Advisory Committee
Manju Sheth, MD
Advisory Committee Chairperson
Dr. Manju Sheth, MD, is an internist focused on women’s health and works at Beth Israel Lahey Health.
Dr. Sheth is the President & CEO of the India New England Multimedia, a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering, entertaining, and educating the Boston community through video interviews, Health related events, and the organization’s flagship event – The New England Choice Awards/NECA Awards, where they celebrate industry leaders in several important categories.
Dr Sheth is also the Director and hostess of ‘Woman of the Year” that has honored 20 women in various fields every year for the past 17 years. Dr. Sheth is also a Co-Founder and the President of Women Who Win #Dreamcatchers, a global media platform for women empowerment across all ages, industries and backgrounds.
In addition to her medical career, she is passionate about women’s empowerment. In recent years, Dr. Sheth has led many fundraisers for local charities including Saheli, which provides support to South Asian domestic violence victims in the Boston area. Dr. Sheth is well-known across the South Asian community for her interview series “Chai with Manju”, where she interviews celebrities ranging from Deepak Chopra, Deb Goldberg, Shankar Mahadevan, and Guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Elizabeth Warren, Deb Goldberg to name a few.
Ramila Thakkar
Advisory Committee Vice Chairperson
Ramila is the Vice Chairperson of the Advisory Committee
She is a past President of Gurjar Gujarati Association of New England, where she served on the board for last 25 years, from 1994 to 2019. With Gurjar she held various positions, concluding with her second term as President before retiring in 2019. Prior to joining Gurjar she was with Sishu Bharti for 10 years, (Culture and language school in Burlington), where she spent 10 years, first as a kindergarten teacher then on the school committee for the last two years.
Gurjar won the NECA award during her Presidency, as the best community organization in New England. Ramila was also in the top twenty for the Women Of The year Award, organized by INE Multimedia, led by Dr. Manju Sheth.
She’s been a core member of the Finance team at Lahey Clinic Hospital in Burlington for 37 years. A graduate of St. Mary’s College in Shillong, Meghalaya in India, she subsequently attended Bentley College for her accounting studies.
Community service comes natural to her. As a child was taught that ‘giving’ was better than ‘taking’. Her passion is reading and languages. Ramila is a resident of Burlington since 1981 and lives with her husband, Praful. She has a daughter who lives in Pennsylvania with her family.
Supriya Saurabh
Advisory Committee Secretary
Supriya has been associated with Saheli for many years and actively participated in community Outreach events, Support Groups, Computer Literacy Classes and Media Communications.
She previously served as a Board member for Saheli. She is an engineer by qualification and worked as Assistant Professor with Kurukshetra University in India. She previously collaborated with a professor at John Hopkins University as Research Scientist in the field of Neuroimaging and Neurospectroscopy.
An advocate of of gender equality and women empowerment, she is passionate about Saheli’s mission. She lives with her husband in Andover, MA and works as Quality and Compliance leader in a Health Technology company.
Rajendra Trivedi, MD
Advisory Board Member
Rajendra is a Psychiatrist at Baldpate Hospital. He is the Medical Director and CEO at CCA and The Pain Center. He is also a member of the Blind Peoples Association of India.
Ramesh Advani
Advisory Board Member
Dhrumil Shah, MD
Advisory Board Member
Dhrumil Shah is a family physician and a CMIO at Compass Medical, an independent provider led organization in Southeast Massachusetts. His primary interests and focus areas are digital health innovation, data science and care analytics, health innovation and entrepreneurship.
Dr. Shah did his Family Medicine training at New Jersey Medical School and subsequently graduated from University of Illinois Chicago completing his Post Masters in Health Informatics. He is actively involved in the Health IT space via many national and regional speaking engagements and collaboratives fueling the much needed disruption to redesign the healthcare delivery space.
He also leads the Greater Boston Chapter of SOPE (Society of Physicians Entrepreneurs) & is Past President of IMANE Indian Medical Association of New England.
Nitigna-Desai, MD
Advisory Board Member
Dr. Desai is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at BUSM and UMASS Medical School in the Division of Addiction Psychiatry. She is board certified by ABPN in Adult Psychiatry and in Addiction Psychiatry.
