Board of ADVISORS

DEBORAH GRACIA, DO

Interim Board President

Dr. Deborah Gracia is the Chief Medical Officer at Borinquen Health Care Center, Inc.;a federally qualified health center facility that has 9 sites and 31 schools and serves the underserved communities all throughout Miami Dade County. Dr. Deborah Gracia has been a provider and educator of Internal Medicine for over 20 years, she earned her B.S. in Nutritional Sciences and Doctorate in Osteopathic Medicine. As a CMO, she is responsible for the Clinical Deliveries of Services, Physicians as well as all Clinical Operations of all Borinquen’s sites. She briefly served as the Interim CEO for her organization. She is also the former Program Director for the Larkin Community Hospital Internal Medicine Residency Program and worked as an associate professor for universities like FIU and NOVA.

Dr. Gracia is Board Certified in Internal Medicine and a current fellow at The University of Arizona Andrew Weil Center of Integrative Medicine. The Borinquen Health Care Center (BHCC) clinics comprise one of South Florida’s FQHC’s serving patients who have disparities in access to healthcare. Being fluent in English and Spanish, French, and Haitian Creole has allowed Dr. Gracia to better assess the needs of the patients and the community and mount appropriate responses to their needs. In the last few years, she has also participated in disseminating and implementing several new programs, which have resulted in significant improvements in Borinquen patient outcomes. Her dedication to Community Health began as a Board Member in this same clinic during her Internal Medicine residency at Mount Sinai Medical Center. Upon graduation, she also served as a clinician at another local community health center, Jessie Trice Community Health Center (JTCHC.) Dr. Gracia was named by Legacy Magazine as one of South Florida’s 25 Most Influential & Prominent Black Women in Business for 2011. She also recently got appointed to the Florida Medicaid Drug Utilization Review Board.

Dr. Gracia seeks to gain knowledge and experience through various collaborations, fellowship opportunities, and conferences to implement innovative programs both for patients and staff at her clinic, putting the patient at the center of the equation and empowering providers, staff, and patients to optimize their emotional, spiritual and physical health.

JUDE BORNSTEIN-CHAU, MD

Vice-President

Policy Committee Co-Chair

Jude Bornstein-Chau is a wife, mother, advocate, and Board-Certified Internist who became a member of IM4US while attending the 8th annual conference in Washington, DC. She is incredibly honored to be on the Board during this exciting period in the organization’s development. Jude believes in Integrative Medicine as a powerful force for social change, and sees IM4US as the organization that can faithfully represent a multiplicity of voices, spurring the fight for social justice and healthier communities.

Jude enjoyed an eclectic undergraduate career that focused on geology and narrative non-fiction but included such diverse subjects as Medieval French and Welsh, and movement analysis. It was during her undergraduate years that she first became interested in the principles of mind-body medicine. Jude earned her Doctor of Medicine from the Penn State, Milton S. Hershey School of Medicine in 2005, and completed her Internal Medicine Residency at Temple University Hospital in 2008, serving some of Philadelphia’s poorest residents. One of her greatest honors so far has been receiving the Melody S. Duffalo Award for Humanism in Medicine, which was awarded to her by her fellow residents. After working in Hospital Medicine for nearly a decade, Jude decided to pursue Integrative Medicine in order to return to her interest in mind-body healing and the root causes of disease. She completed her fellowship through the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine in February 2019.

During her fellowship, Jude began to feel a deep call toward social justice work and left hospital medicine in order to pursue this mission. When she joined IM4US in 2018, she joined the Policy and Advocacy committee where she has been an active member, and for which she will be stepping into the co-chair role. In addition to her efforts with IM4US, Jude is active locally with Health Justice Philly, the social justice body associated with the chronic disease arm of Philadelphia’s Department of Public Health. For the past two years, she has collaborated with the DPH members to organize the nascent Health Justice Summit in Philadelphia. Jude currently works as a primary care physician at Oak Street Health, which leverages data science and population health to drive primary care once more toward common-sense prevention in underserved populations. Of particular interest to her both personally and professionally are mind-body techniques for mental health and pain control, culinary medicine, Ayurveda, and palliative care.

Jude is deeply thankful to share her life with her husband Vinh and their son Kien, both of whom are daily reminders of presence and compassion. In addition to cooking, eating, reading, and Yoga, she enjoys driving a race car as fast as possible.

ARIANA THOMPSON-LASTAD, PhD

Secretary

Equity Diversity Inclusion Committee Board Liaison

Ariana Thompson-Lastad is an integrative health care researcher based in the San Francisco Bay Area. As an Assistant Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, her research focuses on group medical visits and integrative approaches to advancing health equity in safety-net settings. Ariana spent five years as a health educator and group medical visit facilitator at a community health center and received her PhD in medical sociology from UC San Francisco. In addition, Ariana is a member of the Bay Area Structural Competency Working Group, where she co-facilitates training for health care practitioners and trainees. 

STEVEN CHEN, MD

Treasurer

Steven Chen, MD, as the Chief Medical Officer of ALL IN Alameda County, brings an integrative health equity lens to ALL IN’s work on poverty. He is leading the scale and spread of a Food as Medicine model across Alameda County health clinics, health systems, and food systems. His areas of expertise include integrative medicine, health equity, and innovative models of care that address social determinants of health (SDOH) and improve health outcomes. He is interested in somatic approaches to healing social and historical traumas.

As the former Medical Director at Hayward Wellness, an FQHC clinic in the Alameda Health System, he and his team developed an innovative “Food as Medicine” model that is clinically integrated and bundles together a variety of interventions to improve health: a “food farmacy” and food prescriptions through a partnership with a local farm, a “social needs pharmacy” to connect patients to community resources, and a group medical visit “behavioral pharmacy” that combines movement, nutrition, stress reduction, and social support.

Dr. Chen’s commitments to a more just and inclusive world is informed by his experiences as a son of immigrants and a 2nd generation Taiwanese American. Dr. Chen recognizes the importance of language access, and he continues to develop more fluency in Taiwanese, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish to better serve our communities. He grew up watching his immigrant parents and extended family struggle to navigate life in this new setting.

A graduate of Stanford University and Stanford School of Medicine, Dr. Chen is a board-certified family medicine physician who completed his residency training at UCSF-San Francisco General Hospital. He received additional fellowship training in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, the California Health Care Foundation’s Leadership Program, acupuncture training through the UCLA-HMI Physicians’ Medical Acupuncture program, and advanced training in a form of osteopathic manipulative medicine called Strain-Counterstrain.