Cherie is a Principal at Reality Investor Capital LLC, a real estate private equity, investment, and advisory firm with a national platform. In 2016, Cherie served as managing director of Trout Sports, a business advisory firm that supports current and retired professional athletes to build long term career capacity. During her 16 year career as President of Hill Ventures, Inc., Cherie established the sports marketing and investment management of the company’s $150 million real estate portfolio, and spearheaded the strategic launch of a $200 million mezzanine growth fund while providing complete oversight of all business and philanthropic activities.

Cherie was a three-time First Team All-American lacrosse player at the University of Virginia, where she led the Cavaliers to NCAA Championships in 1991 and 1993, was named Team Captain and NCAA Defensive Player of the Year in ‘94, and became the first lacrosse athlete in the university’s history to have her jersey retired. She also played 14 seasons with the U.S. Women’s Lacrosse team, winning three Gold Medals in the World Cup Championships, including MVP honors in ‘97 and 2001. In 2009, Cherie was inducted into the Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame, an honor which was also given to her late father, NBA Hall of Famer and one of the 50 Greatest NBA Players of All Time, Hal Greer. This makes the Philadelphia native a four time Hall-of-Famer as a member of the Pennsylvania Lacrosse HOF, Virginia Sports HOF, Philadelphia Sports HOF, and National Lacrosse HOF. In 2017, she received the Tewaaraton Legend Award. Cherie currently serves as a Board of Director Member for USA Lacrosse, the governing body of Lacrosse in the US.

Since the start of his career, Jon has focused on being a compassionate storyteller through words and images. Whether he’s at the computer, behind the lens, or hosting a gallery exhibition, Jon is a respected voice for the hip hop and New York communities. As our new Digital Communications Manager, Jon is creating space to develop stories of marginalized and underrepresented communities in New York City, and beyond. What he brings to Hip Hop Public Health is a deep understanding of the crucial role of digital media in highlighting the needs and voices of people who often are silenced in our world.

Prior to joining Hip Hop Public Health, Lindsey served as Executive Director of the New York City Department of Education’s Office of School Wellness Programs, where she developed and implemented large-scale initiatives to increase equitable access to Health Education, Physical Education and wellness programs for New York City’s one million students. She established policies and practices, paired with practical and accessible resources, to revitalize Health and Physical Education instruction in grades K-12, and to embed sustainable transformation at both the school and system levels. Lindsey embraced opportunities for organizational change and led the Office of School Wellness Programs through an unprecedented expansion from a team of 25 to more than 100, providing a comprehensive and strategic suite of support structures for New York City’s 1,600 public schools, including professional learning, curricular materials, and programs for students, educators and school communities. Lindsey’s career has also included stints in marketing, development, public relations and communications. Lindsey was a founding member of the NYC Mayor’s Sexual Health Education Task Force and served as its Co-Vice-Chair.

Lindsey loves travelling -- especially if it involves some combination of ocean sunrises, mountain-top star-gazing, and good food and wine -- and she also loves coming home to Brooklyn where you can find her doing hot yoga, reading at her neighborhood cafe, and hosting friends for dinner.

Even when Patrice is not working, she is still kind of working, as she is committed to helping others become healthy in mind, body, and spirit by creating healing experiences for those living through trauma. Patrice resides in DC and enjoys spending time volunteering as a foster for the Humane Rescue Alliance, exercising with her Peloton BGM crew, and collaborating with friends to create trauma healing experiences.

In 2020, as the pandemic created unprecedented challenges, Melinda shifted her focus to create unprecedented solutions. Recognizing racism as a public health crisis and the life-threatening consequences of health inequity on communities of color, Melinda’s work with Hip Hop Public Health combines the power of culturally appropriate and accurate healthcare messaging with access to corporate workforces to create a new model of public/private partnership. Melinda’s mission is to bring together the power of corporations and philanthropy to amplify Hip Hop Public Health’s work.

Melinda’s entrepreneurial background includes co-founding PlumParty.com, a celebrations site that disrupted the party store concept and was credited with revolutionizing how online retail interacted with consumers. Prior to PlumParty.com, Melinda was a Vice President at Dillon, Read & Co. Inc. where she helped structure and execute $3 billion of taxable and tax-exempt healthcare financings, including the first ever financing for the NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation. She was a Founding Board Member/Chair of Children’s Hope Foundation, an innovative non-profit serving the needs of children with HIV/AIDS. A decade-long volunteer at Sanctuary for Families serving the needs of victims of domestic violence, Melinda was most recently Co-Chair of the Family Council, developing age-appropriate ways to engage children and foster volunteerism at a young age.

Melinda is a native New Yorker, a proud mom to Charlotte and Oliver, and a graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Business School.

Liliana has a B.A. in Communications and French from Rutgers University, and a MBA from NYU’s Stern School of Business. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and her dog, Beau. She is fluent in Portuguese, conversational in Spanish, and welcomes any opportunity to practice her rusty French.

Abe enjoys working with nonprofits that contribute to the greater good of the community. He has been privileged to work with several such nonprofits throughout his career, including the Town Hall Foundation and The Culture Project. Abe has a degree in Accounting and Business Management from Brooklyn College. He looks forward to contributing to Hip Hop Public Health’s continued growth and expansion.

When he’s not working, you can find Abe playing video games, watching sports, or managing his Fantasy Football team. He also enjoys movies and TV shows, and appreciating life one day at a time.

