Medical Student Ambassador Bio

Annalisa Okimoto is a third year medical student at Boston University School of Medicine. She was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii and counts herself as incredibly privileged to have grown up fully surrounded by the richness of AANHPI cultures. Annalisa moved to Boston in 2015 for college and medical school, and she am currently doing her third year rotations in Northern California. Moving from Honolulu to Boston to California has exposed her to just how varied the AANHPI health care experience is and the idea that the AANHPI community is not a monolith but composed of innumerable unique communities across the country, all with different strengths and needs. Annalisa is happy to be back in her second year as an All of Us Ambassador and excited to continue learning about and advocating for AANHPI health.

Orange County Asian Pacific Islander Community Alliance Project: 

I am currently working on an outreach project aimed at collecting stories from AANHPI community members in Southern California about their personal experiences with mental health conditions. This includes their experiences seeking mental health care/helping family members suffering from mental health disorders, and the impact their cultural backgrounds have had on their journey with mental health. We aim to collect these video testimonials from populations served by OCAPICA’s various community-based regional partners across Southern California and disseminate their unique and important stories on social media to increase awareness about mental health and its interplay with culture in AANHPI populations.