Conference Presenters
Holly Mikkelson (9:30 AM) |
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Holly Mikkelson is Associate Professor of Translation and Interpretation and Director of the International Interpretation Resource Center, a division of the Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. She is a state and federally certified court interpreter and ATA-accredited translator, and has written numerous books and articles on court interpreting and related issues. She has been a consultant to a wide variety of public and private entities on interpreter training and testing. |
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Cynthia E. Roat, MPH (4:30 PM) |
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Cindy Roat's day
job is as a Manager with Pacific
Interpreters. She holds a B.A. in Psychology and Spanish
Language and Literature from Williams College in Massachusetts, and a
Master's degree in Public Health from the University of Washington. A
trainer for over 17 years, Cindy has worked for a decade in rural
development programs in Latin America, training Community Health Workers
in Ecuador and Bolivia. She also provided technical assistance to health
development programs in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. Certified by the
Washington State Department of Social and Health Services for both medical
and social service interpreting, she worked as a medical interpreter for
seven years in Seattle, WA. |
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Javier Aguirre, BA, MPA (10:30 A) |
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Javier has over 20 years of experience in program administration, in a variety of fields. These include: Migrant Education, Basic Education, Human Services, Social Work, Community Organization and Development, and Economic Development. He has over 17 years as an Educator and Trainer. These include: Secondary School Instructor, Curriculum Director and Resource Room Manager, University Lecturer, and Workshop Development and Facilitation. His background also includes 15 years as a translator and interpreter, including several years as a Superior Court Trial interpreter, and Provisional Federal Court Interpreter, Administrative Hearings. Currently, Javier is the lead person spearheading the development of a comprehensive Interpreter and Translation Services program for Fresno County. |
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Stephen Ramirez, MPH. (10:30 A) |
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Stephen Ramirez, MPH, is the
Principal Staff Analyst with the Fresno County Human Services System, and
administers and supervises professional staff engaged in substance abuse
program development and education activities for Fresno County's large
racial, ethnic and culturally diverse metropolitan and rural
communities. He also has responsibility for conducting major
community-wide and organizational studies and evaluation of program
services including development of new community outreach initiatives and
programs for the Human Services System. Steve is the author of a 1994 book, "Health Promotion for All: Strategies for Reaching Diverse Populations at the Workplace," the first professional guidebook addressing the topic of diversity in workplace health promotion programs. In March 2000, Steve was the recipient of the American Journal of Health Promotion Robert F. Allen Symbol of HOPE (Helping Other People Through Empowerment) National Award, presented annually to an individual who makes an outstanding contribution to addressing the health promotion needs of under-served populations and promotes cultural diversity within health promotion. Steve currently serves as an
instructor on the faculty of the Health Sciences Department of the
undergraduate and Graduate degree program in Public Health for California
State University, Fresno. He also is the chairperson of the Master's
in Public Health Advisory Committee responsible for program evaluation and
conducting self-studies for the purpose of meeting national academic
accreditation standards. Steve has a Bachelor's degree in health
education from Hunter College and a Master's degree in Public Health from
Columbia University School of Public Health, both in New York City. |
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Doreena Wong (1:30 E) |
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Doreena Wong joined
National Health Law Program (NHeLP)
as a Staff Attorney in the Los
Angeles office. A graduate of
New York University School of Law, Doreena has worked for a number of
public interest legal organizations, including the Asian Law Caucus, ACLU
of Pennsylvania and the National Women's Law Center. At NHeLP, Doreena provides support to the Health Consumer
Alliance project and focuses on health care access for immigrants and
limited English proficient populations. |
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Meena Dao, MPH. (1:30 E) |
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Meena
Deo is a Policy Analyst at the Asian and Pacific Islander American Health
Forum, a national advocacy organization dedicated to promoting the health
and well-being of Asian American and Pacific Islander communities.
Meena focuses primarily on health access issues in California,
including cultural and linguistic competence, and has also been involved
in building a statewide AAPI network.
Meena has experience working with community based organizations at
the grassroots level, and was Program Director at South Asian Network in
Southern California before relocating to the Bay Area.
She has also worked in research and health policy settings in New
York and India.
