Board of Directors
To learn more about the IBLCE Board of Directors, visit our Board page!
Executive Committee
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Board Chair
Rebecca Mannel, BS, IBCLC
Ms. Mannel is Manager of the Lactation Center at Oklahoma University Medical Center in Oklahoma City. She holds the position of Clinical Instructor in both the Pediatric and OB/Gyn Departments of the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. She served as president of the International Lactation Consultant Association from 2006-2008. Ms. Mannel is a member of the La Leche League International and serves on the Executive Board of the Pan American Medical Mission Foundation. In addition she has published numerous articles in The Journal of Human Lactation and other peer reviewed publications.
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Chair Elect
Rachelle Lessen, MS, RD, IBCLC
Rachelle is a registered dietitian and IBCLC and has a Masters of Science degree in health education. She works at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia where she sees families with infants in the cardiac intensive care unit and the pediatric units. She also conducts prenatal consults for families in the fetal heart program. Rachelle has an outpatient lactation center for mothers who are experiencing breastfeeding difficulties and specializes in counseling mothers of infants with food allergies. Rachelle serves as the ILCA liaison to the UN Standing Committee on Nutrition and is a board member and past-president of the Breastfeeding Resource Center, a non-profit community center. Rachelle is the co-author of the 2009 ADA Position Statement on Breastfeeding and has written chapters or articles for various publication on issues related to breastfeeding and nutrition.
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Immediate Past Chair
Elizabeth Stehel, MD, IBCLC
Dr. Stehel is a general pediatrician who works exclusively in the newborn nursery at Parkland Memorial Hospital, one of the largest single site birthing hospitals in the United Sates with about 15,000 deliveries annually. She is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at UT Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, where she attended medical school. She also completed her Pediatrics Residency in Dallas at Children’s Medical Center.Dr. Stehel’s interest in breastfeeding began when she joined the faculty at UT Southwestern in 2000 and started working with mother infant couplets on a daily basis. In 2008 she received her IBCLC certification. She is a member of the Texas Breastfeeding Coalition and the Dallas Area Breastfeeding Alliance. She serves the Texas Pediatric Society on both the Parenting and Fetus and Newborn Committees, and the American Academy of Pediatrics as a Co-Chapter Breastfeeding Coordinator for Texas. Dr. Stehel has been married for nine years and has two preschool aged children. |
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Secretary
Paula J. Oliveira, RN, BSN, IBCLC
Paula Oliveira is a registered nurse and International Board Certified Lactation Consultant. She has an extensive background in maternal child health nursing including prenatal clinic, labor and delivery, neonatal intensive care and lactation services in hospital and in private practice. She has experience as the WIC State Breastfeeding Coordinator and developed and implemented the peer counselor training program and remains as a consultant for the State of New Hampshire WIC Program. She was the spearhead for the passage of the breastfeeding law in New Hampshire. She is the Treasurer of the New Hampshire Breastfeeding Task Force and currently is working as the Nurse in Charge of Lactation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.
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Treasurer
Aimee Eden, MA
Aimee R. Eden is a Ph.D. candidate in applied anthropology at the University of South Florida, where she is also working on her M.P.H. in maternal and child health. She holds a master's degree in international development from Ohio University, and is a returned Peace Corps volunteer (Kazakhstan). She has conducted research domestically and internationally on topics including reproductive and maternal-child health, breastfeeding, perceptions of race and ethnicity among health researchers, transnational migration of health workers, legal approaches to cases of abused and neglected children in Florida, and the impact of accelerated high school academic programs on underrepresented groups in Florida.
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Governance Committee Chair
Tomoko Seo, MD, IBCLC, FABM
Tomoko Seo is a pediatrician, who is working in a private maternity hospital and a pediatric clinic in Japan. She certified as IBCLC in 1999 and served as the president of Japanese Association of Lactation Consultants (JALC) from 2001 to 2003. She is a member of the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine. She has translated various documents and books on breastfeeding into Japanese. She has served as Conference Chair of the annual breastfeeding seminar for physicians sponsored by JALC since 2005. She works as a lecturer at breastfeeding conferences as well as a clinician caring for mothers and babies.
