We are starting the new year with exciting changes on our board of directors! ChangeLab Solutions welcomes four new board members, who offer diverse leadership strengths to support our national partnerships.
All of our board members have rich experience in improving community health, bringing perspectives from government and public health, law and policy, and data and analytics. We look forward to the creative leadership that each new member will bring to our team.
Alexandra “Lex” Bhatti, JD, MPH, is a public health attorney with diverse experience in vaccine programs and policy across government and private sectors. She is a US commercial leader at Merck, leading a team focused on vaccine confidence, equity, and public health. She is also a faculty member in the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University.
Previously, she led vaccine policy development and research as well as federal vaccine policy advocacy on Merck’s US Vaccine Policy and Partnerships team. Prior to working at Merck, Bhatti was a public health attorney at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where she led vaccination law research. Her roots are in state public health; she was previously a manager in the Immunization Program Office of the Arizona Department of Health, as well as a senior public health scientist in the Arizona State Public Health Laboratory.
Viengkeo Kay Bounkeua, MPH, is a student in the Racial Healing Certificate Program at the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas and also a board member of the New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty. She was the first Asian American woman to serve as a state representative in the New Mexico Legislature. She has served on the board of Bold Futures NM and is a past fellow of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation Community Leadership Network and the Asian Pacific American Women’s Leadership Institute Fellowship Program.
In 2024, Bounkeua launched Ma Der Collaborations, an independent consulting business that provides services in organizational capacity and development, leadership building for emerging and current leaders, and program design and implementation through deep relationship building and storytelling. Previously, Bounkeua was executive director for the New Mexico Asian Family Center and New Mexico deputy state director for The Wilderness Society.
Emily Parento, JD, LLM, is an independent health law and policy scholar and consultant. Her primary scholarly focus is the intersection of domestic health law and policy with the human rights framework for the right to health and health equity. Parento has written on both national and global health law and policy, examining issues such as the impact of the Affordable Care Act on health disparities; legal strategies to strengthen health equity; and global trends in obesity-related regulation.
Parento has been a visiting lecturer at UC Davis School of Law and has also held tenure-track positions at multiple law schools. She previously was executive director of the Office of Health Policy for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, advising the administration of Governor Steven L. Beshear during implementation of the Affordable Care Act.
Heather Walter-McCabe, JD, MSW, is an associate professor at Saint Louis University School of Law, where her research examines policy mechanisms for advancing health equity at the intersection of law, social work, and public health. Her research focuses on sexual orientation and gender identity, and she leads a legal epidemiology project to analyze state policies that contribute to the health outcomes of LGBTQ communities.
Walter-McCabe’s work examining the impact of policy on health disparities in LGBTQ communities has been published in the Creighton Law Review, Saint Louis University Journal of Health Law and Policy, Journal of Health Care Law and Policy, and Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics. She has also published in numerous peer-reviewed journals as part of her commitment to translating complex legal issues and research findings across multiple professions to make the information accessible for use by practitioners and advocates in improving population health.
Please join us in welcoming our new board members!
01/16/2025