Our Team
Barbara Tsai Navarro, OTR/L, MSOT, MIM
CEO & Co Founder
Barbara is an Occupational Therapist (OT) specializing in Behavioral Health. While teaching her clients Mental Wellness skills for coping with and managing depression and anxiety, Barbara realized she was also using and benefiting from them to address the challenges of a meaningful life. She became passionate about educating people on these preventative strategies to improve mental wellness, live happier lives and thrive.
Having worked in the Tech industry for 15 years prior to becoming an OT, Barbara understands the intersection between skills that enable people to thrive in general and more specifically in the workplace. She has helped people to develop skills for managing stress and anxiety, healthy relationships and to improve their performance and independence at home, school and work.
Barbara has taught Mental Wellness skills and cognitive/executive functioning in private practice, at a traumatic brain injury program and at an award-winning mental health care facility in the Bay Area. She works with Silicon Valley clients and their families who are coping with depression, anxiety and substance dependency.
Bill Lennan
Co Founder
Raised on islands and diversely educated, Bill has always been focused on solving human as well as technical problems.
Over the span of his tech career, he has built products, teams, and solutions for mobile, recruiting, ecommerce, social media, and now education.
He has helped companies ranging from Google and Walmart to hotels and restaurants.
Building high functioning teams has been fundamental to Bill’s success.
His team successes are directly attributable to the skills taught in the HAERT™ Curriculum.
Miriam Law
School name: Monta Vista High School
What year are you graduating?: 2024
Why are you interested in Mental Health?: I want to explore the psychological changes adolescents and teenagers face due to differing environments and peers. Mental health is a prominent topic that is beginning to be prioritized within the rigor of high school, and I want to continue to encourage more discussion on this important subject.
What have you been working on while at HAERT?: I coordinate with the other members to brainstorm the logistics and content for future school events based on the HAERT curriculum, and help maintain the organization for creating social media posts and graphics.
What impact have you created or are you hoping to create?: I want to make mental health resources easily accessible to adolescents and teenagers—encouraging more to reach out for help—and mitigate taboo that prominently arise in Asian families around mental health topics.
Interns
Chantelle Mendis
School name: Mountain View High School
What year are you graduating?: 2025
Why are you interested in Mental Health?: I'm interested in mental health because it's always been a topic that's taught at school. I believe that learning about mental health can help me improve myself and I want to be able to help others improve themselves as well.
What have you been working on while at HAERT?: I've been working on creating signs for our tabling events, making the games or activities for those events and I'm currently in charge of the interns social media. The social media includes making videos for YouTube and updating the Instagram.
What impact have you created or are you hoping to create?: I'm hoping to improve my fellow students mental health and I want to help people understand how they can help themselves in rough times.
Alumni
Aditya Hariharan
Aditya is a senior at Homestead High School.
He really began to take interest in mental wellness as the pandemic began because of the benefits of it as well as his passion to help others. He joined HAERT in Summer 2020 as one of the first interns and has worked on backend development, module content, and social media outreach.
In the summer of 2021, he mainly focused on presenting the importance of prevention based mental wellness to middle school staff and working with the intern team to organize and enhance HAERT’s curriculum.
Marina Raynaud
My name is Marina Raynaud and I'm a Freshman at UC Santa Barbara.
I enjoy playing tennis, dancing, doing theatre, talking to her friends, learning new languages, and spending time with her family.
I am passionate about mental health and wellness because I have personally dealt with mental health issues and want to help other students and people understand what they're going through and help them cope with it.
I've also noticed that there are numerous students that have dealt with a large set of mental health problems, which makes me understand the significance of this type of education. This passion led me to create a petition for mental health change in my high school, and connect with the HAERT Program so we could find solutions to the mental health crisis together.
As an intern for the HAERT program, I have given feedback on curriculum, created a glossary for vocabulary words, researched prospective customer organizations, gathered statistics and feedback from students and teachers during Covid, and summarized modules to make them more concise. I have also contributed to making the curriculum more engaging and relatable to students, and to creating more interesting discussion questions and classroom activities. I love working at HAERT so that I can help people conquer their issues!
Richard Lim
School name: Lynbrook High School
What year are you graduating?: 2024
Why are you interested in Mental Health?: Mental Health is what I appreciate and wish to learn more about. Not that I like mental health because I know a lot about it but because I am curious about how people go through the barriers and how we can further galvanize our mentalities for productivity and consistency.
What have you been working on while at HAERT?: I developed the HAERT Intern website, which I definitely enjoy doing. This includes designing, writing event instructions, creating descriptions, drafting contents, and linking sources I created with the HAERT interns. I’ve also taken a part in drafting the storyline of our cartoon and the Tabling Event Instructions.
What impact have you created or are you hoping to create?: If possible, I would like to make insights from psychiatry and neuroscience (or “mental health resources”) to be understood as tools for mental strength. Still, many people joke about the openness and softness of solutions to mental health, but I do think, on the other hand, that more and more people become mentally tough and immune against challenges or pressures. And, I hope that I can take a part in this growth.
Shreyas Jena
Shreyas is a junior at Monta Vista High School and is a member of the mental health group for the Youth Public Policy Institution.
He thoroughly enjoys video games, walking his dog, and listening to music.
Outside of YPPI, he is an active part of the debate team and is an intern for the Boys and Girls Club. His love for community impact stems from his hopes to foster a healthy environment for all kids suffering from mental health issues.
Aditya Manikonda
Aditya graduated from Lynbrook High School.
He enjoys playing video games, going on long walks with his friends and cooking semi-edible food.
He has a strong passion for education and coding, which led him to help organize and conduct various coding classes for students across the globe. When he is not running at cross country/track and field meets or pulling all-nighters at hackathons, he usually volunteers at local libraries. His passion for volunteering ultimately inspired him to want to have a bigger impact on those around him, which led him to join Sunnyvale’s Youth Public Policy Institute, where he found his passion for mental wellness.