Grace Meng is the first and only Asian-American congresswoman from New York State, with an emphasis on expanding opportunities for communities of color, young people, families, small businesses, and women. In an effort to address healthcare disparities, Congresswoman Meng introduced the “Menstrual Equity for All” Act in 2023 to address the lack of accessibility to menstrual products.

Marine Mallinson is a London-based entrepreneur, early-stage investor, and advisor with a passion for health innovation. After building and exiting tech platforms in Asia, she now focuses on advancing mental health outcomes through investments in therapeutics, AI, digital tools, and medical devices. As a venture advisor to Noetic Fund and advisor to Global Women Asia, Marine brings both lived experience and global insight to address the improper treatment of mental health she sees in society today.

Julia Liou is a transformative leader in community health, known for her visionary approach to systems change and social justice in health. As the Chief Executive Officer of Asian Health Services (AHS) based in Oakland, California, she leads a nationally recognized community health center that provides comprehensive medical, dental, and behavioral health services to 50,000 patients in 14 languages. Under Julia’s leadership, AHS has established an AAPI Action Center to support mental health and healing for victims of violence, expansion of dental and mental health care services, and launch cutting-edge virtual care.

Sophia Yen, MD, MPH, is the co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of Pandia Health, the only women-founded, women-led, physician-founded, and physician-led birth control and menopause asynchronous telemedicine and medication delivery service in the United States. The idea for Pandia Health came after Dr. Yen spent time researching the reasons why women didn’t take birth control and found accessibility to be a key issue. Pandia Health has served thousands of patients across the U.S., aiming to make reproductive healthcare more accessible, convenient, and stigma-free.

With over 25 years of experience in health care, finance, financial technology, and more, Dr. Renu Bhatia is currently the Chairman of The Listing Committee of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the Chairman and Co-Founder of Opharmic Technology, Hong Kong, and the Independent Non-Executive Director of HutchMed, a commercial-stage, biopharmaceutical company.

Born in India and raised in London, Dr. Renu Bhatia has lived and worked across three continents. She moved to Hong Kong from New York over 30 years ago and now calls the city home. Trained as a medical doctor in the UK, she began her career working in the National Health Service before realizing her passion lay in understanding the broader systems behind clinical decisions—what she called "the economics of healthcare." This curiosity led her to pursue an MBA at Yale University.

Judith Farquhar is currently the Max Palevsky Professor of Anthropology and in the College, Emerita, at the University of Chicago. Trained as a medical anthropologist, Farquhar’s research focuses on traditional Chinese medicine and its social and cultural contexts. She authored Knowing Practice: The Clinical Encounter of Chinese Medicine (1994), which examines the theory and practice of traditional medicine in modern China, as well as five other books, the most recent being A Way of Life: Things, Thought and Action in Chinese Medicine (2020).

Dr. Mai Uchida, MD is the Director of Pediatric Depression at Massachusetts General Hospital, a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, neuroimaging researcher, and an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She is an international advocate for mental health, scientific literacy, and gender equality.

Global Women Asia (GWA) has launched the Women in Health Innovation Council, a group of health and business leaders with Asian perspectives. The Council will guide GWA’s efforts to spotlight innovators advancing healthcare through technology, policy, community practices, and equity. Members include leaders from India, Thailand, Hong Kong, and the U.S.

Global Women Asia recently convened our board members, fellows, advisors, and new community members in Hong Kong and Singapore to celebrate diverse leadership and allyship.

Global Women Asia’s 2024 Women-in-STEM Fellows convened from around the world for an exclusive four-day leadership program in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

They visited leading tech companies such as Ripple, Google, LinkedIn, and Plug and Play Tech Center to understand the latest trends of crypto currency, the future of semiconductor design, and the venture capital ecosystem in Silicon Valley.

Thank you for supporting Global Women Asia’s inaugural Women-in-STEM Groundbreakers Award. We’re inspired by this year’s honorees, including Neeru Khosla, Mastercard’s Girls4Tech, Pakistani Women in Computing, and Professor Nancy Y. Ip of HKUST.

Raj Seshadri is the Chief Commercial Payments Officer at Mastercard and a member of the company’s Executive Leadership Team and Management Committee. She is responsible for Commercial & New Payment Flows focused on bringing the same safe and seamless experience consumers have in retail carded payments to business and corporate customers. She was previously president of Mastercard’s global Data & Services team, having joined the company in 2016.

Global Women Asia convened our London community on September 17 to introduce our 2024 Women in STEM fellow Tee Ganbold and 2023 Women in Sustainability fellow Larissa Pramudita Sidarto. Thank you to our host Baker McKenzie and to Jane Hobson and H. Henry Chang for their generosity.

Clara Shih is a technology pioneer, entrepreneur, and bestselling author. She currently leads artificial intelligence efforts at Salesforce and is also the Founder and Chairwoman of Hearsay Systems, a client engagement SaaS startup backed by Sequoia and NEA. She has been named one of Fortune’s “40 under 40” and “Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs,” Fast Company’s “Most Influential People in Technology,” “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum, and TIME's 100 most influential people in AI.

Global Women Asia (GWA) hosted a discussion with Marine Mallinson of Noetic Fund and Patricia Sun of JLIN LLC and Jeremy Lin Foundation for #MentalHealthAwareness. As GWA continues to focus on #WomenInSTEM in 2024, we highlighted the current state of mental health solutions and breakthroughs.

Valerie Karplus is a leading expert and catalyst in the intersection of energy innovation, the decarbonization of global supply chains, and climate policies. As a co-founder and director of the MIT-Tsinghua China Energy and Climate Project trying to solve one of the most daunting challenges facing the earth, she helped enable a whole new generation of leaders from MIT, Tsinghua, and other collaborating groups to lead on energy and climate issues worldwide.

Fatima Kardar is the Corporate Vice President of the AI Infrastructure, Partnerships & Marketplace, Microsoft AI. The AI Infrastructure and Partnership team is building a unified platform to support all copilot offerings across Microsoft’s products. The Marketplace team is creating a services marketplace to connect customers to high-quality services provided from around the world.

On April 18th, Global Women Asia held our offline event in China with Bessie Lee, Greater China CEO, JLL and host of Beiwanglu 贝望录 podcast. Global Women Asia 2023 Fellows Olivia Plotnick and Milawen Ding hosted the event at the office of Gusto Collective in Jing’An, Shanghai.

Samantha Freebairn is the Senior Manager of Aviation Safety Training at Qantas Airways. Previously, she was a pilot for the Royal Australian Air Force, where she flew humanitarian and combat missions across Asia and globally and conducted aeromedical evacuations.

GWA celebrated International Women’s Month by spotlighting notable Women in STEM, our theme for 2024. We held an online conversation between GWA co-founder and board member Fritz Demopoulos and Dr. Songyee Yoon, an AI technology humanist.