Linh Chuong

Linh Chuong is the Policy Co-Chair, the Board Secretary, and a Southern California Chapter Lead at PIVOT. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Health Policy and Management with a focus on Public Policy at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Before she was a researcher, she was an advocate for Southeast Asian health equity. Before she was an advocate, she was and remains the proud daughter of refugee immigrants. Through her work, she developed a recognition that data and research have never been about data, but about (in)visibility and representation— about who gets to define the issue, set the agenda, and determine the solution. She strives to conduct thoughtful research and use simple communication to bridge policy, practice, and people.

Linh received her MPH in Health Policy and Management from UC Berkeley and her BA degrees in (1) Sociology/Anthropology with a Sociology Emphasis and (2) Gender and Social Justice from Hendrix College.

Kỳ-Nam Miller

Kỳ-Nam Miller is co-Secretary of the PIVOT Board, where he also serves as co-chair of the Fundraising committee as well as on the Policy committee. At work, he is an Equity Officer at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) and the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG).

Previously he worked at PolicyLink and the Greenlining Institute, non-profit organizations devoted to advancing racial equity. He spent time in Washington D.C. as an aide to Congresswoman Barbara Lee and helped on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Born and raised in the East Bay, where he lives with his wife, two kids, mother-in-law, and a very adorable Havens dog, Kỳ-Nam is a California bar-certified attorney, received his Masters from the London School of Economics, and graduated with honors from UC Berkeley, where he competed on national champion rugby and heavyweight rowing varsity teams. He has family on both sides of the Pacific and has lived and worked in Vietnam.

Khanh Nguyen

Khanh Nguyen joined PIVOT at its founding in 2017 and has served on its board since then. He is committed to working with progressive Vietnamese Americans to protect democracy and help mitigate the damages of climate change. Among his contributions to PIVOT, Khanh works on PIVOT’s election and fundraising efforts.

Professionally, Khanh is a technology leader with a 30-year career in multiple industries. He worked on pioneering research in semiconductor device manufacturing and led engineering teams at several software startups. He spent 17 years at Google, where he led teams in Search and Advertising. During that time, he founded and grew Google's Shopping Ads product to $20B in revenue over ten years.

Recently, he has focused his career on helping to mitigate the damages of climate change and is currently the Head of Engineering at WeaveGrid, a startup working to enable a smarter grid to support the accelerated adoption of electric vehicles.

Khanh arrived in the US in 1978 with his family via the Leam Sing refugee camp in Thailand. His family settled in Southern California, in the city of Hawthorne with its claim to fame as the hometown of the Beach Boys.

Victoria Nguyen

Victoria has been with PIVOT since the 2020 elections and has been involved in various committees in PIVOT. She co-led the Elections team for the 2022 Midterm elections and is currently leading the Communications team at PIVOT. She is a second-generation Vietnamese American and is passionate about uplifting the voice of the Vietnamese-American community. She graduated with her Bachelor's degree in Political Science (minored in Global Studies) at the University of California, Los Angeles and she received her Master's degree in Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. She has always had a passion for civic engagement and social causes, which led her to PIVOT.

Victoria started her career in non-profit program management and has transitioned to working in the technology sector, leading strategic website projects and marketing initiatives across various products in the E-commerce space. With this experience, she is constantly thinking about how to improve PIVOT technology and communications.

She is an avid traveler, having traveled to over 70 countries and just shy of 50 American states (47 to be exact), and is curious about the world around her, bringing these human connections and different cultures into her daily life. Her home base is the Bay Area, California, but you'll often find her away in some other place. But always down to call into a Zoom meeting from wherever in the world she is.

Hong-My Basrai

Hong-My Basrai resides in Los Angeles County and is the author of Behind the Red Curtain: a Memoir (Los Nietos Press, 2020). She has been active with PIVOT since its formation in 2017. During the crucial 2020 Presidential Election, she served as translation Lead and liaison for several activist groups in need of language support, including Viet Fact Check. 

Currently, Hong-My also sits on the Board of Directors of Inlandia Institute, a literary center and a nonprofit organization for the Arts, serving the greater Inland Empire since 2007. She is also an active member of the Writers' Club of Whittier and was formerly its president.

Born and raised in Saigon, Vietnam, Hong-My Basrai (née Lê Thị) is fluent in Vietnamese and French. Transplanted at age twenty-two to Southern California, she picked up enough English to survive her college years. She has continuously improvised upon the borrowed language to make it her very own. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering. 

