President-elect Joe Biden has announced the names of the people who will lead the COVID-19 Response Team and one of the members of the team is a Nigerian American, Osaremen Okolo.
Okolo, a Covid-19 policy advisor serves on the Biden-Harris Transition domestic policy team. Prior to joining the transition, Okolo served as Senior Health Policy Advisor to U.S. Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois. Okolo drafted, negotiated, and managed the Congresswoman’s legislation, oversight, and policy across a comprehensive health care and public health agenda, most recently focusing almost exclusively on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Previously, Okolo served as Legislative Aide for Health Policy on the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) for Ranking Member Patty Murray of Washington.
A daughter of Nigerian immigrants, Okolo was born and raised in Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard College in May 2017. She concentrated primarily in History of Science (Medicine and Society focus) with an allied, joint concentration in African-American Studies. She also obtained a secondary in Global Health and Health Policy.
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As culmination of her time at Harvard and in combining these academic interests, Okolo wrote an award-winning undergraduate thesis, titled “Blackened Fertility: The Lasting Discourse of African American Female Reproduction After the Civil Rights Movement” and advised by Professor Evelynn Hammonds.
It examined the historical narratives surrounding the so-called hyper-sexuality and hyper-fertility of black women through illustrating how these narratives have influenced African-American access to new reproductive technologies and impacted both physicians’ and black women’s perceptions of their own fertility in the present.
Since graduation, Okolo has continued to explore the intersections between medicine, policy, and service through by working as a health policy aide for the Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.
Outside of all things health, Okolo spends time writing creatively, fanatically cheering on her Boston sports teams and loves Nigerian food.