Team

YTH’s team is headquartered in Oakland, California, with contributors around the country.

Rebecca Braun

Lead, YTH Initiative

[email protected]

Rebecca Braun has 18 years of domestic and global public health experience, working with partners in academic, nonprofit, philanthropic, public, and private sectors across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the United States. At ETR, Rebecca leads the Youth Tech Health (YTH) Initiative, designing innovative solutions for youth health and wellness using new media and technology. She brings extensive experience in strategy and business development, leadership and management, social science research, capacity building and technical assistance, and training and facilitation, with significant content expertise in digital health, human-centered design, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and maternal, child and adolescent health. She holds a DrPH and MPH from the University of California, Berkeley.

Prior to ETR, Rebecca was a Manager at Global Impact Advisors, a social impact consulting firm where she led a portfolio of strategy, evaluation and implementation projects for foundations and nonprofit organizations. She also served as the Senior Advisor for Digital Health at Ipas, leading efforts to design creative, technology-based solutions to improve access to comprehensive abortion care across Asia, Africa and Latin America. She has provided independent research consulting services to several global health organizations, including FHI360, MSI and PSI. Rebecca has published articles in Contraception, Global Health Science & Practice, the Journal of Adolescent Health, and the American Journal of Public Health, and has spoken widely about using digital health solutions to improve global access to reproductive health.

Emma Schlamm

Youth Centered Health Designer

[email protected]
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Emma is a Youth Centered Health Designer and supports both YTH and new fund development. She contributes to a variety of YTH programs related to teen pregnancy prevention and substance abuse, such as Fresno-based In the Know, an app for trans-spectrum youth; they2ze, a mobile application for transgender-spectrum youth; and the Spanish-language site for educational sexual education material on Amaze.org. Emma is passionate about the intersection of mental health, sexual health, and substance abuse. She has studied in both Ireland and Argentina, two countries with very restrictive reproductive rights, inspiring her passion for reproductive justice.

Prior to working at YTH, Emma held many direct service positions, including working with young people with autism, Latino men struggling with substance abuse, and Spanish-speaking preschoolers. Most recently, Emma worked at Exhale, the country’s first and only after-abortion talkline.

Sarah Han

Youth-Centered Health Designer

[email protected]
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Sarah is a Youth-Centered Health Designer at YTH. She contributes to a variety of YTH programs related to community health and sexual and reproductive health, such as INSPIRE+, a human-centered design accelerator for youth-led projects, and PrEPTECH, an integrated tech approach to increasing pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) uptake among young gay and bisexual men. Sarah brings a background in health equity and human-centered design, communications and storytelling skills, and experience in rigorous quantitative and qualitative analyses. She is a first-generation Korean immigrant who is passionate about how technology and innovation can be leveraged to move the needle on entrenched or overlooked sexual and reproductive health, such as contraception access and menstruation.

Prior to working at YTH, Sarah graduated from University of California, Berkeley with her Masters in Public Health with a concentration in Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health (MCAH). Her capstone research examined how pesticide exposure impacted adolescent menstrual cycle characteristics and timing of menarche in a community of Latino farmworkers in the Salinas Valley. Sarah also worked at Berkeley Media Studies Group (BMSG), where she studied how public health issues appear in the media to push the needle on topics like sexual violence prevention, child welfare, immigration, and housing, sharpening her background in advocacy, training and facilitation skills, and her capacity for storytelling and communications. Before her time at BMSG, she conducted impact evaluation, research, and strategic planning for nonprofit, public, and philanthropic organizations across the US at Learning for Action, a social sector consulting group. She graduated with her BA in Human Biology, with a minor in Media Studies at Scripps College for Women in Claremont, California.

Caryn Graves

Consultant

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Caryn Graves has been working for YTH since 2005, performing the “nitty gritty” technical implementations that bring to fruition the end products out of initial concepts.

She has worked on numerous projects over the course of her years at YTH, such as websites for health clinics, STD partner notification, clinic locators, SMS reminders, online faxing of prescriptions, and social media campaigns. YTH has been an ideal outlet for her desire to apply the latest technologies in innovative ways for good social causes.

Caryn has a Bachelor of Science in aerospace engineering from USC and Master of Engineering in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining YTH, she worked as a software engineer in the private sector.

When not helping to forge the frontiers of sexual health promotion, Caryn undertakes a challenge very different in nature but no less in magnitude—the parenting of her two school-aged children. She also enjoys science fiction, games, running, gardening, cooking, and a wide range of music.

Our thanks

We’d like to thank those others that have generously contributed their skills and passion to helping YTH take great strides in advancing youth health, including:

Arai Buendia, Jessica Ken, Jade Lopez, Joseph Negrido, Nick Newton, Zach Seidl, Jasmine Smith, Evonne Smith, Aileen So

ZonaSegura ZonaSegura is a trauma-informed youth-centered innovative mobile solution to address teen dating violence in Honduras. Learn more about ZonaSegura on our program page.