Community Engagement Core Stakeholder Advisory Board

Margaret Gordon is a lifetime community activist. As a young single mother she worked her way off of welfare by attending commercial cooking school, after which she cooked for various institutions including Children’s Hospital and a UC Berkeley fraternity house. Ms. Gordon is a founding member of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, having volunteered for the first three years of operation. She has work experience in mental health services, parent training in the public schools and community organizing.

Appointed by then-Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums to the Oakland Port Commission in 2007, she spent the next five years stridently promoting the interests of community health, workers health and fiscal responsibility in Port operations.

Ouahiba is the Chief of the Pesticide Exposure Evaluation and Medical Education team at OEHHA. Among other things, her team is responsible for providing medical education on pesticide-related illness to health care professionals across California. In 2012, she joined OEHHA as a toxicologist in the Pesticide Epidemiology team and was the Environmental Justice coordinator from 2015-2018. Prior to joining OEHHA, Ouahiba worked for over a decade as a research scientist in different academic organizations in the US, Spain, France, and Switzerland. Her research focused on the effects of endocrine disruptors on human health. She earned a PhD in cell and molecular biology from the University François Rabelais of Tours, France, and an MPH in Environmental Health Hazard Assessment from the French National School of Public Health.

Karen Pierce, a native San Franciscan, is one of the founders of Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates and a legendary Bayview activist for five decades. She recently retired from the San Francisco Department of Public Health, where she worked in the Population Health Division, and previously in the department’s environmental justice program. She has chaired San Francisco committees and task forces overseeing closures of two power plants, and Port operations on the southern waterfront. She also worked with faculty at the University of California–San Francisco for over a decade to transform the university from a citadel to a neighbor.