Cardinal Free Clinics Committees

Board Member Biographies

Lars Osterberg, M.D., M.P.H., Chair of Advisory Board

Dr. Osterberg is co-medical director of the Arbor Free Clinic and president of Opportunity Health Partners, a non-profit organization dedicated to improve the health and social welfare of the homeless in the Peninsula. He has completed a needs assessment of the homeless in Palo Alto with a focus on health and social problems and access to medical care. He received an undergraduate degree at U.C. Berkeley in Bioengineering, an M.D. at U.C. Davis, and a Masters in Public Health at U.C. Berkeley. He also completed his Internal Medicine residency at Stanford.

Ann Banchoff, M.S.W., M.P.H.

After graduating from Stanford in 1987 with a B.A. in International Relations, Ann spent a year in Moscow, where she worked for the New York Times Bureau Chief. Returning to Washington, D.C., she spent the next several years on the staff of the Congressional Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, monitoring human rights, elections, and other political developments in the Soviet Union and the Baltic States. From there, an interest in community health and development led her to a three-month joint U.S.-Soviet-Ethiopian volunteer project in rural Ethiopia. She then returned to the San Francisco Bay Area, where over the past 16 years she has trained and worked in numerous community-based clinics, hospital, and academic settings. At the University of California, Berkeley, Ann collaborated on published research into perinatal health outcomes among Latina women. Before coming to Stanford, she managed a large-scale health education program for Kaiser Permanente's Northern California Regional Offices and was a volunteer perinatal social worker at the Mission Neighborhood Health Center in San Francisco. Ann has Masters degrees in Public Health and Social Work from U.C. Berkeley. She has lived and worked in Russia, France, Mexico, Peru, and Ethiopia and speaks Russian, Spanish, and French.

Larry Bruguera, M.D., F.A.A.F.P.

Antonio Chan, M.D., M.B.A.

Dr. Chan recognized early on the intimate link between sleep disordered breathing such as obstructive sleep apnea as the contributing cause of hypertension, diabetes, weight gain, heart attack, heart failure, stroke, dementia, and sudden cardiac death. He has published papers and abstracts in major journals such as Circulation, American Journal of Cardiology, Pacing & Clinical Electrophysiology, and Journal of Sleep, and has lectured and presented scientific papers throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia in major national and international scientific forum.

He has served as Telemedicine Consultant to the Western Governors Association, Visiting Clinical Professor at Beijing University, Sun Yat Sen University, China; De LaSalle University, Philippines; and the Mayo Clinic, Minnesota. Dr. Chan is a Spokesperson for the American Heart Association and is on the Cardiology Advisory Board of Novartis, Pfizer, Sanofi Aventis and Merck. He is a consultant to Biotronik and a lecturer for Respironics. Dr. Chan was an advisor and benefactor to the original medical student founders of Pacific Free Clinic. He is a member of the Band of Angels, Palo Alto, California, a boutique venture capital organization.

Dr. Chan is a recipient of three U.S. Congressional Awards for Community Medicine and the Martin Luther King Award.

Rex Chiu, M.D., M.P.H.

Gabriel Garcia, M.D.

In 2004 he was invited to provide testimony to the Institute of Medicine Committee on Institutional and Policy Level Strategies on Increasing the Diversity of the U.S. Health Care Workforce, and in 2005 was a key informant to the Sullivan Alliance.

He also directs an undergraduate binational patient advocacy course at Stanford University and has supervised an alternative spring break that addresses how we deliver health care to our most needy communities. In September 2006 he was appointed Peter E. Haas Director of the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University.

Khoi Hoang, M.D.

Elizabeth Iida, Dr. P.H., M.A.

