About #MEACTION
BOARD & ADVISORS

Beth Mazur
Board co-Chair
Beth is a technologist with extensive experience working to grow startup companies and non-profit organizations. She is interested in how to best use technology to empower people with ME and achieve health equality. She worked as a developer and technical product manager for a wide range of organizations including HealClick, Grameen Foundation, and Jaspersoft. She was a member of the Voting Systems Task Force for the city of San Francisco which advised the city in the selection and development of a secure, transparent voting system. Beth co-founded #MEAction and earned her Bachelor’s in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from MIT. @rndNumGen

Jill Hinson
Board co-chair
Jill is an international business leader with twenty years combined experience in organization change, leadership development, and marketing. She is a founding member of ChangeFusion and supports a diverse range of clients to accelerate change, develop leaders, and build organizational effectiveness.

Michelle Pinedo
Treasurer
Michelle Pinedo is chief financial officer with AFS-USA, an organization that delivers meaningful intercultural experiences that empowers people to become globally engaged citizens. In this capacity, she is responsible for ensuring that all the support functions – Finance, IT, Human Resources, Logistics, and Operations – are performing at peak level.

Judy Gayer
Secretary

Jennifer Brea
Jennifer Brea is an independent filmmaker based in Los Angeles. She has an AB from Princeton University and was a PhD student at Harvard until sudden illness left her bedridden. In the aftermath, she rediscovered her first love, film. Her Sundance award-winning, Emmy-nominated feature documentary, Unrest, has screened in over 30 countries and had its US national broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens. She is also co-creator of Unrest VR, winner of the Sheffield Doc/Fest Alternate Realities Award. An activist for people with disabilities and chronic illness, she is a co-founder of #MEAction and served as Executive Director until 2021.

JD Davids
JD Davids is a writer and advocate with more than 25 years of experience in health activism, social movements, policy and journalism who is living with ME/CFS and a handful of other troublesome diagnoses.
As a member of ACT UP Philadelphia and co-founder of Health GAP, Davids was a core organizer in the movement that slashed the cost of HIV treatment and opened up treatment access for millions worldwide, and later founded a national advocacy network devoted to HIV/AIDS and social, racial and economic justice. He’s been an expert advisor to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) and other acronyms.
After a stretch as managing director and director of strategic communications for The Body, he now runs JD Strategies in Brooklyn NY, supercharging strategic communications and organizational development for health and research policy, gender advocacy, and hell-raising activist groups. He’s also writing The Cranky Queer Guide to Chronic Illness. @TheCrankyQueer

Ryan Prior
Ryan is a multimedia journalist and social entrepreneur. He fell ill with ME/CFS in 2007, at age 17. After graduating from college, he founded the Blue Ribbon Foundation to raise awareness about ME/CFS and built a team, setting off on a journey across the US as co-director, producer, and writer of the feature-length documentary film “Forgotten Plague.” During the film’s production, he was recognized as ProHealth’s 2014 ME/CFS Advocate of the Year. The film was released in 2015, and is available on Amazon Prime, iTunes, and Google Play. Since 2015, he has been working as a writer and producer for CNN, covering hundreds of stories ranging from the 2016 election to cutting-edge medical innovation. In 2019, he reported and wrote the CNN story with the highest overall reader engagement across the entire outlet. He has also written for USA Today and the Daily Beast, and is a five-time Stanford Medicine X ePatient Scholar. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Georgia, and was named to the school’s 40 Under 40 list in 2018. @r_prior
