Staff Biographies

• Bob Eisenman, Executive Director
• Michelle Lapinski, Deputy Director
• Lucia Sayre, Program Associate
• May van Scherrenburg, Program Manager

The GHS Initiative has a core staff that is assisted by the staff of its non-profit Founding Organizations and the efforts of the many individuals involved in the six Workgroups.

Bob Eisenman, Ph.D., Executive Director

Bob Eisenman

Bob has more than forty years experience in public policy and social change including thirty-five years in leadership positions in healthcare. Prior to launching the Global Health and Safety Initiative, Bob worked in public policy and community and government relations leadership positions for Kaiser Permanente and played key roles in affecting legislative and regulatory changes, improvements in quality of care and lower costs for healthcare. Bob was also an Emergency Medical Services Administrator, Health Planner, Assistant Professor of Sociology and U.S. Public Health Services' Officer.

Bob has a Master's of Public Health (MPH) from UCLA and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University.

Michelle Lapinski, Deputy Director

Michelle Lapinski

Founding Principal of SustainBiz consultancy, Michelle has over a dozen years of experience working within or with Fortune 500 companies and their supply chains, particularly in the food and agriculture and consumer products industries. Prior to launching SustainBiz, as Director of Advisory Services for Business for Social Responsibility, she lead several industry initiatives including Clean Cargo (greener transportation) and restricted substances & water quality (hazardous materials in apparel and footwear), and her clients included The Coca-Cola Company, McDonald's and many of its suppliers, and Starbucks Coffee Company. As Gap Inc.'s Global Environmental Health & Safety Manager she developed standards for its products and 3500 suppliers in 53 countries.

Michelle holds a Master of Science in Environmental Management from USF and a Bachelor of Arts in Behavioral Biology from Johns Hopkins University.

Lucia Sayre, Program Associate

Lucia Sayre

Lucia is the Program Coordinator of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility (SF PSR), overseeing the development of SF PSR's environmental health program — coordinating the Healthier Food in Health Care project in collaboration with Health Care Without Harm, the Pediatric Environmental Health Toolkit project, and the SF PSR climate change working group. Lucia has worked in educational program development and community organizing for the past twelve years, in the United States, Mexico and South America.

Her work has included training and curriculum development for the Peace Corps program, the design of educational outreach strategies for the Field Museum in Chicago, and grass-roots organizing around issues of food security and access to educational programming on the U.S.-Mexico border.

May van Scherrenburg, Program Manager

May van Scherrenburg

May has over eight years experience in the social change sector working primarily for grantmaking institutions such as the Steven and Michele Kirsch Foundation. Much of her time was spent working to connect smaller, grassroots organizations with critically needed resources to move their environmental health work forward.

Prior to May's foundation years, she worked as an agricultural biologist in Silicon Valley, and as an organic chemist, testing for toxins in produce, soil and water. She has a BA in Biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz.