OCTOBER 2024
We are thrilled to share below four impressive Emerging Health-Activist Awardees. The Awards were presented at our Annual Gala in September 2024! If you missed our Gala, you can watch it on our YouTube channel here!
Congratulations to our Emerging Health-Activist Awardees!
Allan Ndovu, MD, is an emergency medicine resident at Highland Hospital. While in medical school at UCSF, Allan worked on numerous climate and health initiatives, focusing primarily on incorporating climate health topics into the medical school curriculum both at UCSF and nationally. Allan also took a year during medical school to examine the effects of extreme heat on pediatric populations. As a physician, Allan hopes to continue exploring the relationships between climate and health, educating healthcare professionals and policymakers about these crucial connections, and integrating his climate work into his patient care.
Aminta Kouyate MD, is an emergency medicine resident at Highland Hospital and a dedicated advocate for health equity, has over eight years of experience with the San Francisco Department of Public Health, Alameda County Public Health Department, and Children’s Hospital Oakland. In medical school, she focused on antiracism and health equity through her role as a scholar in the Program in Medical Education for the Urban Underserved and as a graduate student instructor, culminating in a master’s thesis which developed a curriculum on antiracism in medical education for a national training organization. Her leadership includes co-founding the UC Berkeley chapter of White Coats for Black Lives, securing a $65,000 grant for the Pathway Development Program, and creating the “Garden of Their Dreams” with the Dream Youth Clinic in Oakland.
Kavya Nambiar is a current third-year medical student at UCSF by way of the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program. A true Bay Area native, she grew up in San Jose, the daughter of immigrants from India, before attending UC Berkeley to study public health. She has developed an interdisciplinary lens that she brings to medicine through experiences working in health policy as a senate intern in Washington, DC, human rights with the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center, and global health through her MS thesis that explored practitioner perspectives on “decolonizing global health” at a US-Mexico refugee clinic. She hopes to become a future family medicine physician who continues to explore the intersections of human rights, social sciences, and medicine from a global perspective, using her privilege and training to create spaces where equity and justice are not just ideals but lived realities.
Katie Lichter, MD, MPH, is a resident physician in Radiation Oncology at UCSF and a Climate Health Research & Policy Fellow with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Her work focuses on the intersection of climate change and healthcare, advocating for healthcare decarbonization and influencing oncology societies to adopt climate policies. She founded UCSF’s GreenHealth Lab, leading over 20 members on projects such as life cycle assessments (LCAs), OR waste audits, and research on climate events’ impact on cancer care. Her recent LCA and carbon footprint analysis of cancer care, published in The Lancet, underscores her research expertise. She has received several national grants, including for wildfire impacts on cancer care and the carbon footprint of medical conferences. Her work also led to the “Network Greener” carbon calculator tool (https://networkgreener.com/), developed in collaboration with SF Bay Physicians for Social Responsibility.
