Meet Our
Leadership
We foster community.
We believe in empathy, growth, and collaboration. We advocate for our patients as well as each other to achieve greater, more sustainable impact in the community.
We create lasting relationships with each other. Teams are most successful when they support each other.
To maximize support and efficiency, our leadership team is structured in two tiers: executive board and project directors.
Executive Team
Max Ptacek
President
Ryan Horio
Internal Vice President
Sophie Ong
External Vice President
Chemistry | Class of 2025
As President, I oversee day-to-day operations of the club and spearhead new initiatives that fall outside the scope of any one project team. I'm passionate about sexual and reproductive health education in underserved populations, providing supplies to address the basic needs of housing-insecure individuals, and the role of emergency rooms and urgent cares in addressing the health needs of vulnerable communities.
HBS + Asian American Studies | Class of 2025
As Internal Vice President, running Fall Class and internal matters are my jam! Getting to meet everyone in the club is my favorite part of this role! I am passionate about serving Asian American populations, historically disenfranchised folks, and unhoused communities. Topics of interest include structural racism, public policy, education equity, and mental health.
MIMG + Asian Humanities | Class of 2025
As External Vice President, I work closely with our UCLA Health physician point faculty and the Volunteer Office to designate volunteer shifts and ensure smooth workflow integration, as well as lead outreach and clinic expansion efforts! My interests in public health are racial and ethnic disparities in health and the cultural, social, and economic factors that shape them (especially in the AAPI community)!
Grace Chang
Resource & Development Vice President
Public Health | Class of 2025
As Resource & Development Vice President, I manage our database consisting of hundreds of local community resources and organizations we connect patients with. I also track resource requests and utilization to ensure we're up to date with the current needs of the clinic populations. My interest in public health is aging — with the older adults population rapidly increasing in the U.S. (and across the world), I'm dedicated to promoting healthy aging.
Project Directors
Jessica Li
Resource Director
Shannon Zhu
Resource Director
Danielle Cho
Outreach Director
MCDB | Class of 2026
As co-Resource director, I work with our team to create and distribute social resources to be used in and out of clinic. Through our projects, I look forward to helping members feel better equipped in their interactions with patients. I believe that public health is essential to understanding the factors affecting the quality of care received by patients, including barriers to accessing, receiving, or continuing with treatments or other services. I'm especially interested in health literacy, language, and other cultural factors!
Physiological Sciences | Class of 2026
As co-Resource Director, I help research and compile low-income resources in a database to streamline the process of case working in clinic. Alongside our members, I also collaborate with external organizations to set up health fairs and connect our local communities to resources. I love that public health allows us to focus on community issues so that individual patient care can be improved upon. I'm especially interested in maternal health, nutrition, and epidemiology!
MCDB | Class of 2026
As Outreach Director, I lead the team as we work on raising awareness about different public health topics through diverse types of media including videos, interviews, podcasts, articles, animations, and graphics. I first started to get interested in public health in high school as I got into science communication. Since coming to college and joining SCOPE PHA, I've learned about upstreamism which has built the basis for the work I'd like to do going forward.
Sean Kim
Community Director
Audrey Shin
Member Development Director
Kiku Shirakata
Transitional Care Director
MCDB | Class of 2026
As Community Director, I plan social events and other PHAmily-oriented activities to foster a close-knit community within PHA. I am interested in how certain attributes such as ethnicity or of communities can lead to different levels of healthcare disparities, spurring my passion in making medical care more equally accessible.
HBS | Class of 2025
As the Member Development Director, I am responsible for growing our members' skills and interests & providing them with opportunities to excel both individually and professionally. I oversee the planning of general meetings, skill-based workshops, and guest speaker sessions. My passion lies in discovering how healthcare sustainability can be implemented, with a focus on advocating for community-engaged projects. I am also interested in learning about upstreamism and preventative healthcare strategies, and how these approaches affect social determinants of health.
PhySci + Japanese | Class of 2025
As Transitional Care Director, I lead the TC team in developing and promoting healthcare literacy for youth, adolescents, and college students to transition from pediatric care to adult care! Public health's interdisciplinary approach to understand how medicine, health, and well being intersects with all factors of day-to-day life have always been an interest of mine. Since entering UCLA, I've had opportunities to learn more and work with the AAPI communities and gain more insight on how culture and politics can significantly impact healthy living.
Dilara Bahadir
Health Technology Director
Isa Matsubayashi
Finance Director
Neuroscience | Class of 2026
As Health Technology Director, I lead a team that analyzes clinic data to augment our case working services. This past year, I also connected PHA members with research at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. I believe healthcare must be holistic and address the comprehensive needs of individuals and communities rather than just treating symptoms. By combining mental, physical, and social aspects of health, public health is the first step to complete treatment.
HBS | Class of 2025
As Finance Director, I acquire funding for PHA through multiple sources so that we have the resources to run our activities and operations with minimal financial stress on our lovely members. I have always been interested in how society, culture, the economy, the environment, and politics affect human health and how people are treated. I strive to better understand how people, not just healthcare practitioners but also policymakers, lawyers, non-life science scientists, businesspeople, parents, teachers... ANYONE can contribute to a healthier society.
Faculty
DR. DENISE NUNEZ
Faculty Advisor