​Our Team

Jes Minor

Co-founder

​My Bronx-grown Italian 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 sharing stories of injustice with my friends 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 was born in Queens, NY and raised by a woman of great strength and dedication to helping others. Growing up in a household below the federal poverty level, I became intimately familiar with inequities very early on. I became increasingly drawn towards health justice issues as I recognized that lack of health cripple's one's ability to truly thrive and live with dignity. I chose the medical profession as my career path but was soon dismayed to find a profession I naively assumed to be impervious to bias and injustice very much complicit in perpetuating health inequities. Jes and I met in medical school and we were moved to create Systemic Disease as a means of addressing institutionalized bias in medicine and supporting the advocacy efforts of students invested in a socially responsible practice of medicine.

Fowaz Hussain

co-chair of coalition building

Currently a medical student at Wayne State in Detroit, I hail from the sunny province of San Diego, CA. I moved around a lot when I was younger before finally immigrating to the US at the tender age of 7. My mother’s struggle of evading the Gulf War in ‘91 as a refugee is one that would reflect in my eyes as I started to meet and befriend the many other kids in school from undocumented, immigrant, and refugee backgrounds. Throw in the painful experience of having to grow up brown and Muslim after 9/11, I quickly learned that life isn’t fair for everyone. Later on, as I would navigate the healthcare system with my grandfather, the bias we would be met with at many appointments was palpable. And now, despite living in a city as diverse as Detroit, my own journey through medical school has been fraught with microaggressions and a lack of cultural humility. As someone who’s passionate about refugee health and diaspora, I joined Systemic Disease to combat the injustice and bias that I and so many of my peers face along this journey.

Valenza Stearns

co-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. ​

Sina Moravej

lead community organizer

I was born in New Haven, Connecticut and recently received my Masters in Public Health from Yale University. During my undergraduate studies I focused on Political Science and Urban Economics which helped me understand how social phenomenon get reinforced at a systematic level. My first exposure to health inequity was during my childhood trips to Iran where I was exposed to persistent public health crises reinforced by poverty cycles. As I grew older I noticed many injustices in the U,S, with people unable to access adequate health care for their mental and physical health. Seeing injustice at the global, national, and local level has inspired me to take a multi-faceted approach to making health justice a reality.


I was introduced to members of Systemic Disease through the U.S. Health Justice Collaborative at Yale and admire their vision in bringing the issue of bias to the front lines of medicine.