2008 BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Rachel L. Jensen, President

Rachel co-founded the Girls Think Tank in October 2006 and currently serves as President and Board Member. Rachel is an attorney and partner in the law firm of Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins, based in San Diego, California. At the firm, she prosecutes nationwide class actions against insurance companies and other large corporate actors.

Rachel received her undergraduate degree in International Affairs from Florida State University. As a college student, Rachel founded a collegiate chapter of the National Organization for Women and revamped the previously dormant Women’s Educational & Cultural Center, serving as the Center’s student director and board member for two years. She also served as a student senator in the student government association. In her senior year, Rachel interned in Governor Chiles’ office to work on immigration and domestic violence issues.

Rachel received her law degree from Georgetown University Law School in 2000. During law school, she served as the founding Editor-in-Chief of the First Annual Review of Gender and Sexuality Law, a publication of The Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law. She also taught Street Law at a public high school in Washington, D.C. After graduating from law school, Rachel joined the law firm of Morrison & Foerster, before clerking for Judge Ferguson on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She later spent a year abroad clerking for the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania, and the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), in The Hague, Netherlands.

In October 2007, Rachel helped organize a three-day World Conference on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery held at UCLA. She has assisted on a number of human rights cases and presented on her experiences at the ICTR, including a panel presentation on The Security of Africa with co-panelists John Prendergast, Karin Ryan, Bobby Bailey (Invisible Children), and Daniel Akech James (one of Sudan’s “Lost Boys”), at the Bishop’s School in Spring 2007.

Rachel believes passionately in human rights and the right to be treated with dignity no matter one’s life circumstances. Please contact Rachel at girlsthinktank@gmail.com if you would like to get involved in our homeless outreach and advocacy program.

Dr. Virginia S. Loh, Vice President

Dr. Virginia S. Loh has a B.A. in English and a Masters in Education from the University of Virginia. She earned her Doctorate in Education from SDSU-USD; her dissertation was a qualitative study on the cultural authenticity of Asian-American children’s literature. She was born and raised in Fairfax, Virginia, which is her namesake; she was named Virginia because she was the first person in her family to be born in the United States. She moved to San Diego in 1999 and is a proud Point Loma homeowner and an official San Diego transplant; as such, she has a vested interest in local politics and plans on running for School Board in 2010. She is a K-12 practitioner, university professor, and a published children’s author. Her debut book, The Jade Dragon, was published by Candlewick Press in 2006. In addition, she writes a column in “The Journal of Asia” and presents and publishes her academic work. She is currently serving as Vice President of the Girls Think Tank. She is also actively involved in other Boards and organizations in the community: Red Shirts Committee, Lincoln Center for the Arts, Voices of Women, San Diego Chamber of Commerce, etc. Social issues that are especially near and dear to her heart include education, literacy, minority student populations, and advocacy for children. Virginia’s favorite socially-conscious books: Heart of Darkness, Love in the Time of Cholera, The Giving Tree. Her heroes are Maxine Hong Kingston, Elizabeth I, Rosa Parks.

And her favorite quote: “…we do it word by word…I change the language. I change people’s mouths. I change the world.” Maxine Hong Kingston

Farzeen Essa, Secretary

Farzeen Essa received her Bachelor of Science, cum laude, in business administration from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte in 2001, and her Juris Doctor, magna cum laude, from California Western School of Law in 2006. While at CWSL, Ms. Essa was a part of the California Innocence Project, a law school program that provides pro bono legal assistance to help seek the release of wrongfully convicted inmates in the State of California who maintain their factual innocence. Ms. Essa currently practices law at Procopio, Cory, Hargreaves & Savitch LLP, a local San Diego law firm.

Ms. Essa is a member of the American Bar Association, the San Diego County Bar Association, the State Bar of California, Lawyers Club, South Asian Bar Association, and the American Inn of Court (William B. Enright Chapter). She is currently serving as Secretary of the Girls Think Tank and is also one of the founding members. Her interests include addressing the issues of homelessness in San Diego, the empowerment of women and human and civil rights advocacy.

Amylu Muirhead-Weas, Treasurer

I am a San Diego native. I attended Grosmont and City Colleges of San Diego, Humanities and French, and the Community College of San Francisco CA, Philosophy, and UC- Berkeley, Shakespearean Studies. I’m a mother of a six-year-old daughter and a wife to Robert Weas. We live in the Rolando area near SDSU. Our daughter goes to the San Diego Unified School District magnet school, The Language Academy. I believe in a world view with a focus on local acts to foster community around us, the smallest acts of kindness can ripple widely. My heros are poets, photographers, and monks such as Sandra Cisneros, Walker Evans and Lao Tzu. My favorite pass-time is evolving.

Helen Zeldes, Public Relations

Biography forthcoming

Jennifer Lai, Special Projects Coordinator

Jennifer is a former labor and community organizer who is now an attorney and associate at Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins LLP in San Diego where she litigates complex class actions for plaintiffs. Jennifer graduated with distinction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Bachelors of Arts degree with honors in History and Political Science. After college, she organized unions for four years. In 2003, she graduated from UCLA School of Law where she served as a law clerk for the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Advocates and the Tribal Council of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians. She also worked extensively with students as a teaching assistant for “Asian Americans and the Law,” a course offered by the UCLA Asian American Studies Program, and as a member of Students of Color Against the Resegregation of Education (SCARE), amicus curiae in Grutter v. Bollinger.

After law school, Jennifer joined Morrison & Foerster LLP in San Diego. In January 2005, eight months prior to Hurricane Katrina, she moved to New Orleans at the invitation of long-time civil rights organizers affiliated with SNCC to launch a grassroots campaign to establish a federal constitutional guarantee to quality public school education. After Katrina, this campaign shifted to providing immediate relief to survivors and newly arrived reconstruction workers as well as legal and organizing support in the formation of the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund, People’s Organizing Committee, New Orleans Worker Center for Racial Justice, and other grassroots-based organizations across the Gulf South. Jennifer worked to sustain the work of these organizations as a staff attorney based out of New Orleans for the Advancement Project and the National Immigration Law Center. She returned to San Diego in January 2007.