10th Annual Banquet (2011) – Biographies

Dr. Judy Chu was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for California’s 32nd District in July 2009. She immediately got to work representing the interests of her constituents, voting on several environmental bills and working through the night on her first day in office, during a marathon debate on important healthcare reform legislation as part of her first assignment on the House Education and Labor Committee, where she served on the Subcommittees on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education and Healthy Families and Communities. 

In the 112th Congress, Rep. Chu serves on the House Judiciary Committee, where she is a member of the Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security and the Intellectual Property, Competition, and the Internet subcommittees.  She is also a member of the House Small Business Committee, where she is leading the Contracting and Workforce Subcommittee as the Ranking Democrat and serves on the Economic Growth, Tax and Capital Access and Agriculture, Energy and Trade Subcommittees.  In 2011, she was elected as the Chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus (CAPAC).

In addition to her vote in favor of passage of the historic health care reform bill, Rep. Chu has championed a number of causes in Congress. She has used her extensive experience as a legislator and educator to help improve our nation’s education system, helping pass a landmark college affordability bill to boost federal college grants and keep student loan interest rates low. Last year, she also introduced a bill that would maintain adequate federal funding for much needed school lunch programs. She has also unveiled a new framework for awarding School Improvement Grants called Strengthening Our Schools (SOS), which provides a more holistic and research-based alternative to the more punitive and overly restrictive guidelines currently used.

She has continued to work hard to help Americans emerge from the Great Recession, co-sponsoring a bill that would extend and expand the enormously successful Jobs NOW program, which uses federal stimulus funds to subsidize jobs at the local level and has already resulted in more than 11,000 jobs in Los Angeles County alone.

Congresswoman Chu is also a strong advocate for effective, humane and progressive immigration reform, having been an original co-sponsor of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR-ASAP) bill introduced by Rep. Luis Gutierrez last year. 

Congresswoman Chu began her career as an educator and taught psychology at Los Angeles City College and East Los Angeles College for 20 years. She was first elected to the Garvey School District Board of Education over 24 years ago.

She was then elected to the Monterey Park City Council, where she served as Mayor 3 times. From there, she was elected to the California State Assembly, where she was Chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee, which has control over all legislation with a fiscal impact to the state. While in the Assembly, she introduced and helped pass the most successful tax amnesty bill in the nation, which was estimated to bring in $300 million but actually brought in $4.8 billion in revenue for the state budget without raising taxes. She was then elected to the State Board of Equalization, California’s tax board.

Rep. Chu earned her B.A. in mathematics from UCLA and her Ph.D. in psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology.

 
Robert Wann is Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, and a member of the Board of Directors of New York Community Bancorp, Inc. (the “Company”), its savings bank subsidiary, New York Community Bank, and its commercial bank subsidiary, New York Commercial Bank. Mr. Wann has been on the Board of Directors of the Company and the Banks since January 1, 2008, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the Company and New York Community Bank since October 31, 2003, and Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of New York Commercial Bank since its inception on December 30, 2005.

Prior to his appointment as Chief Operating Officer, Mr. Wann spearheaded the Finance Division of the Company and the Community Bank. He joined the Company in 1982, and was named Comptroller in 1989; in 1991 he was appointed Chief Financial Officer. An original member of the management team that took the Company public in 1993, Mr. Wann played, and continues to play, a crucial role in the development and growth of the Company.

Mr. Wann is a member of the American Bankers Association and the New York Bankers Association, and serves on the Board of Directors of various organizations. A graduate of Queens College with a degree in accounting, Mr. Wann is on the Board of Trustees of the Queens College Foundation and is a member of the Queens College Art Advisory Board. An active member of the community, Mr. Wann previously served as president of the Flushing Central Lions Club and currently serves on the Board of Directors of a private charitable foundation based in New York.

Betty Lee Sung is Professor Emerita from City College of New York/CUNY, Co-Founder and Board Member of the Asian American / Asian Research Institute. Dr. Sung the author of eight books including Mountain of Gold (1967), a pioneering chronicle of the history of the Chinese in America. Its publication led to an invitation to teach Asian American studies courses at the City College in 1970. She taught and served as Chair of the Asian Studies department at City College, and retired in 1992.

