About Bay Area Older Adults™

Nusrat Khaleeli Ph.D., J.D., Chief Operating Officer

Nusrat has 24 years of experience managing for-profit and non-profit programs and practicing intellectual property law. Dr. Khaleeli manages BAO’s Healthy Living™ Program, legal support including contracts, trademarks, patents and copyrights, and human resources. Previously, she held positions at two biotechnology companies and two law firms, Perkins Coie LLP and King and Spalding LLP. She is a member of the State Bar of California. Nush loves hiking, snowshoeing and exploring new places.

Nusrat recieved a Chemistry Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University. She holds a J.D. from Santa Clara University School of Law where she served as a Technical Editor for the Computer and High Technology Law Journal and received a High tech Law Certificate. She won the Witkin Academic Excellence Award in technology licensing. For a list of her patents and publications, please click here.

Anne Ferguson Ph.D., M.B.A., Executive Director, Founder and Chairperson of the Board

Anne manages Bay Area Older Adults' daily operations, long term strategy, finances, fundraising and volunteers. In order to further advocate for Bay Area seniors, Anne was appointed as a member of the Aging Services Collaborative Leadership Council where she worked with other organizations and individuals to provide leadership and build community-wide capacity to support, maintain, and promote the well-being of older adults and their caregivers in Santa Clara County.

In the first part of her career, Anne was awarded two pre–doctoral and two post–doctoral fellowship grants for cancer research and published 15 peer–reviewed scientific articles within five years. She transitioned into the commercial sector where she has more than 13 years of strategic marketing and business development experience within global biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies such as Molecular Devices, MDS Sciex, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Affymetrix and XOMA. At these companies, she was responsible for closing multi-million dollar contracts with commercial and non–profit entities, management of multi–disciplinary project teams and leading development and execution of business strategy and project plans. Anne loves climbing tall mountains, paddleboarding, kayaking, cycling, snowshoeing and cross country skiing.

Anne received her Ph.D. from UC San Diego, pursued her American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellowship to identify new breast tumor markers at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and completed her M.B.A. at San Jose State University. For a list of her publications, please click here.

Thu Trinh B.S., CFO and Member of the Board

Thu advises Bay Area Older Adults on operations and oversees the finances. She has been a Quality Engineer, Manager and Principle Member of the Technical Staff at Sun Microsystems and Oracle (after Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle) for the past 35 years. She has worked with many project teams to launch a variety of hardware and software products. Thu loves the outdoors and sports including snowboarding, rock climbing, ice hockey, bicycling, hiking and more!

Thu has a B.S. in Engineering from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.

Kevin Sato, Ph.D., Secretary and Member of the Board

Kevin advises Bay Area Older Adults on program management. Kevin Sato is a project management leader with more than 32 years of experience. He is currently the NASA Space Biology Senior Project Scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, where he leads strategic and tactical planning and execution for NASA bioscience efforts to understand how life responds and adapts to microgravity and the extreme environment of space. Prior to this, he was Chief Scientist at Fully Integrated Life-cycle Mission Support Services (FILMSS) and Project Scientist at Lockheed Martin. He is an associate editor of the Nature Partner Journal Microgravity. In 2011, he was presented with the Silver Snoopy award, which is the Astronauts’ own award for outstanding performance, contributing to flight safety and mission success.

Kevin received his Ph.D. in Biology from UC Irvine and pursued his American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellowship at The Scripps Research Institute. For a list of his publications, please click here.

Mallory Von Kugelgen, R.N., B.SN., Member of the Board

Mallory has 23 years experience as a public health nurse and her clinical work history includes AIDS Hospice and Extended Care/Geriatric Psych. Since 2008, she has been the Health & Wellness Coordinator, health educator and geriatric care manager at the Santa Clara Senior Center where she manages a team of three RNs and a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. Her team provides public health screenings, classes, events, connection to resources, and 1:1 visits.

Prior to nursing school, Mallory worked for 10 years as a TV and radio commercial producer in San Francisco, producing commercials for Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing, Fresh Step cat litter, Chevron, and more. Mallory enjoys kayaking, hiking, camping, gardening, spending time on the coast, and riding her bike as far as she can go.

Jan Sirkin, Member of the Board

For the past 40 years, Jan was in the commercial property and liability insurance industry. For nearly 20 years, she was co-owner of an independent insurance brokerage company and was responsible for managing all aspects of the business – sales, customer service, supervising employees, administration, HR and more. She also spent six years on the Board of the American Little League (Pacifica), two of them as president serving 25-30 teams and 500 players, and then president of the Pony league board.

Now that she is retired, she loves hiking in the great outdoors both in the US and abroad. Jan has also been a volunteer with organizations that provide necessities for homeless and low-income youth and farm workers and their children.

