Hepatitis Director

Dr. Dao is Assistant Professor of Medicine and Director, Center of Excellence for Liver Disease in Viet Nam (COE), Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
As Director of the COE, Dr. Dao spearheads Johns Hopkins’s initiative to help address the rising, urgent, and significant disease burden of liver cancer caused by chronic viral hepatitis in Viet Nam. The COE, in collaboration with stakeholders in Viet Nam, is responsible for stimulating, finding, defining, initiating, and managing programs and projects that contribute directly to the mission of the COE - encouraging, supporting, and facilitating meaningful medical care service delivery, scientific research, and educational activities in chronic liver disease between Johns Hopkins Medicine and Viet Nam. On behalf of the COE, Dr. Dao lives and works in Viet Nam for approximately six months annually.
Dr. Dao obtained his Medical Degree and post-graduate training in Internal Medicine, and Gastroenterology & Hepatology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UTSW), Dallas, Texas, USA. At UTSW, Dr. Dao was a member of the Physician Scientist Training Program, a formal mechanism to facilitate and support physician-scientists development in academic medicine.

Dr. Na Li is currently a full-time faculty at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. She
received her medical degree in China and PhD program in physiology at University of Louisville
in 2005. She completed her residency and gastroenterology fellowship at North Shore-LIJ
Health System in 2013 and joined OSU Wexner Medical Center since then. Dr. Li’s clinical focus
is non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), hepatitis B, and metabolic liver disease. She is the
primary investigator for multiple NASH clinical trials and the lead physician for the NASH clinic
at OSU. Dr. Li is a member of AASLD Special Interest Group (SIG) on NASH, a member of
National Task Force on Hepatitis B, and a member of American Liver Foundation Ohio Medical
Advisory Council. She is also a big advocator on community education and prevention of liver
disease. She has given multiple lectures to peers and trainees, and also collaborates with
multiple clinicians and basic scientists on liver-related research.

Dr. Juon is a social and behavioral scientist with primary research interests including health behaviors within minority groups. She has active research programs within the Asian American communities and with the African American populations. She actively participated as a co-I in several NIH funded grants that support a longitudinal study of African Americans, focusing on minority mental health, suicidal behavior, and substance use. She also worked on minority health problems such as cancer control behaviors, hypertension, and mental health of Korean immigrants in mid-Atlantic area since 1998.
With her focus of cancer control among minority population, she has conducted a number of educational and research programs in relation to Asian American Cancer Control projects in the Baltimore Washington Metropolitan Areas: 1) exploring breast and cervical cancer screening in Korean American women; 2) developing and and testing culturally-integrated cancer intervention protocols, including Korean-language educational materials for breast and cervical cancer; 3) developing and evaluating a community-based liver cancer education intervention to increase liver cancer awareness among high risk groups of HBV infection including Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese Americans; and 4) leading the project of Lay Health Worker Model Reduce Liver Cancer Disparities in Asian Americans. Currently, she has been working on a prospective longitudinal study designed to examine a bio-behavior model of hepatic disease progression among chronic hepatitis B patients. The current application builds on her prior work for a sustainable community-based participatory research and behavioral intervention programs to reduce health disparities in HBV infection.

Dr. Amy Trang, Ph.D., M.Ed. is the founder and CEO of Social Capital Solutions, Inc. Since 2014, Dr. Trang has served as the Administrator for the National Task Force on Hepatitis B. As the Administrator for the Task Force, Dr. Trang has worked alongside physicians and public health researchers to develop education curriculum on hepatitis B and C for liver cancer prevention as well as training seminars (in-person and virtually) targeted at primary care providers and mid-level practitioners. Dr. Trang is passionate about raising awareness about viral hepatitis screening and linkages to care services because she has family and friends personally affected by it.
In addition to the National Task Force on Hepatitis B, she also serves as a Program Development Consultant for HBI in the Washington, DC metropolitan area (since 2013); Vice President of Administrative Services and Planning for the Vietnam Viral Hepatitis Alliance (since 2014); Member of the Hep B United National Advisory Committee (since 2017); Patient Community Representative of AASLD’s Online Learning Committee (2022–2025 term); and Member of Gilead’s Hepatitis Community Advisory Group (since 2022).
She has assisted numerous nonprofit organizations across the U.S. and in Vietnam with developing culturally and linguistically appropriate patient education curriculum and learning materials.
Dr. Trang completed her doctorate degree in Public Policy from George Mason University School of Public Policy after transferring her doctoral studies in Culture and Values of Education from McGill University (Montreal, Canada). She holds a master’s degree in Social and Psychological Foundations of Education from the University of Virginia (UVA) School of Education and Human Development, and a bachelor’s degree in International Studies from George Mason University. She has also been an adjunct faculty at UVA since 2000, where she has taught Sociology of Education, Education in Multicultural Societies, Anthropology of Education, Critical Education Policy, Comparative Education, and Asian Education. She was one of the first faculty at UVA to successfully pilot an online course in 2015.

