becoming a physician, she worked in health communications and public health policy at the American Psychological Association and the National Academy of Medicine. She began working in advocacy as a medical student with the National Physicians Alliance, and then as a resident with Doctors for America's Health for All committee. She previously served on the Ohio Academy of Family Physicians Foundation as an alternate student trustee. Kate is a native of Northeast Ohio, and after studying and working in Virginia and Washington, DC, returned home for medical school and practice. She enjoys traveling, cooking, jogging, and reading (mostly) fiction, and is continuously impressed by the passion and dedication of her DFA colleagues!

Bich-May Nguyen believes all patients should have affordable access to high quality health care they need and none of the care they don't. During the day, she is a clinical associate professor at the Tilman J. Ferttita Family College of Medicine in Houston, TX. Dr. Nguyen directs a preclinical course that teaches clinical skills and health systems science, works with community-based organizations to study Vietnamese Americans and COVID-19, and sees patients one day each week. By night, she serves on the board of Doctors for America where she co-directs the Gene Copello Health Advocacy Fellowship and is a board liaison to the Access for Affordable Care impact area. Dr. Nguyen graduated with a M.D. from Baylor College of Medicine and a M.P.H. from the Harvard T. Chan School of Public Health. She completed her residency training in family medicine at Boston University/Boston Medical Center. In her free time, Dr. Nguyen promotes civic engagement and watches South Korean dramas.

Dr. Meghana Rao is an OBGYN working for an FQHC that serves Maryland and Washington, D.C. She completed medical school and residency at Johns Hopkins University. She has been involved with health policy advocacy for over 10 years serving Doctors for America as the Maryland State Director and the Regional State Director. She has also served in ACOG as the Maryland Section Junior Fellow Legislative Chair, the District IV Junior Fellow Legislative Chair, a member of the Government Affairs Committee, and a member of the Ob-Gyn PAC Governing Committee. Meghana lives in Maryland with her husband, three young children, and dog.

Bijou is an MD-PhD candidate at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) School of Medicine, pursuing both clinical training and a PhD in genetics and genome sciences. She is currently researching new gene therapies targeting the hormone asprosin. Bijou pursued her undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis where she double majored in Math and Biology. After graduation she spent one year working at the National Institutes of Health as a Postbaccalaureate Intramural Research Training Award recipient. Bijou joined DFA in the spring of 2020 to continue pursuing her passion for health equity and justice. She’s been particularly passionate about improving health equity and accessibility for marginalized groups of people, reproductive justice, and LGBTQ+ healthcare. She previously co-chair DFA’s Women’s Health Workgroup and was the 2022 Health Justice and Equity Impact Area chair before joining the board. Bijou also runs a nonprofit called No Longer Voiceless, where her team helps those with serious chronic illnesses and at the end of life create a written legacy for themselves and their families. Outside of her advocacy work, you can find Bijou thrifting rare books and hiking National Parks. She can be followed on Twitter @bijoubasu.

Hannah Brennan is a partner at Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, a plaintiff-side class action law firm that focuses on the healthcare industry. Hannah brings antitrust lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies when they unlawfully prevent more affordable generic and biosimilar drug competition. And she brings lawsuits under the Racketeer Influenced Corruption Organizations Act and state consumer protection law against pharmaceutical companies who unfairly price their drugs or fraudulently promote them. Currently, Hannah represents people living with diabetes in their lawsuit against the makers of analog insulin for their inflation of these drugs' prices. Prior to joining Hagens Berman, Hannah worked for Public Citizen in Washington D.C. in the Access to Medicines group, where she focused on access to essential medicines in Latin America. Hannah also clerked for the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and Third Circuit. Hannah is passionate about improving access to affordable care both through policy change and litigation. She is a graduate of Brown University and Yale Law School. In her free time, Hannah enjoys hiking in Vermont with her husband, two kids, and dog or trying to force all of them to ski.

In 2013, when neither the government nor the mainstream media provided consistent, reliable reporting of enrollment data for the Affordable Care Act, Charles Gaba launched ACASignups.net as a hobby, using crowdsourcing to track enrollments in real time. His work soon caught the attention of major media outlets, and has been cited and used as a resource ever since by media outlets spanning the ideological spectrum including the Washington Post, Forbes, Bloomberg News, Vox, MSNBC, the New Republic, USA Today, the CATO Institute, National Review Online and The New York Times among others, as well as prominent medical journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine. Since launching this project, he has expanded his analysis to include the impact of the ACA's Medicaid Expansion and Basic Health Plan provisions, the impact of Silver Loading and a variety of other ACA-related policies and their impact on and by the U.S. healthcare system as a whole. He's also expanded into tracking and analyzing off-exchange individual market enrollment, annual average premium rate changes and a wide range of healthcare policy/health insurance-related issues such as the pros & cons of moving towards single-payer healthcare, establishing a federal public option, lowering the Medicare eligibility age and so on. He spent 18 months as a part-time healthcare data consultant for the Center for American Progress. Charles lives in Michigan with his wife and son.

Dr. Stephanie Liou is a board-certified pediatrician and National Health Service Corps Scholar who is passionate about health equity and reproductive justice. Growing up in a low-income, single-parent immigrant family inspired Dr. Liou to pursue a career in healthcare and advocate for families like hers. She received her BS from Stanford University, her MD from the University of Washington, and completed residency through a leadership track at the University of Chicago. Currently, Dr. Liou is the Director of Pediatrics at Alivio Medical Center, a Federally Qualified Health Center serving predominately low-income immigrant families in southwest Chicago. She practices in Spanish, Mandarin, and occasionally English. Prior to joining the DFA board, Dr. Liou was a Copello Fellow from 2021-2022 and helped lead the Health Justice and Equity Impact Area from 2022-2024. She is also a community advisory board member for Illinois Contraceptive Access Now (ICAN!) and has held leadership positions with the AAMC and AAP. Outside of medicine, Dr. Liou enjoys sewing, bad reality TV, trying new boba places, and traveling with her partner Theo and their adorable rescue pup Tonks.

Reshma Ramachandran, MD, MPP, MHS is a board-certified family physician and health services researcher. Her research focuses on the realignment of incentives for healthcare stakeholders including pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and universities towards prioritizing equitable patient access to safe, effective health technologies. Prior to this role, Reshma worked as research faculty as part of the Innovation + Design Enabling Access (IDEA) Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she focused on policies to address the global challenge of antimicrobial resistance and unaffordable access to prescription drugs. Dr. Ramachandran trained in both medicine at the Alpert Medical School at Brown University and in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She completed her family medicine residency at Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center. Previously, she served as the first PharmFree Fellow with the American Medical Student Association focused on removing the undue influence of pharmaceutical companies on prescribing behavior and medical education. She is part of the National Steering Committee for the Doctors for America Drug Affordability Action Team. She also is a board member of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM) North America and the American Medical Student Association Foundation.