Meena received a Master’s degree in Public Health from Columbia
University, and completed her undergraduate education at Stanford
University. |
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Dennis Kao, MSW (3:00 I) |
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Dennis
Kao is the Project Director of the Immigrant Welfare Project (IWP) at the
Asian Pacific American Legal Center (APALC).
The Immigrant Welfare Project's mission is to empower, assist and
advocate for low-income and indigent Asian Pacific Islanders and to
preserve and expand their rights to a safety net.
Previously, Dennis worked as IWP's Policy Coordinator, focused on
state policy advocacy. Dennis
received his BA in 1993 from UC-Berkeley and his MSW from UCLA in 1997. |
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Manuel Romero, JD. (3:00 I) |
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Manuel Romero is currently the
Director of the Fresno Health Consumer Center (FHCC), a project of Central
California Legal Services (CCLS), funded by The California Endowment to
assist low income consumers in Fresno County who are having problems with
access to health care. In his
current capacity as Director, Manuel is responsible for the supervision of
the Health Interpretation and Linguistic Access Advocacy Project, the
California State University, Fresno Foundation Mental Health Project, and
the Medi-Cal Managed Care Outreach & Education Project.
Manuel was also responsible for the administration and supervision
of a local survey of the uninsured in collaboration with The Access
Project and of the 1931b Medical Outreach Partners.
Manuel obtained his Juris Doctorate Degree from San Joaquin College
of Law and his Bachelor of Science Degree in Business Administration from
California State University, Fresno.
He currently serves on the board of the Fresno County Hispanic
Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse Services, Inc. |
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Vivian Huang, MHS. (3:00 I) |
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Vivian Huang is the
Policy Analyst for Special Populations at the California Primary Care
Association (CPCA) and focuses on improved health care access for special
populations, including farm workers, immigrants, and people of color.
Before joining CPCA, Vivian worked at the Bureau of Primary Health
Care and the Office of the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health
& Human Services. She has a B.S. from UCLA, and a Masters in Health
Sciences from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. |
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Tatiana Vizcaino-Stewart |
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Ms. Vizcaino-Stewart teaches a 40-hour basic interpreter training curriculum entitled, "Bridging the Gap," to bilingual individuals interpreting in health-care settings. Tatiana has been an interpreter for the Merced County Department of Mental Health and has recently become a Diversity Trainer for health care organizations. She provides trainings for health-care providers and support staff on working effectively with interpreters and cultural responsiveness in health care. She is currently involved in the development of the Central Valley Chapter of the California Healthcare Interpreters Association (CHIA), where she serves as Continuing Education Chair for the Chapter. Ms. Vizcaino-Stewart is assisting with the development of a California Health-care Interpreter Curriculum, that is expected will be implemented throughout California. Tatiana was born and raised in Mexico city, and has lived in the US since 1987. She has a BA in international Relations/Comparative Literature from University of California at Davis. |
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Palee Moua |
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Over the past 23 years Palee has worked with Southeast Asian (SEA) and other diverse groups in Merced County. She is a health-care interpreter and culture broker who is called upon by the SEA community for assistance on a regular basis. Palee worked at Golden Valley Health Center for 8 years as an interpreter, health educator and nutrition counselor, serving Latino, Lao, Lu-Mien, Thaidam and Hmong clients for more than 10 practitioners. Palee has served as President of the Hmong American Women's Association of Merced. She was on the Planning Committee for the Pan Valley Institute's Cross Cultural Projects for Latino, African Refugee, Mixteco, and SEA groups within Central Valley. Palee worked at A Women's Place as an advocate for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. She currently works with Health House / California Health Collaborative as co-trainer for the 40-hour, "Bridging the Gap," health-care interpreter class, and is a trainer for Health-care Interpretation and Cultural Diversity. She also works as a language expert, translator and health-care interpreter. Palee is assisting with the development of a California Health-care Interpreter's Curriculum that will be used throughout California. Palee is Co-Chair of the Continuing Education Committee of the Central Valley Chapter of the California Healthcare Interpreter Association (CHIA). |
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May Ying Ly |
