I am a legal assistant working with the firm’s Estate Planning, Business Transactional, and Real Estate Groups. My several decades of working in law firms include extensive experience in the tax area as well. Before I began my career in law firms, in 1988, I spent a legislative term working for then‑New York State Senate Minority Leader Fred Ohrenstein, with the opportunity to see the sausage‑making up close. I worked on issues such as divestment from South Africa, marital property and drug policy reform, and halting the privatization of prisons.

I am the child of a Coptic teacher who immigrated from Cairo in the 1950’s and a Methodist minister with heritage in Massachusetts and Upstate New York dating from colonial times. My mother’s family has members living in many different parts of the world: all over the US, and in Canada, Australia, and Saudi Arabia. My brother has continued the tradition of mixing continents and has two children whose mother is from Brazil. My husband is Jewish, and I also have in-laws who were refugees from the Iranian Revolution. As a person with both colonizing and colonized heritage, I am particularly interested in educating myself on the situations of indigenous peoples.

My father was an activist for women’s reproductive rights in the early 1970’s. By the 1980’s, he began to include me in his activism, bringing me to hold up signs protesting US activities in El Salvador in the square in his adopted New England town. When I lived in Upstate New York, I traveled by bus to march on Washington three times, twice for women’s reproductive rights and once against the first Iraq War. Most of my social change activity since moving to California in 1993 has involved political campaigns rather than more direct activism, but I have been involved in letter-writing to improve women’s health care. I also am a photographer, and I am interested in using visual storytelling to effect positive social outcomes.

I am excited to be working on improving diversity and inclusion at LPS.