The White House on October 18 named 19 young emerging leaders as its fellows for 2021-22, three of which are Indian Americans. The White House Fellowship programme embeds professionals across diverse backgrounds for a year of working full-time.
Talking about the White House Fellows, the President’s Commission has described it as the most diverse class in the programme’s history, which was introduced in 1964 by then-President Lyndon B Johnson.
Three Indian Americans have been selected for the paid fellowship programmes: Joy Basu and Sunny Patel from California; and Aakash Shah from New Jersey for the posts of White House staff, cabinet secretaries, and senior government official.
Joy Basu has been appointed at the White House Gender Policy Council. She had earlier served as a senior adviser to innovative businesses seeking authentic and impact-integrated growth.
Joy had worked as a key architect, the first chief of staff at TPG Growth and builder of The Rise Fund, a ground-breaking impact investment platform.
She had also served as The Rise Fund’s global sector lead for food and agriculture. Before joining the TPG, Joy had served as a consultant at McKinsey & Company. She had worked with businesses, governments and donors, focusing on agriculture development, to improve food systems in emerging markets.
The MBA degree holder from Stanford University currently serves as a trustee for the Heifer International Foundation and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Sunny Patel, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and public health physician interested in building equitable health systems that serve children and families, has been placed at the Department of Homeland Security.
He had launched a comprehensive mental health response for thousands of frontline workers during the Covid-19 pandemic and volunteered as a palliative care physician at Bellevue Hospital.
Sunny had spent the last decade working with the refugee population and conducting forensic psychological examinations for asylum seekers with NYU and Physicians for Human Rights.
He holds an MD from the Mayo Clinic, an MPH from Harvard, and bachelor’s in biology and a master’s degree in physiology from UCLA with college and departmental honours.
On the other hand, Aakash Shah has been appointed to the Department of Health and Human Services. A practising emergency room doctor at Hackensack Meridian Health, he helped out treating some of the earliest confirmed cases of Covid-19 during the pandemic.
Aakash also works as the Director of Addiction Medicine and the Medical Director of Project HEAL (a hospital-based violence intervention programme) at Jersey Shore University Medical Center and the Medical Director of New Jersey Reentry Corp.
He had earlier worked as the Founder and Executive Director of Be Jersey Strong that represented one of the largest and most diverse efforts to connect the uninsured to coverage in the country, and was honoured at the White House for its impact by then-President Barack Obama.