Before joining HHPH, Lori served as Vice President of Healthy Lifestyles at the YMCA of Greater New York, spearheading all aspects of the preventative health and wellness portfolio for the largest YMCA in the United States with a key focus on health innovation, development of youth fitness programming and scaling chronic disease prevention programs to meet the diverse needs of New York City's communities. Lori was the principal architect of the award winning Y-MVP Teen Fitness Challenge – an innovative program blending fun fitness activities with an interactive mobile app designed to recognize, reward and motivate NYC's young people to increase their daily levels of Moderate to Vigorous Physical activity.

Prior to joining the Y in 2011, Lori served as the Executive Director of the Office of School Wellness Programs at New York City’s Department of Education, established under the Bloomberg administration in collaboration with NYC’s Health Department. She implemented policies and designed initiatives to increase the quality and quantity of physical and health education for 1.1 million students in 1,700 public schools. Highlights under Lori’s tenure include the creation of a city-wide sports and fitness league for hundreds of middle schools, introducing classroom-based physical activity curriculum, launching school wellness council grant programs, and spearheading the implementation of NYC FITNESSGRAM, an annual student fitness assessment, which is now one of the country’s largest web-based longitudinal data base on childhood obesity and physical fitness.

Raised in Brooklyn, Lori attended New York City’s public schools and earned a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in Communications and Graphic Design, and a M.A. in Physical Education from Adelphi University in Garden City, NY, where she is currently an Adjunct Faculty member in the Department of Exercise Science, Health Studies, Physical Education and Sport. Lori personally embraces physical activity and her love of music into her daily life as a yoga enthusiast, an aspiring DJ and a spinning instructor who still teaches a weekly cycling class at Crunch Fitness in Brooklyn.

Sandra received her bachelor's in chemistry from Wagner College in Staten Island. Sandra's undergraduate research focused primarily on global public health issues, particularly contamination and nutrition projects in Bangladesh and Kenya. In addition to her research, she continued tutoring and teaching children in various disciplines in NYC.
After graduating, she worked in CUNY Start, a program that prepares underserved NYC youth to become college-proficient in writing and math. She then continued her community work at Rutgers University in an environmental injustice research project. Now, in order to pursue her passion for empowering NYC youth, she proudly joins the HHPH team as a research assistant.

In her free time Sandra enjoys traveling, listening to live music, reading poetry, doing Sudoku puzzles, and of course, educating NYC’s youth.

Harmon worked for Harlem Hospital from 1981 to 1992 as both a program manager in the Psychiatry Department and as program director for the Heart of Harlem Cardiovascular Disease Prevention Program in Cardiology. The Heart of Harlem program was a community-based cardiovascular disease risk reduction program focused on educating the community about the stroke and heart attack risk and offering programs to assist the community with making healthy choices leading to a healthier lifestyle.

Between 1992 and 2003 he continued to work in Harlem, developing numerous health and wellness programs and partnering with many of the CBO’s, churches, schools and community centers in central and West Harlem. He has worked consistently to educate the community about the dangers of smoking, the importance maintaining healthy blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

From 2003 to 2016 Mr. Moats worked for the Neurology Department at Columbia University Medical Center as a clinical coordinator, managing several clinical and drug trials for the stroke services at New York Presbyterian Hospital. Seeing the effects of stroke first hand and understanding the important role of stroke prevention planning for stroke survivors, has led him into his current field of work.

Currently, Harmon is the senior program manager for a relatively new program sponsored by Columbia University. The “InTOuCH” program is a community health worker training program involved in stroke and heart attack prevention activities, dedicated to lowering stroke and heart attack rates in this community. InTOuCH is currently partnering with a number of Central and West Harlem churches, training members of the health ministries in those churches to go out into the Harlem community and screen residents for high blood pressure and diabetes.

Harmon’s primary responsibility is to build infrastructure in Harlem to support improved community health and greater access to health care and medical services.

Madeleine works on the Old SCHOOL and TASHE research projects at CUMC as well as administers the educational programs for HHPH including the Hip Hop Youth Physical Education (HYPE) and supporting HYPE The Breaks Program. Previously, she worked with the Taub Center interviewing people with dementia and their caregivers with the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. In all her work, Madeleine has focused recruitment of Latino participants and educating economically disadvantaged minorities on public health principles.

Madeleine assists with HHPH by overseeing the daily operations of the non-profit including reviewing budgets, managing costs, overseeing inventory, and social media. Madeleine is a published author in the Journal of Neurology. In her spare time, she enjoys running outdoors and has completed the NYC Triathlon twice. As a native of Queens, NY, Madeleine enjoys giving back to her community through volunteering and exploring the NYC music and food scenes.

Ewelina’s research interests involve a hybrid of psychology, public health, music, social justice, and innovation. She is passionate about the role of multidisciplinary fields, media, arts and music in effective health education and behavior change. Together with Dr. Olajide Williams, she has developed the Multisensory Multilevel Health Education Model – a theoretical framework focused on innovative, culturally sensitive, and evidence-based health education. Ewelina is a recipient of several awards, including Fulbright Scholarship and International Postgraduate Research Scholarship from the Australian Government. She also received the Innovative Leader in Magazine Media Award from Yale University for her work on Lifelab – a project that aims at bringing the science of psychology from academia to our daily lives.

Whether it is through her research, previous clinical work, or personal interests, Ewelina enjoys exploring new ideas and connections between them. She often immerses herself in the cultural landscape of NYC – jazz, ballet, museums, and random science lectures. And this exploration informs her work, too.