Prior to The Health Trust, she held positions at the Public Health Institute, United Way of the Bay Area, SRI International, Asian American Recovery Services, Inc., Chinatown Youth Center, Northern California Cancer Center, and Davis Y. Ja, Ph.D. and Associates. Dr. Iida has also worked with many federal, state, and local agencies such as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Department of Education, Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration, California State Department of Health Services, the San Francisco Department of Human Services, the San Francisco Mayor's Office of Children, Youth, and Families, and various private foundations. She also remains active in the community as a founding board member of Los Ayundantes, a school-based literacy and mentoring program for middle-school age Spanish-speaking English Language Learners in Redwood City, and has served on boards of The Marin Institute and the Japanese Community Youth Council. Dr. Iida's expertise includes prevention and early intervention services across multiple disciplines (public health, mental health, substance abuse, child welfare, and education) and cultural competency in health-care service planning, delivery, and applied research and evaluation for a variety of underserved populations.

Dr. Iida earned a Doctor of Public Health degree from Loma Linda University, a Master of Arts degree from San Diego State University, and a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Southern California.

M. (Ken) Kengatharan, Ph.D., M.B.A.

Dr. Kengatharan obtained his Ph.D. in Pharmacology at the William Harvey Research Institute with Nobel laureate Sir John Vane. Thereafter, he held a post-doctoral position as a recipient of the British Heart Foundation Fellowship. The translational research that he directed included the development of animal models of cardiovascular disease for studies of the pathobiology of vascular alterations in sepsis, diabetes and atherosclerosis. Dr Kengatharan is an author in several research articles and reviews in the area of vascular biology and inflammation and has been invited to present at local and international scientific meetings covering topics in angiogenesis, inflammation and ocular drug delivery. From 1999 to 2003, he spearheaded two entrepreneurial efforts that gave him managerial and fund-raising experience in the technology and biotech sectors.

Dr. Kengatharan received his Ph.D. from University of London (the William Harvey Research Institute) and M.B.A. (with Distinction) from Durham University in England.

Anmol Mahal, M.D.

Dr. Mahal has also served on the Task Force on Culturally and Linguistically Competent Physicians and Dentists set up by the California Department of Consumers Affairs. He also served on the Subcommittee of the above task force that studied the issue of licensing culturally and linguistically competent physicians. He has served as the President of the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (AAPIO) of Northern California and presently serves of the AAPIO Board of Trustees.

Currently, Dr. Mahal serves on the American Medical Association Commission on Eliminating Health Disparities and was recently appointed a Commissioner for the Emergency Medical Services Commission of California. He also serves on the Boards of the Sikh Foundation in Palo Alto, California, the Indian Community Center in Milpitas, California, and the Health Professions Educational Foundation of California. He is the recipient of many awards including the CMA Medical Student Section "Physicians Appreciation Award for involvement in the California Physician Corps" and the Leadership Award of the Washington Hospital Healthcare System in Fremont, California, where he served as the Chief of Staff.

Dr. Mahal did his pre-medical education at Khalsa College in Amritsar, India and received his M.D. degree from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi in 1972. He did his Internal Medicine residency and was a Chief Resident at the New Jersey Medical School. He then did a Fellowship in Gastroenterology at the Stanford University Medical Center. He has been in private practice of Gastroenterology and Internal Medicine in Fremont, California since 1979.

Julie Parsonnet, M.D.

Donald Prolo, M.D.

Since 1971, Dr. Prolo has been in clinical neurosurgical practice in San Jose and has founded and directed a tissue transplantation laboratory for research and clinical applications from 1972 to 1995. Human clinical tissue transplantation was pioneered and several hundreds of thousands of grafts were prepared and have been implanted in humans throughout the United States over the years. He has been President of the Stanford Medical Alumni Association (1983-84), California Association of Neurological Surgeons (1994-95), Western Neurosurgical Association (2000-02), Chief of Staff of Good Samaritan Hospital in San Jose (2003-05), and Santa Clara County Medical Association (2006-2007). During his neurosurgical residency, he founded and directed a medical relief program in Chiapas, the southernmost state in Mexico, where medical care was delivered to the indigenous Mayan Indian population.

Elliott Wolfe, M.D., F.A.C.P.