Diana Chao

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+ unique 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 to 100,000+ students worldwide, and also operates the first toll-free 24/7 pan-African mental health hotline out of its Liberia office, now part of the national budget.

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Diana was honored by two U.S. Presidents at the White House, named a 2021 Princess Diana Legacy Award Winner by Princes William and Harry, and is a 2020 L'Oréal Paris Women of Worth. She has provided testimony and advisory to the FDA, SAMHSA, UK Office for Life Sciences, European Union, and more. She graduated from Princeton University with Honors and pivoted from being a NASA astrophysicist and UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change researcher to completing an MBA at the University of Oxford as a Skoll Scholar.