Her multifaceted identity is her strongest strength. Born in privilege, she grew up to experience poverty and persecution in fallen Saigon. Her first few years as an immigrant in America sharpened her survival skills, and at the same time deepened her awareness of inequalities, and the misfortune of the have-nots, mired in the vicious cycle of poverty in precarious living conditions, and lack of language and politicial power. Hong-My then realized that her love of languages could be used, not only to express herself in the new society through literary endeavors, but also to help others through activism, to demand greater justice and representation for people of color, particularly VietAm from all backgrounds and educational levels.

Vina Vo

Vina is the co-founder of the Novalia Collective, an organization that works to build belonging and community through workshops, strategic visioning, and storytelling. Prior to starting her own business, she worked in management consulting and K-12 public education. Within PIVOT, Vina works on membership engagement.

Cathy Lam

Cathy is currently the Treasurer of PIVOT and is co-chair of the Finance/Fundraising Committee. Originally from from Southern California and currently resides in Hilo, Hawaii.

She has a long history of work with the Vietnamese American communities, including leadership positions with Vietnamese American Non-Governmental Organization Network (VANGO Network) and Viet Rainbow of Orange County (VROC). She has been a parent advisor for VROC since its inception in 2013 in response to the discrimination faced by LGBTQ+ people during the Lunar Tet Parade.

Cathy Lam founded Our1World that works with youth and community development in Vietnam on leadership in environmental issues, adolescent and reproductive health. She has development work in Habitat Restoration in Central Vietnam Phong Dien with native Mellaleuca Cajeputi tea tree and in Hue with Forest Restoration of endangered plants.

She was formerly a board member at Newport Bay Conservancy. Along with her husband Mike Kane, they are both key stakeholders/co-founders of Electrical Vehicle movement (now Plug In America) in the early 2000's, working with CA Air Quality Management Board and the automobile industry to manufacture zero emission vehicles. She has 2 wonderful loving LGBT children . She holds a Bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering from UC Irvine. She loves to dance for exercise, to hike, swim and garden in her spare time.

Minh-Thu Pham

Minh-Thu Pham is a champion of collective problem-solving to tackle our biggest challenges. She co-founded New American Voices, which mobilizes Asian American voters, and advises foundations and non-profits on global trends and institutions. During the primary, she was an advisor on Pete Buttigieg’s foreign policy team and a policy volunteer for Biden for President. Previously, she was Executive Director of Global Policy at the United Nations Foundation, where for 10 years she led initiatives to make the UN more effective, tackle climate change and poverty (helping to create the Sustainable Development Goals), and improving relations between the U.S. and the UN. Minh-Thu was an advisor to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan after the Iraq War and has worked in Bosnia and Ethiopia.

Minh-Thu serves on the Advisory Council of Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, where she received her MPA; is a Leadership Now Project member of thought leaders working to fix our democracy, a Truman National Security Project fellow, and named a 2020 AAPI National Security & Foreign Policy Next Generation Leader. She was a Council on Foreign Relations Term Member and a 92Y Women inPower Fellow. She graduated from Duke, where she wrote a thesis on the student and Buddhist movement in 1960s Saigon. She’s a lifelong follower of Thich Nhat Hanh.

As a PIVOT board member, she hopes to offer what she knows from policy, politics, strategy, and building bridges. She is deeply concerned about the direction of our democracy; she thinks Vietnamese Americans’ shared war and refugee history enables us to understand the consequences of a divided country and therefore support a more inclusive and cohesive society. Minh-Thu left Vietnam by boat at age 3, spent eight months in a refugee camp in Indonesia, and resettled in TN, eventually moving to NC. She lives in NYC with her husband and two daughters.

Frederick Tran

Born in California, Frederick Tran (he/him/his) transplanted to Texas with his mom and sister when he was eight years old. He learned Vietnamese through Vietnamese classes through his temple’s youth group and watching Paris by Night with his grandmother. He really honed his Vietnamese working as a radio show host (later assistant station manager) for the Dallas Vietnamese Radio during college. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Critical Language and International Studies, with an emphasis in Russian from the University of Texas at Arlington. Currently, Frederick resides in Dallas, TX, and works for Allies in Youth Development as their donor relations associate, social media manager, and Vietnam program director.

Frederick started his career in politics in the summer of 2020, working as a marketing intern for the Dallas County Republican Party. He primarily fundraised for a local candidate for a Texas state house representative. Following that stint, he was one of PIVOT’s inaugural fellows for Texas where he started the #BlueTexas team to flip the state house blue for 2021. He hopes to continue to build the progressive momentum in Texas, especially with the AAPI community.

