Advisory Board
The foundation is guided by a small advisory board of physicians whose careers sit at the intersection of clinical medicine, global health, and medical education. They shape the foundation’s priorities, mentor the next generation of clinicians who come through it, and tie its work into a wider network of partners across Stanford, Harvard, and beyond.
Founder
M.D., M.Sc., M.A. · Stanford University School of Medicine
Dr. Mediratta is a pediatrician, educator, and global child health innovator dedicated to expanding access to high-quality care and training the next generation of healthcare leaders.
Dr. Mediratta attended Johns Hopkins, majoring in public health. As a Marshall Scholar, he earned an M.A. in Medical Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies and an M.Sc. in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He then attended medical school and completed pediatrics residency at Stanford School of Medicine.
Today he is a Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford and a Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health, where his work centers on reducing neonatal mortality and scaling health-worker training in low-resource settings across Ethiopia.
Visit personal site →
Advisor
M.D. · Emergency Medicine, Harvard residency
Dr. Rizal is a physician, educator, and innovator who leads international initiatives across health education and medical career mentorship, expanding access to public health knowledge while developing new platforms to train future healthcare leaders.
Dr. Rizal graduated cum laude from Princeton University in Public and International Affairs. She pursued a Fulbright Scholarship with the World Health Organization and the Philippine Cancer Institute, then earned her M.D. at Stanford School of Medicine and completed emergency medicine residency at Harvard.
Her work centers on scalable health education. During her Fulbright she led the Philippines’ first HIV awareness campaign, partnering with rock bands and MTV Philippines to raise funds for the country’s first public HIV clinic. At Stanford she partnered with Khan Academy to create influenza education videos that reached 100,000+ views.
Visit LinkedIn →The advisors’ combined experience spans clinical pediatrics, emergency medicine, public health policy, medical anthropology, and the practical work of building scalable health education programs. Three threads connect everything the foundation does.
The foundation has worked in the same community since 2005. The advisors prioritize continuity over expansion: deeper relationships with the families and health workers already in the program, rather than a wider footprint that the foundation could not sustain.
From Rachel’s Khan Academy influenza videos and the Philippines’ first HIV campaign to Rishi’s video-based neonatal-danger-signs curriculum now reaching 40,000+ Health Extension Workers, both advisors share a conviction that the most useful health interventions in low-resource settings are the ones that can be reproduced by anyone with a phone.
Both advisors built Cracking Med School Admissions together, advising thousands of medical-school applicants, many of them first-generation. The foundation is one expression of a longer commitment to making medicine accessible from both sides: the patients who need it and the clinicians who will deliver it.