Thelma King Thiel is the founder and chair of Liver Health Initiative. Her crusade against liver disease began five decades ago when she lost her infant son Dean to a rare and fatal liver disease, Biliary Atresia. She has been a tireless advocate for promoting liver education and prevention of liver diseases while serving as the CEO of the American Liver Foundation, the Hepatitis Foundation International, co-founder and Chair of the Liver Health Initiative and founder of the National Viral Hepatitis Roundtable. Ms. Thiel has trained thousands of healthcare providers with her Foundation for Decision Making program in collaboration with SAMHSA, CDC, OMH, University of North Texas. University of Illinois, and the Stravitz-Sanyal Institute for Liver Disease and Metabolic Health at the Virginia Commonweaalth University. Having served as a Commissioner on the National Commission on Digestive Diseases and an advisor to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at NIH. She’s produced 15 award winning DVDs on liver health and prevention of hepatitis. She was featured in a documentary called The Visionary, aired on 140 PBS stations. Ms. Thiel mounted an international awareness campaign promoting the adoption of liver information/education in schools, government and military agencies to fill a global need for promoting prevention of drug abuse, hepatitis, obesity and 13 types of obesity related cancers, fatty liver, and diabetes type II. She is a frequently published author of articles promoting liver health education and broadly acclaimed coloring books for children in both English and Spanish. Internationally recognized as The Liver Lady, Thiel’s Liver Health Education Curriculum and Script of unique and motivational communication techniques are being promoted to fill the global liver knowledge gap.

Dr. Tang attended medical school at the University of Wales in the United Kingdom. She completed her infectious diseases fellowship at The University of Maryland Medical Center in 2014. In 2016 she joined the faculty at the University of Maryland, Baltimore as an Assistant Professor of Medicine. She is the director of the Hepatitis Clinic at the Baltimore Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center. In addition to clinical duties, she provides teaching and mentorship to medical students, residents, Infectious Diseases Fellows, and virology and epidemiology graduate students. Her research focuses on hepatitis B translational research and designing and implementing clinical trials, with the goal of advancing hepatitis B cure research. Her particular interest is in investigating the interactions with HIV coinfection and how these affect recovery of hepatitis-B specific immune responses.
Dr Tang is dedicated to improving health equity and outcomes among the marginalized communities at greatest risk for viral hepatitis. She serves on the board for HBI-DC, an immigrant health advocacy group, with the mission to improve access to hepatitis B, C, D and HIV education and screening. She routinely supports community health providers with advice on hepatitis B management and assistance with accessing antiviral treatment and clinical trials.
Through her work in community outreach, Lydia has built a network of patient advocates and primary healthcare providers in the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area that she works with to identify priority areas to study, promote research, and engage study participants. She is the principal investigator of a natural history study for chronic hepatitis B and, through a model of embedding research clinics within community healthcare centers, has built a cohort of over 300 study participants with chronic hepatitis B including people living with HIV, with a large repository of research samples, that have already been used to investigate several research questions and have led to multiple publications and collaborations.

Dr. Jennifer Lee is the Chief Medical Officer for the Alliance of Community Health Plans, representing non-profit, provider aligned community health plans across the nation. She is also a Clinical Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at The George Washington University in Washington, DC and was previously a Visiting Scholar at the National Academy of Medicine focused on value-based payment reform. She previously served as the Director of the Medicaid program for the Commonwealth of Virginia and as Deputy Under Secretary for Health for Policy and Services at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. From 2014-16, Dr. Lee served as Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Resources for Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe. Dr. Lee has also served as a White House Fellow and a health policy fellow on the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. She received her bachelor’s from Yale University, her medical degree from Washington University School of Medicine, and completed her residency at Johns Hopkins. She is a board-certified, practicing emergency physician.