The Board

Elizabeth is an experienced public health professional with global and domestic health experience. She is currently the Executive Director of The Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University. Prior to joining IQSS, Elizabeth served as the Chief Operating Officer at Greater Portland Health which provides high-quality, patient-centered healthcare that is accessible, affordable, and culturally sensitive. In several academic, community, public sector, and health settings, Elizabeth has provided health system and community strengthening efforts, led trauma-informed resilience trainings, and worked with partners to translate proven research into the implementation of effective programs in the U.S., Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Elizabeth received her Masters in Public Health from Yale University and her Bachelors from Bates College. Bringing experience from serving on other Boards, Elizabeth is honored to be part of Mindbridge and is committed to contributing to bridging psychological and neurobiological science to applied human rights work. You can find Elizabeth personally recharging through physical activity in the beautiful outdoors with her family and friends.

Dr. Linda Silka is a social and community psychologist by training, with much of her work focusing on building community-university research partnerships. She has several decades of experience in leading community-university research partnerships on environmental, economic development, and environmental health issues.

Dr. Silka was the former Director of the University of Maine’s Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center and is now Senior Fellow at the University of Maine’s George Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions. Prior to moving to the University of Maine, Dr. Silka was a faculty member for three decades at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she directed the Center for Family, Work, Community, served as the Special Assistant to the Provost for Community Outreach and Partnerships, and was Professor of Regional Economic and Social Development. Silka has written extensively on the challenges and opportunities of building research partnerships with diverse and has consulted internationally on how to build community-university research partnerships.

Allison Walker-Elders is a public health professional with nearly a decade of experience. Her education includes a degree in Neuroscience from Wellesley College and a Master of Public Health from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

When not working toward reproductive justice and a world with fewer barriers to healthcare, Allison enjoys running, reading, and looking at pictures of baby goats.

As a Black, Somali, Muslim girl from Maine, Muntaha has grown up keenly aware of the injustices that impact people of color and the lack of equity that is present within white majority communities. Muntaha works at Youth and Community Engagement (YCE), Portland Empowered, Gateway to Opportunity, and the Postsecondary Support Project where she works with underrepresented to encourage the power in telling their own stories. Through these groups, she continues to engage youth voices, and is grateful for the opportunity to help uplift individuals impacted by systematic struggles.

Qasim Rashid is a Pakistani-born American author, activist, and human-rights attorney. Rashid has written for numerous outlets including Time, NPR and The Independent. His essay "I believe in love for all, hatred for none" was featured on NPR's This I Believe.

“Pulling from my experience as a human rights attorney, author, politician, and social media influencer, I bring the critical receipts needed to help disentangle fact from fiction, and work to counter the deterioration of human rights at home and abroad.”

Alaina Brenick (she/her) is currently an Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Sciences at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Brenick received a pre-doctoral traineeship from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to obtain her Ph.D. (University of Maryland) prior to completing a postdoctoral fellowship in the international and interdisciplinary program, Human Behavior in Social and Economic Change, at Friedrich Schiller Universität of Jena, Germany. She is a scholar-activist dedicated to the interdisciplinary and translational approaches fundamental to the field of Human Development and Family Sciences. Through a social justice lens, Dr. Brenick analyzes how diverse social groups—often with vastly different societal structures, norms, and expectations—experience, reason about, and respond to intergroup conflict, bias-based victimization, and systemic discrimination. Her scholarship utilizes a social-ecological framework to analyze the individual, micro-, and macro-system influences on these factors and is designed to be applied directly to policy, practice, and social action. Dr. Brenick’s research provides a fundamental knowledge base for creating contextually and developmentally appropriate intervention programs, designed to reduce individual prejudice and systemic oppression and promote socially just and equitable intergroup relations.

Helen A. Neville is the Chair of the Department of Educational Psychology, a professor of Educational Psychology and African American Studies, and a Center for Advanced Studies Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is past president of the Society of Counseling Psychology (APA Division 17) and the Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity and Race (APA Division 45) and a fellow of the American Psychological Association. She is active in the Association of Black Psychologists, having served on their Board of Directors and receiving their Distinguished Psychologist award. Her research on race, racism, African American psychology, and radical healing has been published in a wide range of journal articles and she has co-edited 8 books in this area. 

Charissa S. L. Cheah, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychology and Asian Studies Faculty Affiliate at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. A cultural developmental scientist, Dr. Cheah’s research illuminates how individual, relational, and contextual factors shape the social-emotional, mental, and physical health of children and adolescents, with a sustained focus on Asian American and Muslim American families. Her innovative mixed-methods work advances conceptual frameworks on parenting, racial-ethnic identity socialization, and development, offering culturally grounded perspectives on development in the context of migration, marginalization, and resilience. Dr. Cheah has published widely and served in key leadership roles across developmental science, including as President of the Society for Research on Adolescence. Her scholarship has been supported by federal agencies and private foundations. Dr. Cheah is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development. A dedicated mentor and public scholar, Dr. Cheah bridges research, policy, and practice to amplify Asian American voices and foster equity in psychological science and youth well-being.  

Dominik Doemer (he/him) is the Director of Communications for the Scholars Strategy Network. In this role, he leads SSN's organizational communications strategy and media support for the organization’s over 2,000 members, including helping researchers connect with reporters, write opinion pieces for popular outlets, and develop a media strategy for their work. He has worked on hundreds of opinion pieces written by scholars and placed pieces in outlets such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, CNN, and many others. He frequently leads workshops on how to best communicate with reporters or write compelling op-eds.