Sustaining service for meaningful impact.

Siddharth is a physician and public health scientist who seeks to change the way we regard society’s helpers, healers, and protectors. He supports organizations to become trauma-responsive by addressing traumatic exposure among field-workers, support staff, and program beneficiaries. 

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After several years of providing consultation to international NGOs, faith-based agencies, human rights organizations, and health care organizations, Siddharth founded Greenleaf Integrative. Greenleaf has since become a hub for like-minded individuals who seek to facilitate organizational change through training about traumatic stress, neurobiology, and leadership efficacy.

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Siddharth’s interdisciplinary expertise spans preventive medicine, mindfulness and spirituality, the humanities, cross-cultural adaptation, disaster response, and real-world applications of neuroscientific thinking. Through workshops and retreats, Siddharth has provided customized training to diverse organizations, which include: sexual assault and incest victim advocates (India), nurses (Ethiopia, USA), mental health practitioners (USA), and disaster relief workers (Pakistan, Sri Lanka, USA).    

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Before founding Greenleaf, Siddharth conducted a private practice at the GW Center for Integrative Medicine in Washington, DC. He also headed the Preventive Medicine Residency Program at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Brooklyn, NYC, where he had a faculty appointment in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan.  

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Siddharth received his Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies from Rice University and completed his MD at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX. After one year of specialized training at the Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry, he went to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, NY for advanced training in Preventive and Behavioral Medicine where he attained his Master of Public Health.

Karla Siu serves as Executive Vice President at Greenleaf, where she oversees the organization’s strategy and programs.

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Karla is a social work practitioner with over 20 years of experience in research, clinical practice, and non-profit management. She has collaborated with leading trauma practitioners, evidence-based treatment developers, and implementation science experts at the Center for Child and Family Health and RTI’s Center on Social Determinants, Risk Behaviors, and Prevention Science. Karla has also partnered with top national health service researchers at University of North Carolina’s Cecil G. Sheps Center to conduct stakeholder-engaged research funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).

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Prior to joining Greenleaf, Karla provided consultation for the NC Office of Rural Health’s Farmworker Health Program and for El Futuro, a community mental health clinic, to implement bilingual tele-behavioral health for primary care clinics in rural areas. As El Futuro’s clinical program director, Karla managed a growing team of 15 licensed clinicians, led program design and implementation, and chaired the quality improvement committee.

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In her work, Karla has centered issues of community mental health, biculturalism, welfare reform, and provision of services to domestic violence offenders. In 2009, she co-authored an article in the Journal of Family Violence, and in 2019, she contributed to the Becoming a Church that Cares Well for the Abused curriculum. In 2021, Karla co-authored an article for the Journal of Emergency Medicine, “Trauma Mitigation for the Workforce: A Conceptual Framework Applied in COVID-19 Pandemic Conditions,” with colleagues Dr. Siddharth Ashvin Shah, MD, MPH and Dr. Trever Dangle, PhD. The article was written for leaders and managers of organizations whose staff are routinely exposed to traumatic events or encounter dangerous conditions in the course of their work.

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Karla earned her Master of Social Work degree at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, NC and her Bachelor of Social Work degree at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA.

As director of operations, Erin Brackens is responsible for ensuring Greenleaf’s organizational effectiveness through the smooth internal operations of the organization. This includes human resources management and development, and operations management.

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She comes to Greenleaf from Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, DC, where she worked for over a decade in medical education. She also has experience as a clinical mental health counselor specializing in trauma and psychological first aid for distressed persons.

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She holds a Master of Arts in Clinical Mental Health Counseling and a Master in Education from Regent University in Virginia Beach, VA as well as a Bachelor of Arts in History from Bridgewater State University in Bridgewater, MA.