Leadership Team
Victoria Liao
Founder & President
Guido De Santis
European Chapter Leader
Kelly Shen
North American Chapter Leader
Victoria Liao is a current high school senior at Palo Alto High School and founded Youth for Public Health (YPH) in her mission to promote a more sustainable and scientific public health culture through safety and disease prevention education. Throughout her high school career, she has taken a deep interest in the humanities and its interdisciplinary application with medicine and the sciences. She is also involved in her high school's robotics team as the Business Captain and leads grant sponsorship applications, runs subteam recruitment, oversees subteam projects, and communicates with leadership and team members to ensure timely completion of team projects.
Guido is an aspiring physicist/engineer from Avellino, Southern Italy. He devotes his time to STEM research and tutoring underprivileged students. His interests range from swimming and reading classics to playing chess. He is interested in global health studies and policies, as well.
Kelly is a high schooler at SHP (Sacred Heart Preparatory) who is extremely interested in cardiology and interventional radiology, as well as social justice issues in medicine. She hopes to be an ever-curious doctor who is conscientious of healthcare disparities in our changing world. In school, she is editor in chief of her school’s literary magazine, and is learning director on her school’s robotics team. She loves singing opera, and attends SF Conservatory on Saturdays. In her free time, she enjoys writing nature themed poetry, as well as birdwatching at local hiking trails.
Board of Directors
Prof. dr. John W. A. Rossen
Ph.D., MMM, MSc
Prof. dr. John W. A. Rossen has a 30-year history in Molecular Virology and Microbiology and published over 200 peer-reviewed articles. Since 2004, he is actively involved in Molecular Diagnostics and Prevention of Infectious Diseases. As a Professor for Personalized Microbiology at University of Groningen, he and his research group focus on applying Next Generation Sequencing to Clinical Microbiology and Public Health. He is the immediate past president of the ESCMID Study Group for Genomic and Molecular Diagnostics (ESGMD). From March 2020, he is affiliated as an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Pathology of the University of Utah School of Medicine. He is also an expert advisor for several biotechnology start-up companies to further power science and medicine to improve human health and understand microorganisms and their role in human disease. In addition, he started as a medical molecular microbiologist at the Laboratory for Medical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (LMMI) Isala. He obtained a BS in Mathematics & Physics, MS in Biology, and a Ph.D. in Molecular Virology and Cell Biology from Utrecht University. His Ph.D. research focused on “Coronavirus – Host Interactions."