Lecture Speaker: Dr. Linda Rae Murray

Dr. Linda Rae Murray has spent her career serving the medically underserved. She has worked in a variety of settings including Medical Director of the federally funded health center, Winfield Moody, which served Cabrini Green Public Housing Project in Chicago, Residency Director for Occupational Medicine at Meharry Medical College and Bureau Chief for the Chicago Department of Health under Mayor Harold Washington. 

Dr. Murray is the recently retired Chief Medical Officer for the Cook County Department of Public Health. She also practiced as a general internist at Woodlawn Health Center, was an attending physician in the Division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at Cook County Hospital and is an adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) School of Public Health (Occupational & Environmental Health and the Health Policy & Administration departments). 

Dr. Murray plays a leadership role in many organizations including the National Association of City and County Health Officers Health Equity and Social Justice Team, the national executive board of American Public Health Association and serves on the board of the Chicago based Health and Medicine Policy Research Group. In 2011, Dr. Murray served as President of the American Public Health Association. She is the Co-Chair for the Urban Health Program Community Advisory Committee at UIC. 

Dr. Murray has been a voice for social justice and health care as a basic human right for over forty years. She remains passionate about increasing the number of Black and Latino health professionals.

Lecture Speaker: Dr. Richard David

Dr. Richard David is a retired neonatologist and co-director of the neonatal intensive care unit at Stroger Hospital of Cook County. His clinical work for 37 years involved care of critically ill newborns from low-income minority and immigrant Chicagoans. His research has focused on perinatal epidemiology and more specifically on the relation between social inequality – especially racism in its various forms – and birth outcomes.

In addition to his “day job” in academic medicine, he has been active in different organizations working for social justice. This includes a variety of things ranging from street protests opposing healthcare cuts or police violence to marches opposing US complicity in the ongoing genocide in Palestine. He has been instrumental in raising opposition to US wars of aggression and support for genocide inside the American Public Health Association.

Lecture Speaker: Dr. Naomi Paik

A. Naomi Paik is the author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the 21st Century (2020, University of California Press) and Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (2016, UNC Press; winner, Best Book in History, AAAS 2018; runner-up, John Hope Franklin prize for best book in American Studies, ASA, 2017), as well as articles, opinion pieces, and interviews in a range of academic and public-facing venues. Her next book-length project, “Sanctuary for All,” calls for the most capacious conception of sanctuary that brings together migrant and environmental justice. A member of the Radical History Review editorial collective, she has coedited four special issues of the journal—“Militarism and Capitalism (Winter 2019), “Radical Histories of Sanctuary” (Fall 2019), “Policing, Justice, and the Radical Imagination” (Spring 2020), and “Alternatives to the Anthropocene” (Winter 2023). She coedits the “Borderlands” section of Public Books alongside Cat Ramirez, as well as “The Politics of Sanctuary” blog of the Smithsonian Institution with Sam Vong. She is an associate professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, and a member of the Sanctuary Campus Network, Sanctuary for All UIC, the Migration Scholars Collaborative, and Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, UIC. Her research and teaching interests include critical ethnic studies; U.S. imperialism; U.S. militarism; social and cultural approaches to legal studies; transnational and women of color feminisms; abolition; carceral spaces; and labor, race, and migration.

Lecture Q&A: Dr. Nadine Naber

Dr. Nadine Naber is Professor in the Gender and Women's Studies Program and the Global Asian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago and founder of Liberate Your Research Workshops. She is author/co-editor of five books, including Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism (NYU Press, 2012) and Arab and Arab American Feminisms. She is the recipient of major awards such as the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Prize from the American Studies Association; the 2002 YWCA’s Y-Women’s Leadership Award; and the Marguerite Casey Foundation’s Freedom Scholar Award. She serves on the boards of the Journal of Palestine studies; the National Council for Arab Americans; and the Feminist Peace Initiative. She is co-founder of the Arab American Cultural Center and the Global Middle East Studies minor at UIC and the organization: Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity .

Panelist: Leone Jose Bicchieri

Leone is the Founder and Executive Director of Working Family Solidarity, and has worked for 30 years organizing workers and working families of all backgrounds for economic and racial justice.

Panelist: Chris Rudd

Chris Rudd is an award-winning designer, community organizer, and founder of ChiByDesign, a Black-owned and people-of-color-led social and civic design firm. Chris has a deep background in social equity work, systems change, and youth development. He’s worked with youth and community residents across Chicago, supporting them in designing new anti-racist infrastructures to enable an equitable future. 