One of his bucket list items is to see Lệ Quyên perform live at Phòng Trà Không Tên in Saigon. He is also a loving parent to Axel, a rescue dog.

Hanh Hua

Hanh Hua, based on the Gulf Coast of Alabama, currently works as a Realtor® and Certified International Property Specialist (CIPS) with the boutique brokerage of Bellator Real Estate & Development, a part of 68 Ventures that operates the whole life cycle and services of real estate transactions to provide an all-inclusive experience. Previously, Hanh lived in Hanoi, Vietnam and was embedded within the National Institute of Malariology, Parasitology and Entomology (NIMPE) under Vietnam's Ministry of Health (MoH) as a malaria global health officer with the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), a part of the Clinton Foundation. Alongside the World Health Organization, she helped reorient Vietnam national malaria program from control to elimination and secured a $15.2 million multi-year grant; the impact of the decision allowed Vietnam to accelerate its malaria eradication timeline by 5 years to 2020.

Besides her involvement with PIVOT as a board member and co-chair of Candidate Support Committee, Hanh belongs to a number of local and national non-profits, including serving as the 2021 National Policy Chair for the Asian Real Estate Association of America (AREAA), the largest Asian trade organization in North America with 17,000 members. Recently, she was appointed to the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) 2021 Multicultural Advisory Group. Additionally, she is a member of Leaders Forum and the Mobile Jaycees Azalea Trail Maid Project. Hanh tries to exemplify her company’s motto of “to see all we can do with all we have been given.”

Nick Nguyen

Nick Nguyen was born in Pennsylvania in 1976 and grew up in Ohio, his parents refugees from South Vietnam who fled the persecution of the Communist North Vietnamese regime in the year before. After attending college at Ohio State, he spent time in Austin, TX, and Detroit, MI before settling in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2005. After 20 years in the technology industry as a software engineer, startup co-founder, product manager, and executive, his most recent career change was in 2019 when he decided to shift to becoming a full time parent.

Like many Vietnamese Americans, he grew up with conservative politics, and grew more progressive as his education and career progressed and exposed him to more systems and peoples all over the world. As a person who is deeply invested in the potential of technology to change lives, his interest in joining the PIVOT board is closely tied to fighting the rampant misinformation that affects his community of Vietnamese Americans. As Research Lead and a writer on Viet Fact Check, he aspires to inform and protect the Vietnamese American community from the damage that misinformation causes.

He lives in Palo Alto, CA with his wife, two children, and a Boston Terrier.

Hieu Le

Hieu resides in Washington, DC, and is a senior campaign representative with the Sierra Club, the nation's oldest and largest environmental organization, working to combat the climate crisis through decarbonization of the transportation sector. His prior experience includes working on numerous democratic campaigns, including Beto O’Rourke’s Senate campaign, and policy advocacy across K-12, higher education, labor, and renewable energy issues.

He graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a bachelor's degree in political science.

Phi Nguyen

Phi Nguyen is the Litigation Director for Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta. She focuses on impact litigation in the areas of voter rights and immigrant rights. Since joining Advancing Justice-Atlanta in early 2017, Phi has helped block a Georgia state law that restricted voters’ right to an interpreter at the polls and represented a class of Vietnamese immigrants suing the federal government over the indefinite nature of their detention in ICE centers.

Phi specialized in medical malpractice defense for several years before dedicating herself to community-centered civil rights litigation. She has nine years of litigation experience and has completed six jury trials. Phi graduated from the University of Georgia in 2005 and the Georgia State University School of Law in 2009. Growing up in the South as a Vietnamese American with refugee parents, Phi's life experiences formed into her passion to protect and promote the civil rights of the AAPIs. Phi was introduced to Advancing Justice-Atlanta in 2016 when she partnered with them to lead Vietnamese Voices, a voter registration drive targeting Vietnamese Americans; this became a jumping point for further grassroots efforts to politically mobilize AAPI communities. Outside of her legal practice, Phi co-produces Wake Up, Atlanta, a web series dedicated to educating and civically empowering AAPI millennials in Georgia.

