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Lisa J. Pino is the former Director of the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS). Before joining the Biden-Harris administration at HHS, Pino was appointed as the New York State Department of Health’s Executive Deputy Commissioner. Her oversight included the operational response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the state's public health programs for 19.5 million New Yorkers, including Medicaid, the Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), Hospital and Alternative Care Facilities, Wadsworth Laboratories, the Center for Environmental Health, Center for Community Health, and AIDS Institute.
Prior to her service in New York, she practiced employment and immigration law as Counsel at Mayer Brown LLP's Global Mobility and Migration practice in Washington, D.C., where she advised Fortune 500 clients on their business immigration needs in the United States, Europe, MENA, Latin America, and Asia.
Pino also served in President Obama's administration as a senior official from 2009-2017, where she was appointed as USDA's Deputy Administrator of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Civil Rights, and as Senior Counselor to the Secretary at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). At USDA, she championed access to nutrition for food insecure populations, data and design modernization for states' SNAP administration, instituted USDA's first Limited English Proficiency policy, increased EBT access in farmers' markets by over 200%, directed aid to minority and women farmers who had experienced discrimination, and developed new anti-discrimination program regulation protections. At DHS, she drove the 2015 U.S. cyber breach mitigation of 4 million federal personnel and 22 million surrogate profiles, the largest hack in federal history, by renegotiating over 700 vendor procurements and establishing new cybersecurity regulatory protections, in addition to working on the DHS Ebola and Zika response with the Office of Health Affairs.
Prior to joining the Obama-Biden Administration, Pino was a legal aid attorney in the Southwest border of Arizona protecting the rights of migrant farm workers, a community organizer on behalf of immigrant food service workers in the Bay Area, and an AmeriCorps volunteer at legal aid in Arizona protecting immigrant families who were unlawfully evicted and targeted under predatory lending schemes.
A New York City native who is fluent in Spanish, Pino is the first-generation daughter of immigrant parents and the first college graduate in her family. She received her B.A., M.A., and J.D. at Arizona State University with honors, and completed a Harvard Kennedy School of Government executive leadership program as a National Hispana Leadership Institute Fellow. In 2021, Arizona State University’s College of Humanities inducted her as a College Leader for her leadership in public service.
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