Education: B.S. in Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Policy Experience & Interests: Health policy is a relatively recent area of interest for Leslie, inspired through an AmeriCorps service term in Western Queens in which she managed strategic health education programming. The scarcity of health resources available to low-income and immigrant residents of Queens led her to develop an interest in the marginalization of populations through existing U.S. health legislation. Leslie has taken undergraduate Bioethics courses, which touched briefly on health policy; however, her current knowledge is based on independent reading and work in clinical research. She is particularly interested in legislation related to women’s reproductive health and prenatal medicine. Overall, Leslie hopes to explore the impacts of the Affordable Care Act on patient outcomes and health care costs and strategies for increasing access to preventive health care for at-risk populations.