Board of Directors

Jeffrey Kinney

Jeff is retired, having spent the majority of his career in corporate banking, and more recently as a nonprofit executive with a large human services organization. His nonprofit responsibilities included oversight of marketing, fund raising, advocacy, and strategic planning. Jeff has served on numerous nonprofit boards in New England and has a passion for serving refugees and immigrants.

Pooja Agrawal, M.D., M.P.H.

Pooja is a practicing Emergency Physician and Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Yale University. She has been involved with humanitarian emergencies, forced migration and refugee resettlement for over two decades. She studies the effects of displacement on physical and mental health, the impact of resettlement on newcomers and host communities, and how access to care impacts long term health and integration. She holds a faculty appointment in the Yale School of Medicine and Yale Center for Asylum Medicine.

LaShawn R. Jefferson

LaShawn R. Jefferson has had a distinguished career in the service of social justice, across human rights, philanthropy, and academic administration.  She was the Senior Executive Director of Perry World House, a global policy think tank at the University of Pennsylvania. She has over two decades of experience in legal and policy advocacy, strategic planning and programming, women’s international human rights, civil-society organizations, and philanthropy. At the Ford Foundation, she worked to advance women’s human rights globally and in the U.S. through field building and investments in the areas of rights advocacy; policy advancement; strategic communications and engagement; intersectional leadership and analysis; women-of-color leadership; research; and capacity building. She held several leadership positions at Human Rights Watch, where she directed their women’s rights research and advocacy work, providing strategic and intellectual leadership, crafting and executing long-term advocacy strategies, managing staff across seven regional or thematic foci, attracting and leveraging resources to advance human rights, and representing HRW at the highest levels of national, regional, and international fora. She is the author or editor of dozens of human rights reports on a variety of issues confronting women around the world and has written op-eds and articles that have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and The International Herald Tribune.

Gita Drury

Gita serves as an advisor for high-net-worth individuals, families, and foundations to invest their resources for lasting social and environmental impact. Her expertise includes philanthropic strategy development, intergenerational grantmaking, donor engagement, and fundraising.

Gita’s broad understanding of the nonprofit sector allows her to collaborate closely with donors to articulate and fulfill their philanthropic visions, drawing upon her extensive  network of changemakers nation-wide. Recent partners include the Dream Machine Innovation Lab, Galaxy Foundation, and Open Philanthropy.

Based in New Haven, CT, Gita can often be found chasing after her energetic six-year-old or visiting family in Kenya and California.

Regina Duchin Kraus, ESQ.

Regina has been retired from the private practice of law since 2022. She earned a law degree from the University of Connecticut School of Law in 1991, having completed a BA in Speech Pathology and Audiology from the George Washington University. However, she is not fully retired from legal work in that, currently, she represents Afghan refugees in their applications for asylum to The Department of Homeland Security. Regina has been actively involved in community non-profit work for many years. She was a Board Member of IRIS from 2018 to 2024 and rejoined the Board in January 2025. She is currently on the Board of Directors of the Waterbury Symphony Orchestra and a member of the Women’s Giving Circle of the Waterbury Foundation. Formerly, she was a Trustee of the Jewish Federation of Western Connecticut Foundation, member of the Foundation’s Executive Committee and member of the Grants Committee. Prior to that tenure, she was on the Board of the VNA of Southern Connecticut.

Enkeleda Duka

Enkeleda is an executive with experience across a range of businesses spanning health, pharmacy, and banking.  Enkeleda has held several finance and transformation leadership roles at The Cigna Group and prior to that at American Bank of Albania. She holds a BS in Finance from the University of Tirana and an MBA in Business Administration from Boston College. Being an immigrant herself, she has a passion for serving refugees and immigrants.

