Bernadette Lim, BA
Bernadette Lim, BA
UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program
Bernadette Lim is a social justice health advocate who works tirelessly for the health of under-resourced women, children, and families. Currently, she is an MD/MSc. student at the Joint Medical Program with UC Berkeley School of Public Health and UCSF School of Medicine. She graduated from Harvard University in 2016 with cum laude honors in Human Evolutionary Biology and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and a minor in Global Health and Health Policy. After graduation, she was a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar in India addressing mental health disparities faced by women physicians in public hospitals.
Bernadette has led movements for health equity for women, children, and families particularly at the intersections of gender equity, racial justice, and socioeconomic inequality. She is the founder and Executive Director of Women SPEAK, the first youth-led, youth-centered initiative that has impacted 1,000+ young women across the United States to initiate dialogue, mentoring relationships, and youth change-making centered on gender, identity, and social justice. In addition, she is the primary editor and author of the first Report on the Status of Women and Girls in Boston. At Harvard, she co-founded the school’s Asian American Women’s Association, now the largest Asian-American women's-centered forum for students at Harvard, and traveled to Kenya and the United Kingdom on full scholarships to pursue global health work and promote health and hygiene education for girls.
While in medical school, her work on addressing health inequity has continued as the founder and director of the Freedom Medicine Collective, which includes the Freedom Community Clinic, an integrative medicine pop-up clinic that aims to serve 200+ women, children, and families from underserved communities facing chronic stress and disease in the Bay Area, and the Freedom School for Intersectional Medicine and Health Justice, a community that seeks to re-imagine how medicine and public health education can integrate community activism and be more welcoming and inclusive of the narratives of women of color and those of intersectional identities. For her Masters thesis, her work centers on creating community-centered art initiatives that uplift the voices of Filipino youth in underserved areas in the Bay Area.
In addition, Bernadette is the creator and co-host of the popular podcast Woke WOC Docs (available on iTunes, Spotify, and SoundCloud) that tells the narratives of women of color in medicine.
For her work, Bernadette has been named as a California Senate District 29 Women of the Year Honoree, UCSF Dean's Prize Scholar in Health and Society, Pacific Standard Top 30 Under 30 Thinkers in Policy and Social Justice, Glamour Magazine College Woman of the Year, Gold Foundation Fellow, Albert Schweitzer Fellow, Creativity Foundation Legacy Prize Winner, and Clinton Global Initiative University Alumni Honoree, among many others. She has written about social justice issues for the NY Times, Huffington Post, the Harvard Crimson, and more.