Wilna Paulemon is a public health professional with a passion for promoting health equity and improving global maternal health outcomes. As Associate Director of U.S. Programs, she is responsible for supporting activities related to the U.S. Safer Childbirth Cities initiative and priority global maternal health advocacy engagements.

Wilna first joined the Merck for Mothers team in 2019 as a graduate summer associate through the Merck internship program. Her tasks included developing recommendations for the community of practice of the Safer Childbirth Cities initiative and supporting other activities related to the announcement of the first cohort of grantees under the Safer Childbirth Cities initiative in the fall of 2019.

Prior to her role as Associate Director of U.S. Programs at Merck for Mothers, Wilna worked at Partners In Health, where she developed COVID-19 related materials that helped public sector partners implement effective and equitable pandemic response programs. She also has experience as a global health consultant, where she supported various programmatic, policy and strategic projects focused on COVID-19, vaccine confidence and health systems strengthening.

Wilna holds bachelor’s degrees in Community Health and Child Development from Tufts University and a master’s degree in Public Health from Columbia University.

Alexandra has over 15 years of consulting experience working with philanthropic and corporate clients to develop strategies and assess impact. At Afton Bloom, Alexandra has advised leading philanthropists on strategy development, design of innovative funding mechanisms, equitable approaches to partnership engagement and more. She also supports growing non-profits with a focus on racial and gender equity to design strategies and build their capacity to grow as critical actors in the field. Her work has specialized in mental health, reproductive health, birth equity, and advancing women in technology and venture capital. Her clients include the Hewlett Foundation, Community Health Acceleration Partnership (CHAP), the Pritzker Children’s Initiative, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the AAKOMA Project, LatinasRepresent, and more.

Prior to founding Afton Bloom, she served as a Director at FSG where she led the Global Health practice and founded the Gender Equity practice area. In her eight year tenure at the firm, she led strategy projects for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Facebook, Samsung, Merck Foundation, and Humana. She built a deep understanding of the important role of the private sector in philanthropy and gained perspective on how philanthropy can best be used as a tool for social change.

She holds an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, a Graduate Certificate from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a BA in Asian Studies and Mathematics from Hamilton College.

She speaks Mandarin Chinese and in her free time enjoys weekly backgammon, photography, and running.

Léah Lomotey-Nakon, PhD is a scholar-practitioner who leverages over 15 years of experience across academic, philanthropic, and corporate healthcare settings to research and advance healthcare and health philanthropy strategies. As a scholar, Leah designs participatory, arts-based and mixed-method reproductive and organizational bioethics research in the Southern US and West Africa. As a practitioner, Léah uses human-centered, trust- and arts-based methods to facilitate creative and meaningful experiences for groups and teams focused on justice-based strategy and innovation projects.

At Afton Bloom, Léah deploys her decade of experience in philanthropy to lead projects that help funders advance parent and child health policy and related reproductive health strategies at the local, state, and national levels.

Léah earned a PhD in Bioethics, a M.Ed. in community and organizational development and a M.T.S. in social ethics from Vanderbilt University as well as a BA in political science from Emory University. Her research has been supported by the Aspen Institute, RWJF/Johns Hopkins Health Policy Research Scholars, Hastings Institute, and the Meharry-Vanderbilt Engaged Research Core, and Social Science Research Council, among others. She currently also serves as an Assistant Professor of Bioethics at Baylor University.