Katherine C. McKenzie, MD. FACP

Kate is a faculty member at Yale School of Medicine.  She currently directs the Yale Center for Asylum Medicine (YCAM), which she founded. In this capacity, she performs forensic evaluations of asylum seekers at Yale and in detention facilities, leads the asylum medicine teaching program at Yale, mentors clinicians across North America, and lectures extensively on topics of asylum, detention, and physician advocacy. She is a past recipient of the Leonard B. Tow Award for Humanism in Medicine and Yale’s Faculty Award for Achievement in Clinical Care. Kate’s work has appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, Time magazine, CNN, and many other publications. She is consistently named a “Top Doctor” by Connecticut Magazine, in addition to being certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine since 1995.

Juliette J. Meeus

Juliette J. Meeus is a retired television news journalist, communications consultant and media coach who has been working with refugees on the front lines in Connecticut since 2021. A long time advocate of international human rights and social justice, Juliette became involved with IRIS as a member of a co-sponsorship committee resettling an Afghan refugee family. She was then asked to step into the refugee committee chairman’s role to welcome and support another refugee family, this one from Syria.

Before retiring, Juliette helped launch CNBC and MSNBC and worked overseas for Reuters Television. She also spent 4 years running a theater in Paris, France. Juliette has a BA from Brown University and master’s from Columbia University School of Journalism.

Jennifer S. Milano, Esq.

Jen worked as an attorney in private practice for 25 years, and now focuses on volunteer work with a particular interest in international human rights. She has served on several nonprofit boards and been an active community volunteer in her hometown of Guilford since she moved there in 2004. Jen has been an IRIS volunteer since 2008,and especially enjoys forming friendships with the refugees she has helped resettle.

Maria Mostajo, J.D.

Maria Mostajo, J.D., is a retired New York City prosecutor, investigator and executive with over 25 years of experience in public service. Today, she is a community leader and advocate, focusing on social and environmental justice, the arts and the resettlement of refugees. 

Mostajo recently joined the board of Integrated Refugee and Inmigrant (IRIS) and serves on their Governance and Strategic Planning Committees.

A passionate art collector, Maria Mostajo focuses on increasing the visibility of Latin American and Latinx artists. Through her board leadership and curatorial work she also champions ‘matronage’—an intersectional approach to supporting women in the arts through legal aid, collection, and community building. Mostajo serves on the board of the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, CT, where she chairs the Collections Committee and also serves on the Governance and Development Committees. In her membership on Circulo groups of both the El Museo del Barrio and Americas Society, both in NYC, she works to increase the visibility of underrepresented artists. Maria also serves on the Connecticut Arts Foundation in an effort to provide a living wage support and professional development skills to empower artists to focus on their craft.

Mostajo also serves as President of the Lake Waramaug Association, an organization focused on the preservation of the lake and its surroundings as a natural, historical, residential, and recreational area. She previously served as President of the National Council of Jewish Women, NY Section, where she launched the anti-sex trafficking and refugee advocacy initiatives. 

Rich Stein

Rich Stein is first generation American-born and is grateful for the promises, opportunities, and freedoms of this country. He co-chaired an interfaith community sponsor group in Newtown that resettled five families, as well as helping those families secure CT and Federal benefits, and teaching them about the U.S. financial system. Rich has been a self-employed options trader and private investor for 24 years. Prior to that he worked in variety of corporate roles, including mergers and acquisitions, a corporate strategy group, and logistics. Rich has served on a number of investment committees, most notably as a Trustee for the endowment committee for the Episcopal Diocese of CT. He also served as Sr. Warden of his parish. He loves to travel the world because it narrows the gaps between people. Rich studied Economics at The University of Chicago, and has a Masters of Management from Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. 

Randy Teel, Ph.D.

Randy rejoined the Board at IRIS in 2025 after previously serving from 2016-2023. Randy is the Chief Business Officer at Arvinas Inc., a New Haven-based biotech company developing medicines in both oncology and neurodegeneration. Prior to Arvinas, Randy was VP of Strategy at Alexion Pharmaceuticals, also in New Haven. He began his career at McKinsey & Company, advising healthcare companies, after receiving his PhD in Immunobiology from Yale University.