- Saturday, April 20, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE US President’s Commission on White House Fellowships has announced the appointment of 19 young emerging leaders as its class of White House Fellows for 2021-22. Three among them are Indian Americans and they are: Dr Sunny Patel, Dr Akash Shah and Joy Basu.
In a statement, the White House said, “The prestigious White House Fellowship program embeds professionals from diverse backgrounds for a year of working as a full-time, paid fellow for White House staff, Cabinet Secretaries, and other senior government officials.”
The commission called the programme the most diverse class in the history of the programme and selection into the programme is based on a record of professional accomplishment, leadership skills, potential for future growth and commitment to service.
The prestigious programme was created during the presidency of Lyndon B Johnson in 1964 to give the fellows first hand, high-level experience with the workings of the federal government.
Dr Patel is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and public-health physician who is placed at the department of homeland security. He is a doctor of medicine from the Mayo Clinic, Minnesota, and a master of public health from Harvard. He also holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biology and physiology, respectively, from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has launched in the past a comprehensive mental health response for thousands of frontline workers during the Covid-19 pandemic and spearheaded health interventions for the vulnerable population in the US and abroad, including India, Thailand and the Dominican Republic.
Dr Shah has been placed at the department of health and human services. He is practising emergency room doctor at Hackensack Meridian Health in New Jersey and has helped in treating some of the earliest confirmed cases of Covid in the US. He is also the director of addiction medicine and the medical director of Project HEAL at Jersey Shore University Medical Center and the medical director of New Jersey Reentry Corp.
He was also the founder and executive director of Be Jersey Strong, a grassroots student movement assisting with the implementation of health insurance reform in New Jersey and an adviser to several local, state and federal campaigns and policymakers.
Basu from San Francisco has been placed at the White House Gender Policy Council. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Public Policy and Economics from Duke University and the juris doctor and master of business administration degrees from Stanford University with a certificate in public management and social innovation.
During her days at Stanford, Basu was the co-president of the Women of Stanford Law, as an Arbuckle Fellow and as a leader of the Afghanistan Legal Education Project.
