About Us

Mary Owen (MD)

Founder + Co-Lead

Norma Poll-Hunter (PhD)

AAMC Co-Lead

Tom Anderson

AAIP Co-Lead

Reno Charette

AIHEC Co-Lead

Reno Charette currently serves the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) as the Health Initiatives Director for the Aseto’ne Networking Project (ANP), NARCH BIRCH funded by the National Institute of Health, and IHEART funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. AIHEC serves 37 tribal college/universities encompassing 20,000 students. The AIHEC Health Initiatives team seeks to inspire tribal college students to pursue a biomedical career that includes engagement in research with tribal communities to reduce health disparities.

Ms. Charette holds a Master of Arts degree in History with a specialty in the American West supported by a bachelor’s degree in Liberal Studies with an emphasis in Native American Studies. Ms. Charette is a member of the Ties in the Bundle clan of the Crow Nation and a descendant of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa, Pembina clan. Her Crow name is Bilikupa Chichixa Iiakaash meaning Sees a Circled Rainbow.

Ms. Charette has eleven years of experience in teaching Native American Studies and serving as the Native American Achievement Center Director at Montana State University Billings (MSUB). Former positions she has held include the Coordinator of Indian Affairs Governor for Brian Schweitzer’s administration, Project Director for Big Horn Teacher Projects funded by the U.S. Department of Education at MSUB, Program Assistant for the Circles of Care project funded by SAMHSA at In-Care Network in Billings, MT, Project Coordinator for the Health Careers Opportunity Program in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Montana (UM) as well as an academic advisor for the TRiO funded Educational Opportunity Program at UM.

Ms. Charette has served on many boards in the Billings community, but currently focuses on being a grandmother for 22 grandchildren.

Jason Deen (MD)

Dr. Jason Deen (Blackfeet) is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine at the University of Washington, in the Divisions of Cardiology. He is the director of UW Medicine’s Center for Indigenous Health. He is a graduate of the American Indian Health Pathway through the Center of American Indian and Minority Health at the University of Minnesota Medical School. Dr. Deen serves as the Vice Chair for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in the Department of Pediatrics, Chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Native American Child Health, and co-Chair of the American College of Cardiology’s Internal Medicine Pathway program, leading the Indigenous cohort. As a Multiple Principal Investigator of the Strong Heart Study, his main research interests are cardiovascular health disparities in American Indian communities and cardiovascular risk stratification in American Indian youth.

Antoinette Martinez (MD)

Christopher Derby (MD)

Breanna De Leon (MPH, ScM)

 Kristen Rowan

Kristen Rowan is the Training & Development Coordinator for Oklahoma State University in Oklahoma City. Ms. Rowan specializes in creating, planning and managing training programs for students, businesses and organizations. She produces trainings that are meaningful, dynamic and that help individuals become more aware of themselves and their organization. Her passion for helping people to be the best version of themselves in both their personal life and work life is the motivating source that makes their programs successful. For the last seven years, Ms. Rowan and her team have been able to double their enrollments and create more opportunities for the community and state than ever before within the department.

Drew Babcock

Drew Babcock is proud to be a two-time graduate of the University of Montana earning both a B.S. in Athletic Training and M.S. in Health and Human Performance. A native Montanan, he was born in Kalispell and raised in East Glacier and the Browning area on the Blackfeet Reservation. He is an Amskapi Piikuni (Blackfeet). He spent his high school years in Las Vegas, NV, then returned to Montana on a collegiate track scholarship and has stayed in the Missoula area since 2002.

Mr. Babcock always been interested in healthcare, which is a big reason for him becoming an athletic trainer, spending over 16 years as an athletic trainer with Grizzly Athletics. Throughout his collegiate and post collegiate education he has become passionate about healthcare inequity, especially in regard to American Indian/Alaska Native populations and frontier settings.

In his current position with the Family Medicine Residency of Western Montana, he is the liaison with their IHS, Tribal, and Urban Indian organizations. He also focuses on faculty and resident doctor education, American Indian med student recruitment, and workforce and pathway development.

Roberta Zayas (MCRP, MPA)

Roberta Zayas is a member of the Diné (Navajo) Nation. She is born for (maternal clan) Tsénabahiłnii (Sleeping Rock People clan) and born into (Paternal clan) Táchii’nii (Red Running into the Water People clan). Her maternal grandfather is Tsénjíkiní (Cliff Dwellers People clan) and her paternal grandfather is Tódích’íi’nii (Bitter Water clan). She currently resides in Albuquerque, NM but hails from a place known by her grandparents and their children as Red Willow Springs, Arizona, a rural area in the mountains of Northeastern Arizona located on the Navajo Reservation near Sawmill, Arizona.

Ms. Zayas currently serves as a Program Manager with the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) specializing in community partnerships, community capacity building, and positive youth development with a focus on supporting diverse populations. In her current role, she oversees the expansion of programs, establishes sustainability of programs into communities, provides project planning, and oversees operations of the projects. Ms. Zayas has collaborated in community work with rural communities throughout New Mexico and Arizona, with indigenous communities and youth. Her efforts are focused on advocating for the underserved populations and believes that being a culturally responsive individual entails using the indigenous value-based approach to community development and utilizing the 7-generation model to carry out community development. Her educational background includes a B.S. in Sociology, M.C.R.P in Community Regional Planning, and M.P.A. in Public Administration.

Stephanie Dobos

Program Manager

Stephanie Dobos, while originally from New York, is based out of Raleigh, North Carolina where she attended Duke University for her undergraduate studies and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for her MPH. Having worked in multiple fields (veterinary medicine, molecular biology, clinical research), she landed on public health as her career trajectory following the COVID-19 pandemic and learning of the health disparities that came along with it. She is passionate about uplifting historically marginalized communities and focuses strongly on the epithet of “equality versus equity”, which led her to IHEART where she now serves as their Program Manager. Her fervor for the tenets of IHEART align seamlessly with her mission to further understand social determinants of health and their repercussions.

Isabelle Burke

Communications Coordinator

Isabelle Burke serves as the Communications Coordinator for Health Initiatives at the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC), where she coordinates programming to serve the educational and professional development needs of Indigenous students in the nation’s Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs). Ms. Burke comes to IHEART with a background in nonprofit communications and grant management, as well as a strong commitment to grassroots organizing aimed at building more diverse, empowered, and resilient communities. Her current portfolio of projects at AIHEC includes managing communications and program coordination for the IHEART initiative, as well as coordinating a Native American Research Centers for Health (NARCH) Building Indigenous Research Capacities in Health (BIRCH) grant funded by the National Institutes of Health to support TCUs with improving their research capacities in the health sciences through educational programs for students, faculty members, and community health stakeholders in the surrounding Tribal communities.

Ms. Burke holds Bachelor of Arts degrees in Public Policy and Japanese Language & Literature from the University of Virginia. Prior to joining AIHEC, she developed skills in program management and communications from working at several education and diplomacy-oriented nonprofits in the U.S.-Japan space.