Leadership
Marked By COVID is 100% volunteer-run and grassroots-powered. The direction of our work is determined by thousands of Activists, community members, and our Community Advisory Board.
Policy, organizing, and communications experts, an all-women Board of Directors, and a range of other advisors, endorsers, and elected officials support the work of our Activists, including:
Kristin Urquiza, MPA (she/her)
Co-founder & Mark’s Daughter
Kristin is the nation’s top disaster equity advocate, with expertise in race, economic, environmental, and health policy. An experienced grassroots organizer, Urquiza co-founded Marked By COVID and catalyzed the nation’s foremost community-led Covid justice movement days after the death of her father, Mark Urquiza, to Covid in June 2020.
By uplifting impacted voices, Urquiza improved the nation’s Covid response and advanced legislation for a just recovery, recognition, and pandemic prevention. Over the last 20 years, she has transformed global power dynamics to put power back in the hands of people at former Congressman Henry Waxman’s Mighty Earth, Angela Glover Blackwell’s PolicyLink, California’s leading environmental justice organization Communities for a Better Environment, and U.S. PIRG.
Urquiza holds a B.A. from Yale University and an MPA from U.C. Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, and is the recipient of the Arizona Public Health Association’s 2021 Community Partner Award and the Goldman School’s inaugural Alumni Award for Social Justice Impact.
Twitter: @kdurquiza
Christine Keeves, MPH (she/her)
Co-Founder, Communications Lead
[MEDIA CONTACT: Christine@MarkedByCOVID.com]
A proud child of immigrants from New York City, Christine fights for essential information to flow in and out of the communities most harmed by a crisis or disaster.
Christine leads Marked By Covid’s creative, PR, and online strategic comms, where she uses traditional media and digital technologies to democratize communication. She ensured firsthand stories of hundreds of Covid grievers and survivors are featured in media outlets to reach a combined circulation of over 20 billion, and serves as co-director of Marked By Covid’s Memorial Matrix and co-creator of Marked By Covid’s AR-powered National Covid Memorial.
Christine holds a Bachelors of Science from The George Washington University and a Master of Public Health from Boston University. She has a 20-year track record of successful communication and advocacy campaigns at institutions like Health Care for All, National Center for Lesbian Rights, Natural Resources Defense Council, SF LGBT Center, and M+R Strategies.
Twitter: @ckeeves
Kimberly Jones, Esq. (she/her)
Board Member & Carl’s Daughter
Since 2007, Kimberly Jones has served as a leading advocate for low-income students, first-generation students, students with disabilities, and students of color. Currently, Ms. Jones serves as the Executive Vice President at the Council for Opportunity in Education (“COE”). In this role, she serves as the chief operating officer, providing leadership over the organization’s government relations and advocacy efforts; program and professional development offerings for college access and success professionals; print and digital communications, fiscal policies, and information technology; and the development and implementation of all student programming offered by COE. In September 2022, COE’s Board of Directors voted unanimously to elect Ms. Jones as the Council’s third president. Her tenure in this role will begin in October 2023.
Prior to joining COE, Ms. Jones was an Associate in the Communications Practice Group at the law firm of Dow Lohnes, PLLC (now Cooley LLP), where she advised clients on a variety of broadcast and media law issues.
Ms. Jones has served in leadership roles within various professional and civic organizations, including the Committee for Education Funding, of which she served as President. She is an inaugural Advisory Board Member for Black History 365, a comprehensive textbook and curriculum guide designed for students and educators that spans the breadth of Black American history, and a Board Member of Marked By COVID, a non-partisan charitable organization that promotes accountability, recognition, and justice for the millions of victims of COVID-19, including her father. Ms. Jones also volunteers with the DC Family & Youth Initiative, an organization that provides mentorship and support for young people in and aging out of the foster care system in the Washington, DC metro area.
A Harry S. Truman Scholar, Ms. Jones is a graduate of Yale University and the Georgetown University Law Center. In 2016, Kimberly was named one of the "40 Under 40 Nation's Best Advocates" by the National Bar Association and also received the organization’s Excellence in Activism Award. In 2018, she was selected for the Diversity Executive Leadership Program sponsored by ASAE, the American Society of Association Executives. In 2021, Kimberly earned the Certified Association Executive (CAE) credential from ASAE.
Ryan Pukos, MPA (he/him)
Policy Lead
Ryan has a Master of Public Administration from Baruch College’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs where he studied equity-focused social welfare policy and non-profit management.
Ryan also brings more than 13 years of diverse, non-profit experience to his role at Marked By COVID – from running environmental issue campaigns to co-founding a sustainable tourism non-profit in Mexico, to planning and implementing smart city solutions aimed at making New York City a more livable, welcoming place.
Sarah Senk, PHD (she/her)
Memorialization Lead
Sarah Senk is an associate professor in the Department of Culture and Communication at California State University Maritime Academy. She completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 2011 at Cornell University, where she focused on contemporary Anglophone writing, trauma theory, and memory studies, examining how literary production in former British colonies has responded to a legacy of colonial violence and loss. Her current research deals with both the impact and representation of trauma and anxiety in contemporary literature and visual culture.
She has published articles in The Canadian Review of American Studies, Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics, Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, and Contemporaries: Post45, as well as essays on memorialization in The American Prospect and Slate, and is currently working on a book manuscript on post-9/11 commemorative practices.
Sarah formally joined Marked By Covid in December 2021 as a member of the Board of Directors and works closely with community members, Activists, and allies to ensure equitable memorialization of our losses. Sarah is co-director of Marked By Covid’s Memorial Matrix and recent author of an Outlook Perspective in The Washington Post about Covid recognition with 9/11 Survivor Lila Nordstrom.
Sachin Pawaskar, Ph.D. (he/him)
Memorial Matrix Technical Lead
Dr. Sachin Pawaskar is a Senior Research Technology Fellow in Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis at the University of Nebraska Omaha. As the technical lead for Marked By Covid's Memorial Matrix team, Dr. Pawaskar brings his expertise in Big Data Analytics, Data Visualization, Internet of Things (IoT), and Cloud Computing to bear on the task of building a comprehensive crowdsourced database of grassroots memorials to those lost to COVID-19. An advocate for the power of technology and data to create a just future, Dr. Pawaskar is dedicated to promoting transparency, accountability, and good governance through the democratization of data.