Diana Miller M.A., Board Development and Networking Advisor

Diana is helping BAO build a strong board of directors and connects BAO to the community. She was the project manager for the senior’s agenda at the Santa Clara County Dept of Aging and Adult services where she oversaw the County’s initiative for all 15 cities achieving the WHO Age Friendly designation and being one of the pilot communities for Dementia Friendly America. Previously, she was the Community Outreach Director for Vice Mayor Judy Chirco, City of San Jose. She served as Executive Director of two nonprofits, People Acting in Community Together, (PACT) and the Tenderloin Senior Organizing Project. Her experience working with seniors has been in a wide variety of settings including an inpatient geriatric psychiatric unit of a hospital, skilled nursing home and low-income HUD senior housing. She has also served as a consultant, trainer and facilitator to grass roots organizations.

Diana holds an M.A. from Wheaton College and a B.A. from the University of Kansas.

Lori Andersen M.P.A., Tactical Advisor

Lori helps us connect to the nonprofit organizations that serve older adults in Santa Clara County and provides feedback on short- and long-term planning. Lori served as Operations Director of Long Term Support Services at the Santa Clara Family Health Plan. Lori has extensive experience in the field of aging with more than 30 years working in public and non-profit organizations in the areas of planning, program development and operation, grants management and fund development. For eight years she served as Director of Planning for the Council on Aging Silicon Valley responsible for assessing the needs of older adults and building community capacity to address them. As Director of the Bay Area Independent Elders Program, Lori managed a $6 million grants program for a foundation collaborative that was designed to strengthen and expand local resources for long term care programs. Prior to joining the Santa Clara Family Health Plan, Lori was Director of the Health Trust's Healthy Aging Initiative, where she built programs for advocacy, caregiver support, expansion of health promotion programs and community engagement opportunities for older adults.

Lori holds an M.P.A. from the University of Southern California and a B.A. in Government and Public Administration from American University in Washington D.C.

Wusooq Khaleeli M.B.A., Finance Advisor

Wusooq advises BAO on financial planning and investments. He joined Ontario's Workplace Safety & Insurance Board in 2009 as Director, Investments. He is a CFA charter-holder and has accumulated 20 years of investment experience developing new products for investment firms such as Fidelity Investments and HSBC Investments and managing external equity portfolios for AIMCo and the Ethical Funds Company.

Wusooq holds an M.B.A. from Rice University and a B.A. from UC Berkeley.

Heidi McFarland, B.S., Park Programs and Partnerships Advisor

Heidi McFarland is BAO's Park Programs and Partnerships Advisor. Heidi has a 20+ year career in Parks and Natural Resources as a seasoned park professional, environmental educator and interpreter, and has extensive experience in volunteer management. She advises BAO on volunteers, park trails, interpretation and partnerships. Heidi is currently a professor at West Valley College in the Park Management Program where she teaches and develops partnerships with community-based organizations. She spent more than 16 years with Santa Clara County Parks and Recreation ultimately leading to her position as Park Interpretive Program Coordinator. During this time, she grew the county parks volunteer program and created the docent program to deliver high quality interpretive programs.

Heidi holds B.S. in Environmental Studies with an emphasis in Environmental Education from San Jose State University, and Associate’s degrees in Park Management and Communications from West Valley College. She is also a Certified Interpretive Trainer, California Naturalist Instructor, Project WET and Project Learning Tree Instructor and more!

Bronwyn Barnett M.A., Marketing Communications Advisor

Bronwyn is BAO's marketing communications advisor. She has held many high level marketing positions including Head of Marketing Communications at Invitae, Deputy Director of Communications at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, marketing communications manager at Affymetrix. Previously, she was Managing Editor at Red Herring magazine, a weekly print publication.

Bronwyn holds a master's degree in journalism from Stanford University and a bachelor's degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley.

Michael Hundt Healthy Hikes™ Program Advisor

Mike is our indispensable expert who gives us advice on trails and interpretation and one of our hike leaders. He was born and raised on a Wisconsin dairy farm and grew up outdoors baling hay, chasing cows, fixing fences, picking rocks and working in the tobacco field. After college, he started his computer career at Amdahl, and for 25 years, he installed and maintained large mainframe computers used by multibillion dollar companies, the military and many others. Later, he taught people how to install and repair these huge mainframe computers. After retirement, he was able to focus on his love for nature and has been investigating, photographing and videotaping wildlife, especially tule elk, bobcats and mountain lions. He is a certified California Naturalist, Field Technician for the Coyote Valley bobcat and Henry Coe mountain lion research teams, and a volunteer docent and interpreter for Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority and Henry Coe State Park.