THIS SESSION WILL BE HELD AS A LIVE STREAM WEBINAR ONLY - NO IN-PERSON SESSION.

About the Speaker:  Ana Mascareñas served at the California Environmental Protection Agency’s Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) from 2015 through June 2021, where she was appointed by Governor Brown as the first Assistant Director for Environmental Justice. During her time there, she cultivated teams across the state to lead community engagement, promote environmental justice and equity in decision-making, and conduct government-to-government consultation with California Native American Tribes.

Before joining DTSC, Ana was membership coordinator and then policy and communications director at Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles, where she promoted environmental health protections and fought for social and environmental justice in local, state, and national policy efforts. From 2006 to 2008, she served in the office of then Congressman Xavier Becerra, directly assisting constituents in their claims and applications with federal agencies. She was a member of the East Los Angeles Residents Association board of directors from 2007 to 2015, where she organized alongside community, youth, and business leaders to improve social, educational, economic, and structural resources through advocacy and civic engagement.

Ana is a member of the National Academy Sciences, Engineering and Medicine ad hoc committee, “The Chemistry of Urban Wildfires” convened to describe chemistry information that would improve mitigation of acute and long-term health effects of residential burning during wildfires at the wildland-urban interface. She was the 2020 recipient of the American Public Health Association’s Rebecca A. Head Award, which recognizes an outstanding emerging leader from the environmental health field working at the nexus of science, policy and environmental justice. In 2018, she was recognized by the Collaborative on Health and the Environment’s 20 Pioneers under 40 in Environmental Public Health.

Ana graduated from Brown University with bachelor’s degrees in human biology and sociology and received a Master of Public Health in environmental health sciences from the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was born in Northern California and raised in New Mexico.