Tuyet Duong
Tuyet Duong has spent two decades championing human rights, civil rights, equity, and economic justice issues. Her career has spanned across nonprofit, corporate, and government sectors. She currently serves as the Chief Policy and Government Affairs Officer at the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF), where she leads the policy department’s work advancing economic justice, racial equity, and reproductive justice.
Her prior stints include serving in the Management and Public Diplomacy Sections of U.S. Embassy Seoul, building community programs and supporting strategic planning efforts on democracy, security, economy, and human rights; as a Visiting Fellow focused on language access at the Office for Victims of Crime at the U.S. Department of Justice; and as a Director of Asia at a large contracting company based in Virginia.
For three years, Tuyet served in the Obama Administration where she oversaw public private partnerships and economic engagement at the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. She also liaised with the immigrant rights community and spearheaded the Gulf Coast regional outreach.
At the beginning of Tuyet’s career, she led the language access and equity response for BPSOS-Houston, coordinating a historic disaster response operation to assist Hurricane Katrina Southeast Asian evacuees. After this, she joined the advocacy team of Asians Advancing Justice – AAJC, where she led national coalition efforts to introduce federal legislation to fix family immigration backlogs and she also supported the first meetings of the New Orleans Language Access Coalition. Her advocacy for and with Gulf Coast Southeast Asian communities culminated in a year-long response effort to the British Petroleum (BP) oil spill, where her internal engagement and policy work to ensure that immigrant shrimpers had access to relief funds and state legislative processes earned her the Department of Homeland Security Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Officer’s Inaugural Distinguished Award of Merit.
She received her Bachelor’s Degree in English from the University of Texas and a Juris Doctor from the University of Texas School of Law. She lives with her partner, three boys, and her mother-in-law in Virginia and is a second generation Vietnamese American.
Dr. Regina Davis Moss
Dr. Regina Davis Moss is the President & CEO of In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda and the In Our Own Voice Action Fund. She has more than 20 years of experience in the public, non-profit, and political sectors; and has dedicated her entire career to advancing complete physical, mental, and social well-being for women of color through research, programmatic initiatives, and the development of innovative strategies for informing health policies.
Formerly, Regina was the Associate Executive Director of public health policy and practice for the American Public Health Association (APHA), where she led women’s, children’s, and reproductive health initiatives; managed strategy with government agencies, community-based organizations, and other stakeholders; and oversaw APHA’s Advancing Racial Equity and Social Justice initiative. She has held senior management positions for a national healthy eating and active living education initiative for Black women and the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Prior to that, Regina served as a research supervisor for an epidemiologic study on uterine fibroid tumors and as a public health service fellow in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office on Women’s Health. Her recent book, Black Women’s Reproductive Health and Sexuality: A Holistic Public Health Approach, explores the impact of government and society on the reproductive health and sexuality of Black women and offers evidence-based solutions that support Black women in leading healthy and thriving lives.
Dr. Hanna Tessema
Dr. Hanna Tessema, Co-Founder of the Black Women’s Learning Institute (BWLI), brings 19 years of experience as a public health practitioner specializing in HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment, and care among diverse communities, particularly among Black women. At BWLI, she has spearheaded research initiatives, collaborated with regional partners on HIV prevention campaigns in the southern US, and authored reports on Black women’s health, anti-racist clinical care, and wellness. Additionally, she co-leads translational research endeavors that bridge research findings with practical health literacy applications.
Dr. Tessema’s passion lies in meaningful community engagement and promoting health equity to ultimately improve community health outcomes. Her public health journey began in maternal and child health and reproductive health, focusing on program design, evaluation, pregnancy prevention & healthy relationship education for young teens, and conducting workshops for women with high-risk pregnancies in clinic waiting rooms in the South Bronx. Her public health career started in maternal and child health and reproductive health, specializing in program design, evaluation, pregnancy prevention, healthy relationship education for young teens, and conducting workshops for women with high-risk pregnancies in South Bronx clinic waiting rooms. In her capacity at BWLI, she leads research projects investigating Black women’s health across the lifespan in collaboration with partners in the southern US.
She serves as an adjunct faculty member at George Washington University (GWU), where she teaches an MPH course on social and behavioral health. Dr. Tessema holds a Doctorate in Public Health (DrPH) in Health Behavior from GWU, an MPH in Epidemiology from New York University, an MSW in Social Policy and Evaluation, and a BA in Political Science from the University of Michigan.