​Our Team

Jes Cerdeña

Co-founder

​My Bronx-grown Italian-Chilean mother raised me with the belief that if I didn’t like something about my world, I could change it. Growing up in a New Jersey suburb of Manhattan surrounded by friends from immigrant families, I witnessed firsthand how exclusion and inequity shaped my community. Beginning in high school, I became involved in advocacy for disability and indigenous rights, and later joined efforts in solidarity with the LGBTQ community and #BlackLivesMatter. Upon arriving in medical school and exchanging stories of injustice with my peers of color, I became involved in anti-oppression and LGBTQ curricular reform. Systemic Disease was borne out of that belief that we could change what we could not accept in medicine, and I am incredibly grateful to Tehreem for being my partner in this effort.

Tehreem Rehman

co-founder

I am currently completing her Emergency Medicine Residency at Advocate Christ Medical Center, a busy Level 1 Trauma Center serving Chicago Southland. I graduated from Yale School of Medicine where I led interdisciplinary curricular reform and coalition-building to promote inclusive and equitable health care. I
obtained my MPH with a concentration in Epidemiological & Biostatistical Methods from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health as a fully-funded Sommer Scholar and completed my undergraduate studies at Columbia University as a John Jay and Gates Millenium Scholar. I am invested in the integration of population health frameworks in healthcare operations and passionate about developing clinical-community partnerships to promote value-based care in healthcare delivery and management.

Valenza Stearns

chair of coalition building

I am an undergraduate biological sciences student at Seton Hall University, interested in human rights advocation and working towards humanizing our current healthcare system. In New Jersey, my adolescence involved a fixed acknowledgment of non-traditional gender ideologies and a family structure broken by mental illness. The challenging experiences supported my later development to publicly dissent from the majority at the expense of fortifying equity and nondiscrimination. During these years, I was exposed to the heavy toll that stigmatization of mental illness exerts on individuals and society at large and the danger of not getting treatment when needed. I learned that change against this bias is sown in individual action seeking education and pushing legislation and policies that improve access to treatment. 

In college, I have the opportunity to witness and learn from instances of injustice in low-income communities while volunteering, whether from stigmatization or generational inequity. I currently work with a non-profit organization called NETwork Against Malaria in an aim to stop the cycle of poverty in Uganda by specifically addressing societal and public health barriers that contribute to the spread of malaria. I am incredibly humbled by the opportunity to contribute to Systemic Disease, an initiative that I hope will raise learned bias from the public consciousness into action and eventually elemental change for more humanistic healthcare systems. ​