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Board Members
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Andreja Tekauc Golob, MD, IBCLC
Andreja Tekauc Golob is paediatrician, working as a neonatologist in the Perinatal department of University Clinic for Gynecology and Perinatology in Maribor, Slovenia. She is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Faculty of Medicine, University of Maribor. She finished her postgraduate doctoral study in 2010 and is in the process of preparing her doctoral dissertation. She is also the Country Coordinator for IBLCE in Slovenia, a Member of the Ministry of Health working group for breastfeeding strategy, a Member of the executive national board for Gynecology and Perinatology and Vice president of the National neonatology section.
Her interest for breastfeeding began when she joined the National committee for promoting breastfeeding in Baby Friendly Hospitals in 1996. In 1998 she became the UNICEF International assessor of Baby friendly hospitals. She received her IBCLC certification in 2001, recertification in 2006 and 2011. She counsels and advises mother from all over Slovenia on a daily basis. She also gives lectures on newborns and breastfeeding in a course for new parents.
From 2002 onwards she has organized the IBLCE exam for Slovene candidates and candidates from the former Yugoslavia. She has been translating the IBLCE exam into Slovene for the last two years. Andreja is married. She has three adult children and two granddaughters. |
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Esmé Nel, IBCLC Esmé is an active La Leche League Leader (since 1986) and she obtained her IBCLC certification in 2002. She holds a Bachelor degree in Commerce at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. Esmé’s passion for supporting breastfeeding mothers and babies grew out of the experience of raising four of her own children as well as a result of her hands-on work with patients in the medical practice she managed since 1986. |
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Janine Stockdale, PhD, PG CHSE, BSc. Hons, RM, RN
Janine first became a midwife in the UK in 1985 and worked mostly in the National Health Service until in 1989 when she spent a few years working in the USA. On returning to Northern Ireland, she was awarded a R&D Research Fellowship (NI) that enabled her to apply the process of Motivational Instructional Design (MID) to routine breastfeeding instruction. As the first person to adapt MID for health, she has played an important role in understanding how to close the theory /practice gap using theory-orientated, practically-based psychology models. In 2007 she was awarded a PhD by the University of Ulster for her work in understanding motivation to sustain breastfeeding. Since completing her PhD, she has since received awards for her application of MID, including the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland Prize for the Greatest Contribution to Practice Award (2008) and the University of Ulster Award for Innovation (2008). As a post-doctoral researcher and educator, Janine joined the academic team at Trinity College Dublin in 2008; there her expertise in motivation applied directly to learning has resulted in her receiving the Provost Teaching of the Year Award (2011). Janine was also appointed (part-time) in 2010 to the Royal College of Midwives as a Research Fellow, where she continues to use her expertise in MID in midwifery.
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Jean Rankin, PhD, MSc, BSc (Hons), PGCert Teaching, RM, RGN, RSCN
Jean is Senior Lecturer in Research (Maternal, Child and Family Health) at the University of the West of Scotland. Previous appointments include Lead Midwife for Education, Academic Director (Midwifery) and Senior Midwife (Clinical Practice). Over the years Jean has played an active role in the support and protection of breastfeeding through initiatives such as the Scottish Joint Breastfeeding initiative, peer support programmes, UNICEF accreditations for Baby Friendly Hospital, Community and more recently for educational standards in breastfeeding for BSc midwifery and public health programmes at the University of the West of Scotland. Jean has two ‘grown-up’ children and one granddaughter, Lucy. |
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Regina Maria Roig-Romero, BS, IBCLC, RLC
Regina Maria Roig-Romero was a La Leche League Leader for several years beginning in 1991; she became an IBCLC in 1996 and is currently the Senior Lactation Consultant for the WIC breastfeeding program in Miami, Florida, serving the IBCLC needs of all mother-baby dyads at several primarily Hispanic WIC clinics. She has assisted in the creation, development and leadership of the breastfeeding program in Miami since its inception in 1996. Under her guidance, thirteen of the Miami-Dade County WIC program’s Peer Counselors became IBCLCs from 2002-2011. In 2011, Regina served as an invited member of the USDA Food & Nutrition Service Expert Panel on the revision and update of the Loving Support Peer Counselor Training curricula. She was an invited speaker at the National WIC Association’s (NWA) Washington Leadership Conference & Breastfeeding Summit in 2010, a featured speaker during the Spanish Workshop of the 2012 ILCA annual conference, and was appointed to the NWA Breastfeeding Promotion Committee in August, 2012. |
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