She received her medical degree from GMCS, Surat, India. She pursued her further training in Psychiatry in Boston, MA. She completed residency training in Psychiatry from Mass Mental Health Center followed by fellowship in Addiction Psychiatry at MGH.
She has served as a Chief of Psychiatry from 2018-2021 and as Chief and Director of Substance Abuse Services since 1996-2021 at Bedford VAMC. She has recently joined Clinical Resource Hub for VISN 1 as an addiction psychiatrist.
She has participated in multiple research activities since 1998 that includes initial work on validation of ASAM Patient Placement Criteria and psychopharmacological interventions in the area of Dual Diagnosis.
She has extensive experience in treatment of OUD and has published on outcome evaluation of OUD treatment. In addition, she was recognized by the VA for her work shepherding EXCELLENCE in addiction services, particularly efforts in championing innovations in evidence-based care.
Dr. Desai is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and an active member of American Association of Addiction Psychiatry, cochair of their scientific committee and a consultant on Opioid Resource Network. She has been involved with teaching of the medical students, psychiatric residents as well as addiction psychiatry fellows from both Boston University Medical Center as well as UMASS Medical School. She has trained more than 75 addiction psychiatrist so far. She is well recognized for her addiction work and had been appointed by the Governor of MASS to work on his Opioid Commission in 2017-2018.
Anu Chitrapu
Advisory Board Member
Anu Chitrapu is Senior Vice-President and Executive at Bank of America.
Women empowerment, eliminating gender based violence, education for girls and protecting the environment are causes that Anu is passionate about. It was this passion that led to the creation of Nyrvaana, a social enterprise founded by Anu and her two sisters, with a mission of saving fabric from landfill while providing employment to disadvantaged women. Anu recently published a book for girls to show them they can be whatever they want to be and even the sky is no longer the limit. The book, You Can Be, shows role models in professions in which women are traditionally underrepresented.
Anu was President of TiE Boston (2020-2022), a member-based organization founded in 1997 by a group of successful entrepreneurs, corporate executives, and senior professionals of Indian origin, in order to foster future innovators. During her tenure, Anu was able to increase women representation on the board to 50%, created a pitch competition for women founders and increased the number of women across all TiE programs.
Anu is on the Board of Advisors for the Museum of Science, Boston and on the board of DAWN (Direct Action for Women Now).
Trupti Patel, Esq
Advisory Board Member
Trupti is an Attorney at Trupti N. Patel & Associates in Burlington and Boston. Trupti specializes in immigration law, transnational cases, and H1 visa issues.
David Ludwig, Ph. D, MD
Advisory Board Member
David is a physician at Boston Children’s Hospital. He is the Director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center, and the Director at the Optimal Weight for Life (OWL) Program. David is also the John Fielding Crigler, Jr. & Mary Adele Sippel Crigler Chair in Pediatric Endocrinology.
Jayashree Voruganti
Advisory Board Member
Jayashree is an Independent Consultant at Late Stage CMC Program Management at Biogen Idec. She is the current President of the India Association of Greater Boston in Burlington, Mass.
Sweta Mepani
Advisory Board Member
Sweta is the Senior Director of North America Delivery at NTT DATA, Inc. She is a member of the Indian Circle of Caring, LearnToLove Inc., JSNE, JCGB, and a Life Member of Gurjar.
Ranjani Saigal
Consultant
Ranjani is a consultant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the owner of Lokvani.com. She is a member of VisionAid, TIEBoston, Udavam Karangal, Boston Pledge and the Co-Chair of MITHAS. She is currently the President of Ekal Vidyalaya.
Shaleen Sheth
Advisory Committee Secretary
Shaleen Sheth is the co-founder of Women Who Win. She oversees their website, relationships with contributing writers, and leads the mentorship program. She is an alum of Babson College, where she studied Finance and Business Analytics, and currently works in e-commerce in Boston. She is also on the Young Professionals Leadership Council for Akshaya Patra, and a member of Supermajority Majority Leaders Cohort.
She received a citation from the Massachusetts State Government for “Leadership in Women Empowerment”.
She was selected in the Young Digital Women to Watch under 25 list by Digital Women Co in 2022. She was also a finalist for their “Digital Women for Good” award.
Shaleen is passionate about media and technology, and how it can be used to drive community organizations like Saheli forward.