Sign In
Free Newsletter
Yvonne Commodore-Mensah, Dr. Yevette Rooks and Lanlan Xu | Horizon Foundation
Listen to this articleThe Horizon Foundation named Yvonne Commodore-Mensah, Dr. Yevette Rooks and Lanlan Xu to its board of directors.
Howard County resident Commodore-Mensah is a professor at Johns Hopkins University, serving in the School of Nursing; The Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology and Clinical Research; the Department of Epidemiology in the Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Center for Health Equity. She also serves at the CEO of the African Research Academies for Women, an organization that works to promote STEM education among African women. Yvonne is a fellow at the American Heart Association’s Council on Cardiovascular Nursing and a fellow at the Preventive Cardiovascular Nurses Association. She holds a doctorate from the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, a Master of Health Science from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a Bachelor of Science in nursing from Fairleigh Dickinson University
Rooks leads the University of Maryland’s University Health Center’s sports medicine department, serving as the primary care clinician and sports medicine specialist to UMD student-athletes and overseeing areas such as athletic training, nutrition and sports psychology. Prior to this role, Rooks served as the chief medical officer for athletics at Rutgers University’s health care provider, RWJBarnabas Health. She is a member of the American Academy of Family Physicians; American Medical Society for Sports Medicine; and College Athletic Trainers Association; and is an executive board member of the College Athletic Trainers Society. A Howard County resident, Rooks holds a Bachelor of Science in biology and chemistry from State University of New York at Albany, and her medical degree from the Health Science Center at Syracuse. She completed her residency at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
Xu is a health policy expert at the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services for reforms to improve quality, reduce cost and achieve equity in the healthcare system. She recently acted as a policy adviser on detail to the White House Initiative on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, leading key policy areas such as health equity and data disaggregation. A longtime advocate for the Asian American community in Howard County, Lanlan participated in the Horizon Foundation’s first cohort of the Howard County Equity Collaborative as a member of the Howard County Chinese School. She holds a doctorate in public policy from Indiana University and a doctorate in German literature from Georgetown University.