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May Ying Ly co-founded Hmong Women’s Heritage Association and is the current Executive Director. Hmong Women’s Heritage Association is a nonprofit, community-based organization providing a variety of services from youth programs, interpreter training and resources, and referrals for Hmong families in crisis. Under May Ying’s leadership, the organization is fast becoming one of the most influential Hmong organizations in California. May Ying has over ten years experience working with immigrants in three counties: Merced, Yolo and Sacramento. She was a Human Services Supervisor with Sacramento County where she supervised and provided training to a staff of over 100. She is the Cultural Broker and Interpreter in author Anne Fadiman’s award-winning book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: a Hmong Child, Her Doctors and The Clash of Two Cultures. She is the recipient of this year’s National Hmong Women’s Leadership Award as well as a Fellow of the American Leadership Forum. In the past, she has received numerous community awards for her efforts including the Healthy Start Champion Award from the Sacramento City Unified School District. She holds a BA in Education from CSU, Sacramento. |
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Marbella Salla |
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Marbella Sala has worked with UC Davis since 1989. For eight years, she was manager of the Affirmative Action and Diversity Office at the UCD campus. Since 1997, she has managed the Medical Interpreting Department at the UCD Medical Center in Sacramento. The department was established in 1988 as a result of a compliance agreement with the Department of Fair Employment and Housing. Its staff currently includes 37 interpreters/translators who provide services in 21 languages. Ms. Sala was born in Mexico City and migrated to United States when she was four years old. |
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Tou Vue Her, Pharm.D. |
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Born in Laos
1976 |
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Ira Pollock |
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Ira Pollack graduated Cum Laude from the University of Miami (Florida) School of Law where he was also a member of the Law Review. He has served as a Trial Attorney with the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division in Washington, D.C., where his primary responsibility was the litigation of cases involving housing discrimination under Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. While at the Department of Justice he also served as a Special Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, and as a member of a Special Investigative Task Force in the Criminal Division which was formed to review investigative activities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He later became the Chief of the Civil Rights Branch of the San Francisco Regional Counsel's Office of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. In this position he was the chief legal advisor to the Office for Civil Rights concerning its enforcement of statutes within its jurisdiction which prohibit discrimination by recipients of federal financial assistance on the bases of race, color, national origin, age, and handicap. These statutes include Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Hill-Burton Community Service Assurance, the Age Discrimination Act of 1975, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and the Multiethnic Placement Act of 1994. Of particular concern to the Office for Civil Rights are issues concerning access to services by person who are limited English proficient, racial and ethnic health disparities, equal opportunity to access managed care organizations, access to welfare-to-work services, and the provision of services to disabled persons in the setting most integrated to their needs. For the past five years, he has served as Regional Manager of the Office for Civil Rights, Department of Health and Human Services, Region IX. In this position he is the chief civil rights official for the Department's enforcement program in the states of Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada, and the Pacific Trust Territories. |
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Jim McDiarmid, PhD. |
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Jim's first cross cultural experience was picking tobacco with African-Americans in North Carolina. After graduating from the University of Virginia in anthropology, Jim lived in Australia for five years. One of his jobs was working with Aborigines in the Outback. Living in New Zealand for 7 years, gave Jim the opportunity to work with and learn about Maoris, the native Polynesians. Jim returned to the US to work with inner-city alcoholics and drug addicts before earning his doctorate in clinical psychology. For the past 15 year, Dr. McDiarmid has taught family practice resident physicians in Merced. He co-directs a project to improve cultural competency within a residency program and a community health clinic, Golden Valley Health Centers. Finally, Jim works with Health House's Partners-in-Healing program, teaching western medicine to Hmong shaman and western doctors about traditional healing practices of the Hmong. Dr. McDiarmid has been a trainer in the 40 hour "Bridging the Gap" medical interpreter training program. |
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Emma Dominguez, MSW. |
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Emma N. Dominguez was born and educated in Nicaragua where she received a Master’s Degree in Social Work from La Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua. She is a superior Spanish speaker and speaks Spanish in a beautiful and skillful way. She is currently working for the Merced County Mental Health Department as a bilingual Mental Health Worker II and is a member of their Cultural Competency Committee. She is also a member of the Central Valley CHIA chapter. |