Thang Do

I am an architect and an entrepreneur. For nearly 30 years, I have led Aedis Architects, a San Jose-based architectural firm that specializes in the design of educational institutions. More recently, I founded SoFA Market, an urban food hall in San Jose’s emerging SoFA Art District, as well as The Fountainhead Bar, an architecture theme bar located within.  I have been active in the efforts to revitalize downtown San Jose, as evidenced through my services as Chair of the San Jose Planning Commission, board member of SPUR, the San Jose Museum of Art and the Housing Trust of Silicon Valley and member of San Jose Architectural Review Committee. As a a committed urbanist and environmentalist, my architectural work embraces sustainable design practices, such as Aedis Architects’ office, a LEED Platinum-certified corporate headquarter. Community activism has played a significant part in professional work, ranging from advocating and advising on urban design issues and influencing planning practices to policy makers. Recognizing my contributions to society and the architectural profession, the American Institute of Architects elevated me in 2017 to the AIA College of Fellows, a distinction bestowed on fewer than four percent of AIA architects.

I am a native Vietnamese speaker and fluent in both Vietnamese and English. I am conversational in Italian and French, with a limited ability in Spanish and Mandarin Chinese. I live in Saratoga, California, with my wife and four children, in a historic home that I restored and transformed.

Thu Quach

Thu Quach, PhD has been working in public health and health care for over two decades. Her research, service, and advocacy work have been grounded in her own lived experience as a refugee from Vietnam, and the struggles her family faced in the health care system. She was among the tens of thousands of boat people who left Vietnam to escape persecution. Arriving in the US with her parents and two siblings at age 5, her family struggled with resettlement, and it has made her a fierce advocate of immigrant rights.

Trained as an epidemiologist, she has conducted community-based research, focusing on Asian Americans and immigrant populations, including examining occupational exposures and health impacts among Vietnamese nail salon workers. This work was inspired by her own mother, who passed from cancer at the age of 58, after working as a cosmetologist for decades. These research findings have contributed to the extraordinary work of the nationally-recognized California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, informing community engagement with the nail salon workforce and policy advocacy leading to the passing of the groundbreaking Healthy Nail Salon Recognition Program local ordinance in San Francisco and subsequent statewide bill.

Dr. Quach currently serves as the Chief Deputy of Administration at Asian Health Services, a federally qualified health center in Oakland serving approximately 28,000 patients in English and 14 Asian languages. She is involved in local, statewide, and national research and policy efforts to promote health equity, including data warehouses, community-based participatory research, civic engagement, and health policy. Her work includes promoting smoking cessation among Asian American immigrant patients, data disaggregation, and addressing social determinants of health.

In addition, she has been very involved in a relatively new organization – the Progressive Vietnamese American Organization (PIVOT), which engages and empowers Vietnamese Americans for a just and diverse America. She has also been very involved with her local church, Buena Vista United Methodist Church, which was founded to help Japanese immigrants and has become a Pan-Asian faith community.

Dr. Quach received her Bachelors of Art as U.C. Berkely, her Masters in Public Health at UCLA, and her PhD in Epidemiology at UC Berkeley.

She is the mother of two boys, who are of Japanese and Vietnamese heritage. Her goal for responsible parenting is to share with her sons about the past experiences of their ancestors, from her own refugee experience to the internment of their Japanese American grandfather, in hopes that they would be committed to also fighting for the most vulnerable communities.

Uyen Nguyen

Uyen is a first generation immigrant and a refugee. She came to the United States at eleven years of age. Her career has followed the typical path of many; earning her degrees in Pharmacology at UC Santa Barbara, her MS in Biomedical Sciences from UC San Diego, and her MBA specializing in entrepreneurship and venture capital from UC Berkeley. Things finally got interesting when Uyen went to work as an Investment Officer for CalPERS, one of the largest pension funds and investment portfolios in the world where she helped to ensure Californians received great pensions and healthcare.

Next, after spending several years employed in the arid brownness of California, her desire for greener pastures and her need to be closer to family led her to accept an assignment as Director of Investment for Mekong Capital, a private equity firm focusing on mid-growth consumer businesses in Vietnam.

After having had enough “green pasturing” in 100% humidity, Uyen relocated to Seattle where she accepted a position at….where else, Amazon! After completing her mission at Amazon and now firmly established in Seattle, yet still unwilling to discard her love of travel & the international lifestyle (see: trying lots of cuisines and learning about different cultures), Uyen co-founded Nue. Now she does everything under the sun to keep Nue functioning and making it a great place for both guests to visit and employees to work. With all that, she still finds time to video chat with her nephews 5 times a day while also trying to change the world through chairing boards for charitable causes and performing volunteer work for several humanitarian agencies.