P.D. Soros Fellowship for New Americans

Chitra Akileswaran is the President and Chief Executive of East Bay Medical Group, a 300-provider multispecialty physician group based at Alameda Health System, a large safety net health system in Oakland, CA, where she has been practicing since 2015. She is also the co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of Cleo, a health tech platform and employer benefit that supports working parents to grow their families and their careers. Cleo is venture-backed by top tier Silicon Valley firms including Greylock Partners and NEA.

Chitra was born in Portland, OR to parents who emigrated from India and are naturalized citizens. They now live with her in Oakland, CA.

Chitra completed her MD and MBA degrees at Harvard in 2011. She received a BA in Community Health, magna cum laude, from Brown University. She moved to San Francisco in 2011 to complete her residency training in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco.

Chitra has a long history of combining her interests in community-based work on health inequities with innovative approaches to care delivery. As a Fulbright Grantee to South Africa, Chitra studied female migrants' social, sexual, and health-related networks. She traveled to the Dominican Republic to address the needs of Haitian batey communities, and collaborated with a private bank in south India to create a maternity financing product for rural women. Chitra also spent some time at McKinsey & Company.  

She looks forward to a career that focuses on using technology and organizational change to ensure equitable, accessible, and high quality outcomes for people and families along the reproductive life cycle.