Paulette Cha is a research fellow at PPIC, where her work focuses on the health of underserved populations, especially children and immigrants. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed outlets including the American Journal of Public Health and the Journal of Adolescent Health, and she has been cited in numerous media outlets such as the Sacramento Bee and the Orange County Register. Before joining PPIC, she was a joint postdoctoral fellow at UCLA and the University of Southern California, and she has past experience evaluating social policy interventions in health and education for low-income individuals. She holds a PhD in health policy/health economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Roshena Duree joined CWDA as Senior Self-Sufficiency Policy Analyst in June 2022 and was promoted to Deputy Director of Self Sufficiency in February 2023. In this role, Roshena serves as the policy lead for CWDA in the Self Sufficiency area. Prior to joining CWDA, Roshena served as a Legislative Analyst and Associate Legislative Representative of health, human services, and homelessness for the California State Association of Counties (CSAC). Before joining CSAC she held the position of CalWORKs policy analyst at the California State Department of Social Services. Roshena began her career with Sacramento County Department of Human Assistance where she gained programmatic experience in CalWORKs, CalFresh, Medi-Cal and Child Care. Roshena has a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from the California State University, Sacramento.

Dr. John David Heintzman is a family physician who has a passion for delivering quality primary care to all people. Out of this passion came a realization that many individuals and groups do not benefit from equal access to lifelong, high-quality primary care. That spurred Dr. Heintzman to get public health and research training to better study access to primary care by Latino populations, especially those using community health centers. Dr. Heintzman has collaborated with others at OHSU Family Medicine and the OCHIN Inc. nonprofit to use electronic health records to better understand inequalities in care. This includes studying differences in asthma treatment delivered in primary care between non-Hispanic white children and Latino children. It also includes evaluating alternative ways to pay for primary care in community health centers. Dr. Heintzman is part of a team committed to using new methods to better understand nuanced health disparities in racial and ethnic minorities, and to give providers and policy makers better data to improve the health of all of us.

Shalini Mustala is a research associate at the Public Policy Institute of California, where she focuses on the health care safety net. Before joining PPIC, she worked as a planning engineer for the government of India, working closely with rural infrastructure policies. She has a background in civil and environmental engineering and holds a master’s degree in public policy data science from the University of Southern California.

Richard Pan is a pediatrician, educator, health services researcher, and former State Senator and Assemblymember representing the Sacramento region. He is a volunteer physician at the Sacramento County Primary Care Clinic caring for Medi-Cal and uninsured children and youth. In the California Legislature, he served respectively as chair of the Senate and Assembly Committees on Health; in addition, he was chair of the Asian American Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus. He led California’s implementation of the Affordable Care Act and advocated for legislation to increase vaccination rates, expand newborn screening, prevent sexually transmitted diseases, enable gun violence research, and improve pandemic preparedness. Before his governmental work, he was a professor at the University of California, Davis, and Director of the Pediatric Residency Program, where he created Communities and Health Professionals Together, a nationally recognized service-learning curriculum. He was co-founder and chair of Healthy Kids, Healthy Future, securing health coverage for over 65,000 California children, and he created the Sacramento County Health Authority to provide local oversight of Medi-Cal plans. He received the Physician Humanitarian Award from Medical Board of California and the Beverlee A. Myers Award for outstanding leadership and accomplishments in public health from the California Department of Public Health. He has a BA in biophysics from Johns Hopkins University, an MD from the University of Pittsburgh, and an MPH from Harvard University.