Rachael Neumann, 29

Rachael Neumann wasn’t sure that a business career was for her until 2006, when she volunteered at a Burmese refugee camp in Thailand. Her passion for health led her to the camp medical clinics, where she used her business savvy to devise a new system to combine Western and traditional Burmese medicine for patient treatment.

“I noticed there was a real opportunity for the clinics in these camps to greatly improve both their efficiency as well as the health services they provided for their patients if they took a little more of a business approach,” she said, eventually presenting her ideas to the UN High Commission for Refugees based in Bangkok.

Last year, she graduated from Columbia University with master’s degrees in business administration and public health. While at Columbia, Neumann organized the April 2009 African First Ladies Summit in Los Angeles, which brought together African first ladies to address pressing health challenges in their respective countries.

Her involvement in the Jewish community was sparked on a Birthright trip and participation in the Schusterman Foundation’s ROI Summit soon after. She was a founding board member of Repair the World, a portal for young Jews involved in service learning.

Today, Neumann works with LeapFrog investments — the world’s first micro-insurance fund. Professionally, she holds a short-term position at a leading global consulting firm in Melbourne, Australia, advising governments and business throughout the Asian Pacific. But a born-and-bred New Yorker — despite her four years spent at Stanford — she’ll be back here at the end of the year.

Claim to fame: Rachael is a certified elephant trainer.

Other hobbies: snowboarding, scuba diving, and trapeze.

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