Biography
Meena (Minosa’ins) is a citizen of the Haliwa-Saponi Tribe and Asian Indian of Indo-Fijian descent. She has worked alongside Indigenous populations both reservation-based and urban, having supported and led programming surrounding health and human services, community-based research, and Indigenous informed systems of care. She holds an MPH with a focus on community health education from Bastyr University and an MS and PhD in prevention science from Washington State University.
Her experience is grounded in reciprocal collaborations and knowledge sharing through a cultural and integrative lens to address intergenerational trauma, generational healing, health equity, and social justice in partnership with Indigenous and communities of color. Additionally, her research practice and specialty interests surround trauma transmission among Indigenous populations via kinship systems and how these relationships prevent adverse behavioral health outcomes such as toxic stress, suicide, and substance use through strengths-based and harm reduction intervention strategies. Throughout this work, she has been guided by the lived experience of her broader community, family, and that of her own, to center traditional Indigenous knowledge, multi-ethnic identity, and cultural strengths as the focal point of prevention efforts and growth in methodological and research praxis.
Outside of work, Meena enjoys beading, yoga, reading and connecting with, and walking alongside our plant and bird relatives, harvesting, gardening, cooking, and birding. She is based in Portland, OR.