Chris is a former Clinical Professor of Practice and Lead of Community-led Design at the Institute of Design (ID) at IIT, where his work focused on advancing the co-design practice and developing an anti-racist design field. Chris is a former Stanford Institute of Design (d.school) Civic Innovation fellow, a 2021 Illinois Science and Technology Coalition Researcher to Know, and a 2022 World-Changing Ideas honoree.

Moderator: Caesar Thompson

Caesar (they/them) is a community health worker, oral historian, student, educator, and action researcher at the University of Illinois Chicago focused on healthy work, liberatory pedagogy, and the subjective well-being of Black folks. They organize to protect Chicago communities from COVID-19, to support newly arrived and undocumented residents, and for collective liberation as part of Radical Public Health at UIC in collaboration with the Progressive Student Coalition and as part of Healthcare Workers for Palestine – Chicago.

Facilitator: Sari Bilick

Sari Bilick (she/her) is the Organizing Program Director at Human Impact Partners (HIP), based in the Bay Area in California on unceded Lisjan Ohlone land. Sari leads HIP’s organizing work, including co-coordinating Public Health Awakened, a national network of public health professionals organizing for health, equity, and justice. She has over 15 years of experience in organizing and before joining HIP worked in labor, community, and political organizing and brings extensive experience in leadership development, training, and coalition building. Sari has engaged public health practitioners, healthcare and service workers, immigrants, tenants, domestic workers, and faith communities to take action around a wide range of economic and social justice issues. She is passionate about organizing and mobilizing communities around the issues most important to them and bringing a social justice and equity lens into all spaces.

Action Lab Facilitator: Radical Public Health (RPH)

Radical Public Health (RPH) is an collective of students, alumni, faculty, staff, and community members that seeks to address the systemic, underlying causes of public health challenges and to consider more radical solutions. RPH:

• Creates a forum and supportive environment for radical perspectives at UIC, including within the School of Public Health (SPH) community.

• Enhances collaboration and builds solidarity with SPH faculty, other schools within UIC, community organizations, and movements that share our values.

• Maintain an egalitarian internal structure that reflects our values.

• Normalize radical perspectives within learning, research, and practice in the public health community

Membership is open to all students at the UIC School of Public Health and other UIC students, alumni, faculty, and staff, including undergraduates. Membership is also open to like-minded individuals in other schools, organizations, and groups.

RPH provides an open forum for radical and heterodox perspectives in public health work and its associated disciplines. We provide a network of people who support each other in our intellectual, educational, and professional pursuits. We provide a collective of colleagues, mentors, and friends dedicated to social justice and social change.

Lecture Speaker: Dr. Mario LaMothe

Mario LaMothe is Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, specializing in Black Studies and Anthropology. His research involves embodied and affective pedagogies of Afro-Caribbean religious rituals, performance practice, and queer lifeworlds. His forthcoming monograph Vodou Rich: Haiti, Dancemakers, and Dedoublaj is a Haitian Performance Studies experimentation that illuminates how Haiti, Haitians, and their embodiments continue to haunt circum-Atlantic social and cultural histories, through the embodied continuation of Vodou and African Diaspora humanity. Mario’s writing is featured in various peer-reviewed and commercial publications. In addition, he co-organizes Afro-Feminist Performance Routes, the Queer/Sexualities Working Group for the Haitian Studies Association, and the Un/Commoning Pedagogies Collective.

A performance artist and curator, Mario is inaugurating Kafou Lespri, a live and digital platform of art, activations, and activism that is a creative home for Haitians and their interlocutors to celebrate the lived experiences of transnational Haiti.

Lecture Speaker: Aia H.

Aia is an educator, storyteller, and builder working in the field of public health. She is a daughter of immigrants and first gen college graduate with a Masters in Higher Education Leadership and Student Affairs. In her free time, you can find her by the lake or hanging out with her chosen fam (which includes her cat, Assata).

Panelist: Yoselin Colorado

With 8 years of experience in the field of health equity, Yoselin Colorado is currently a Reproductive Life Planning Coach at Cook County Health. Yoselin is passionate about reproductive and sexual health and ways in which advocacy, education, resource navigation and health-technology can aid and center community members' health. She is motivated by social justice to break down barriers and build sustainability in the communities through health and wellness, safe environments and cultural humility. She consistently works towards a commitment of lifelong learning, providing access to resources, and coaching individuals to success around choices that matter the most. 

Yoselin brings to her work the understanding that each person has different values, experiences, and desires. With an at-large view of what reproductive health can mean to communities and people, Yoselin is driven to ensure all people have the tools and support to create a healthy life for themselves and that includes reproductive health! 

