Speaker's Profile

Diana Chao is a first-generation Buyi Chinese-American from California. Diana founded Letters to Strangers (L2S) at 14-years-old after bipolar disorder and a blinding eye condition nearly ended her life. By beginning to heal through letters, she discovered that writing is humanity distilled into ink. Today, L2S is the largest global youth-for-youth mental health nonprofit, exchanging 60000+ letters and impacting over half a million people in over 70 countries over the last ten years. L2S published the world’s first youth-for-youth mental health guidebook for free, currently taught in schools worldwide, and also operates the first toll-free 24/7 pan-African mental health hotline out of its nationally-recognized Liberia office.Diana was honored by two U.S. Presidents at the White House, named a 2021 Princess Diana Legacy Award Winner, and 2020 L'Oréal Paris Women of Worth. She graduated from Princeton University in 2021 with Honors and pivoted from being a NASA astrophysicist and UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change researcher to recently completing an MBA at the University of Oxford as a Skoll Scholar. Having grown up below the poverty line with parents who don't speak English, Diana learned firsthand how healing is a non-linear process that no one should have to approach alone.