In 1994, she completed a database of the Chinese immigrant records in the New York Region National Archives. The database will enable scholars to recreate the early history of the Chinese in this country and serve as a source for genealogical research.

In 1996, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters from the State University of New York Old Westbury, and she gave the commencement address.

An advocate for Chinese American interests, Dr. Sung is active in many organizations, and she speaks out against discrimination and injustice toward Chinese Americans. She has been honored by many organizations such as the Cosmopolitan Lion’s Club, the Organization of Chinese Americans, and Asian American Higher Education Council, among many others. In 2006, Dr. Sung was honored with the University of Illinois Alumni Association’s Illini Comeback Award.

Adhikaar, meaning rights in Nepali, is a New York-based nonprofit organization working with Nepali-speaking communities to promote human rights and social justice for all.  To achieve our mission, we

• facilitate access to information and resources on immigration, health, workers’ rights, and other issues;
• organize community members to collectively advocate against social injustices and human rights abuses;
• conduct participatory research and policy advocacy on issues affecting our community;
• build leadership of community members, with the focus on marginalized groups within Nepali communities.

Sahar Khan is a recent graduate of City College of New York/CUNY, with a B.A. degree in Media Communications and Arts. Born in Dubai and raised in New York City, Ms. Khan is the recipient of the Skadden Arps Honors Program, Deans List, Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society, Alan Berman Scholarship, STOCS Scholarship, and Certified Student Leader. She has served as a member of the University Student Senate, Women in Islam, Great American Minds, Muslim Student Organization, The City College of New York Student Empowerment & Engagement Development Series and Undergraduate Student Government.

Ms. Khan will be attending CUNY School of Professional Studies to continue her studies in Spring 2012.

Seimi Kim is an undergraduate student at Brooklyn College/CUNY, majoring in Film Production. Born and raised in Korea, Ms. Kim moved to the United States in 2007 and enrolled at Brooklyn College in 2008. Before directing HOME, she directed a short documentary, His Passion for Theatre (2010), and a short fiction film, Goodbye My Friend (2008). She performed in three theatre productions, Nocturnal (2011), Ti-Jean and His Brothers (2010), and Agnes of God (2009). She thematically interested in diversity, feminism, and inter-culture issues.

Ms. Kim’s short film, HOME, won Best Fiction Film at the Asian American / Asian Research Institute’s 2011 CUNY Asian American Film Festival, and screened at the 34th Asian American International Film Festival.

Vivian Lee is an achor/reporter for NY1 News. Since September 2008, Lee has covered topics ranging from a Russian national suspected of selling weapons to rebels across the world, to the closing of St. Vincent’s Hospital, and the story of five men arrested and charged in connection with the shooting of a 15-year-old girl. She also anchored hour-to-hour coverage of the Times Square foiled bomb plot and the mid-air collision of helicopter and plane that claimed nine lives in August 2009.

Early in her tenure with the station Lee covered: the mortgage crisis, MTA doomsday budget hearings, and the death of an emotionally disturbed man in Brooklyn resulting from police use of an electroshock weapon. She also covered the surrender of three police officers indicted in connection with the alleged sodomy assault of a Brooklyn resident. In December 2008, Lee was the first in the city to report the arrest of a firefighter for allegedly calling in false alarms to 911 because he was upset over firehouse closings.

Among her accolades, in February 2011, Lee received the Asian American Business Development Center’s award for Outstanding Community Service. She was also honored with the Asian Professional Exchange (APEX) Volunteer award in 2008.

Previously, in 2002, Lee worked at WNBC as a general assignment reporter on stories such as Eliot Spitzer’s sex scandal and resignation, and Manhattan’s two deadly crane collapses. Before her stint at channel 4, Lee was the Parliamentary Correspondent for Citytv of the CHUM Network in Canada, where she covered governmental affairs in Ottawa after being posted to the bureau after 9/11. Prior to reporting on the Hill, she was a general assignment reporter and fill-in anchor for newscasts on CityPulse News in Toronto. She also co-anchored the evening news at A-Channel in Calgary. 

Lee earned a Bachelor of Journalism degree from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.