Panelist: Mary Driscoll, RN, BSN, MPH

Mary Driscoll has worked in healthcare for over 40 years, learning early that working in health requires a social justice lens. Her first involvement was at a Chicago free clinic in the early 1970’s, then at a Cook County community clinic.

Next she went on to work in the Cook County Health System in various capacities, including Perinatal System Coordinator, Nursing Director in the HIV Primary Care Center, and finally the Chief Nursing Officer and Director of Patient Care Services for the entire County Ambulatory System of Care. In 2007, she was recruited to the Illinois Department of Public Health to build a Division of Patient Safety and Quality, which would use public health and hospital data to promote improvements in healthcare services and public health, provide a framework in which to look at population health using social determinants, and to strengthen the ties between public health and healthcare services. While at IDPH she was privileged to mentor Masters Level CDC fellows in the fields of prevention, informatics, and system integration.

Mary has authored several peer-reviewed articles, is a reviewer for the Maternal and Child Health Journal, and has served on the Governing Council of the American Public Health Association and the Cook County Health System Board. She was a founder and longtime Board member of the Illinois Maternal and Child Health Coalition (now Everthrive). Currently,  she is teaching in the UIC School of Public Health Undergraduate Program and is a Board Member of Chicago Women Take Action (CWTA).

Panelist: Shalonda Carter

Shalonda Carter (she/her) is the mother of three beautiful girls. Her life goal is to be the best mother she can and to show her children how to empower themselves and others by living everyday life with purpose. Shalonda completed her bachelor’s degree in Community Health Education at Southern Illinois University of Edwardsville. She has built her career working to support and empower new mothers and children in low-income communities and has previously worked in case management & care coordination supporting women with high-risk pregnancies. She currently serves as a warm line advocate with NDoula Community Alliance advocating for laboring mothers focusing on health equity within black and brown communities, a Reproductive Life Planning Coach with the Cook County Stroger Health Dept., and a community advisory board member with ICAN centered around reproductive justice and choice contraception, ensuring women are well-informed about their rights and resources they need to live a healthy lifestyle and plan for happy and healthy futures.

Moderator: Renee Odom-Konja, MPH

Renee Odom-Konja (she/her or they/them) currently serves as the Division Coordinator of Family Planning Services at Cook County Health and conducts sexual and reproductive health research at the University of Michigan. She is an active member of Youth Reproductive Equity, which advances autonomy for adolescents through research and policy advocacy, and the American Public Health Association, focusing her energy on policy recommendations.

Renee is a public health practitioner that has served her communities in a multitude of facets around maternal and child health. She has worked in health centers focused on sexual and gender-based violence prevention and family planning. She has conducted original research on stress’ effects during the perinatal period, barriers to obtaining abortion care, and coercion related to contraceptive use. Renee’s lived experience and research illustrates the ways that social factors – including policy and individual factors like income, neighborhood, education, race, and gender – impact reproductive health, driving her advocacy for reproductive justice. After work, you can often find her at an organizing meeting with Radical Public Health or planning a teach-in on systemic issues and their impact on health. To rest and recharge, she snuggles with one of her three cats, curls up with a good book, and gardens at her community garden in Chicago.

Panelist: Dr. Tammy Abughnaim

Dr. Tammy Abughnaim is an American board certified emergency physician based in Chicago. She completed emergency medicine residency at Advocate Christ and now works at several community sites in the Chicagoland area. She has worked in global health equity in Peru, and more recently in Gaza in 2024. Dr. Abughnaim’s work focuses on health equity, healthcare delivery in low resource settings, point of care ultrasound, and social justice. She is a member of Healthcare Workers for Palestine - Chicago.

Panelist: Emily Hacker

Emily Hacker is a health policy analyst currently managing portfolios in domestic harm reduction, with recent experience in international refugee health. Prior to working in public health, Emily worked as an EMT for more than a decade and continues to study emergency medical services in war zones. She is a member of Healthcare Workers for Palestine - Chicago.

Panelist: Caesar Thompson

Caesar (they/them) is a community health worker, oral historian, student, educator, and action researcher at the University of Illinois Chicago focused on healthy work, liberatory pedagogy, and the subjective well-being of Black folks. They organize to protect Chicago communities from COVID-19, to support newly arrived and undocumented residents, and for collective liberation as part of Radical Public Health at UIC in collaboration with the Progressive Student Coalition and as part of Healthcare Workers for Palestine – Chicago.