BOSTON– The American India Foundation, which promotes social and economic change in India, will hold its 13th Annual Bow Ties & Bangles New England Gala on Saturday, March 23, 2019 at Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel in Boston.
The upcoming gala, which will highlight AIF’s Maternal and Newborn Survival Initiative program, known as MANSI, will also honor Dr. Brian Pereira, MD, a long-time supporter of AIF.
Dr. Pereira is President and CEO of Visterra, a developer of novel antibodies for the prevention and treatment of infectious and other major diseases. He is a seasoned biopharmaceutical and healthcare leader with experience in financing and growing companies, including the clinical development and commercialization of innovative drug products.
Prior to Visterra, Dr. Pereira served as the President and CEO of AMAG Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMAG) from 2006 to 2011 and as its President from 2005 to 2006. Prior to AMAG, he served as the President and CEO of a Tufts Medical Center Physician Organization from 2001 to 2005, where he was instrumental in restructuring operations to enable greater financial strength. He also served in earlier roles at Tufts Medical Center including Interim Chief Operating Officer in 2001, Vice-Chairman for Strategic Development of the Department of Medicine from 1999-2001, and as a staff physician beginning in 1993.
Dr. Pereira received his medical degree (MBBS) from St. John’s Medical College, his MD (Medicine) and DM (Nephrology) from the Post Graduate Institute, and an MBA from Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.
The AIF gala chairs are Nalini and Raj Sharma and Preetha and Mammen Chally. AIF’s New England Leadership team includes Namita and Santhana Krishnan; Sunita and Brian Pereira; Nalini and Raj Sharma; Vandana and Vivek Sharma; and Pratima and Venkat Srinivasan.
AIF’s New England Council of Governors are Srini Ambati, Nirmala Garimella, Andy Gupta, Farida Kathawalla, Vikram Mahidhar, Nimit Nathwani, and Sangita Thakore.
The American India Foundation is committed to catalyzing social and economic change in India and building a lasting bridge between the United States and India through high-impact interventions in education, livelihoods, public health, and leadership development.
Working closely with local communities, AIF partners with NGOs to develop and test innovative solutions and with governments to create and scale sustainable impact. AIF’s programming seeks to achieve gender equity through developing inclusive models that focus on and empower girls and women.
Founded in 2001 at the initiative of President Bill Clinton following a suggestion from Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee, AIF has impacted the lives of 4.6 million of India’s poor. With offices in New York and California, eleven chapters across the U.S., and India operations headquartered in New Delhi, AIF is transforming lives across 24 states of India while addressing these issues on a regional, country, and international scale. Learn more at www.AIF.org
MANSI is designed to reduce maternal and child mortality in rural, impoverished areas. The Maternal and Newborn Survival Initiative (MANSI) utilizes a public-private partnership model to provide the resources and support required to empower local communities to care for their mothers and children while improving the local health system. MANSI provides preventative and curative care for both mothers and newborns all the way from the individual household to government health facilities to ensure new mothers and infants have the care they need to prepare for, survive, and thrive during and after pregnancy.
The project equips villages with a trained community health worker (Sahiya) to provide home-based care, strengthening individual and family knowledge to promote positive health behaviors while building capacity for whole communities to provide peer-based care through an innovative surveillance system to create an innovative model for community- and home-based care. Through this system, timely referrals and emergency care during pregnancy ensure that mothers get qualified care when they most need it, improving access to and utilization of public and private healthcare services. By promoting social cohesion through mobilizing communities for collective action and increasing healthy deliveries in institutional settings by leveraging a government maternity incentive scheme, AIF is instituting a system for sustainability at all levels for the community and local Health Ministry to uphold over the long term.