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Marilyn Mochel, R.N., C.D.E. |
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Marilyn Mochel is a Program Manager with Healthy House and the California Health Collaborative, in Merced, California. Over the past twenty-eight years, Ms. Mochel has worked with diverse multiethnic groups in California as a registered nurse, health educator and culture broker in a variety of hospital, clinic, public health and community settings. She developed and implemented successful pilot programs that received the 1996 Award for Excellence in Multicultural Health from the National Association of County and City Health Officials. She co-founded a health focused collaborative of organizations and concerned citizens entitled the MATCH (Multidisciplinary Approach to Cross-cultural Health) Coalition. Ms. Mochel assisted the coalition obtain funding for projects to improve access to culturally sensitive health care for underserved groups in Merced County. Funding included the development of a multicultural community health center, Healthy House. Ms. Mochel is currently employed by the California Health Collaborative and is the program manager of the Central Valley Healthcare Interpreter Training Project and the Partners in Healing Project. Ms. Mochel facilitates and teaches Bridging the Gap, the healthcare interpreter-training program developed by Seattle’s Cross Cultural Health Care Program. She is actively working with CHIA's Standards & Certification Committee to develop Standards of Practice for healthcare interpreters in California. Recent cross-cultural trainings include four to eight hour workshops for Departments of Mental Health and Health and Human Services in Fresno and Tulare Counties, Golden Valley Health Centers in Merced and Stanislaus Counties, and Stanislaus County Public Health Department. These trainings include strategies and skills for healthcare providers to work more effectively with interpreters. She assisted in the development of curriculum for Hmong shaman to introduce them to Western medicine and link them to health care providers. Marilyn co-authored the article, The Hmong and Health Care in Merced, California with anthropologist, Miriam Warner, Ph.D., that was published by the Hmong Studies Journal in 1998. Email: mmochel@cell2000.net |
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Carl Waddle, PhD. |
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Beverly Treumann |
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Beverly Treumann is an interpreter at UCLA Medical Center. She is certified for medical interpreting in Spanish and English, by Cooperative Personnel Services for the State of California. In addition to interpreting, her duties at UCLA include translation of patient education materials, and scheduling agency interpreters, bilingual staff and volunteers to assist patients in languages not covered by staff interpreters. Ms. Treumann also is a conference interpreter (consecutive into English and simultaneous interpreting into Spanish) for visiting Latin American speakers at public events in the Los Angeles area. Prior to joining the Interpreter staff at UCLA Medical Center in 1998, she worked at Children's Hospital Los Angeles in 1997 and Family Practice Medical Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1996. Treumann worked as a freelance interpreter from 1992 to 1996. She was contracted by several Minnesota hospitals, including Hennepin County Medical Center, University of Minnesota Hospital and Clinic and Ramsey County Hospital. Ms. Treumann was also contracted by the Minnesota Second District Court for legal interpreting for plaintiffs, defendants and witnesses in juvenile, family, and probate courts, probation and public defender offices, and jail. Ms. Treumann acquired her Spanish as a second language working in Mexico and Central America in the 1970s and 1980s. These experiences included serving as a literacy teacher in the Nicaraguan Literacy Campaign in 1980, an initiative of the Sandinista government in the first year of the Nicaraguan revolution. As a literacy teacher, she lived with an 11 member peasant family, did domestic and farm work during the day, and held classes in literacy and elementary arithmetic in evenings in San Rafael del Norte, Nicaragua. Currently,
Ms. Treumann is the Chair of the Los Angeles Chapter of CHIA, and is on
the Board of Directors of CHIA. |
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Niels Agger-Gupta, PhD. |
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Niels is the Executive
Director of CHIA, and has a doctorate in Human & Organizational
Systems from the Fielding Graduate Institute. His dissertation focused on
best practices in health interpreting across Canada and the US.
Niels is on the Policy & Research Committee of the National Council on
Interpreting in Health Care. Niels worked with the senior
management team of the Calgary Regional Health Authority, helping the city
of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, develop interpreter policy and a process for interpreter
implementation, and worked as a consultant with the Alberta
Multiculturalism Commission between 1987 and 1998, with a focus on
health-care and public sector access issues for people from diverse
linguistic and cultural backgrounds. |
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