Just months after we published our first news stories in August 2015, we tried something new: we listed and published brief biographies of the state’s 28 Most Influential Black Leaders. People really liked it, shared it on social media, told us who else should have been on that list. Many asked me if we’d do another list the next year; I said yes, we probably would.
We did more than that. That next year, we published another list of the state’s most influential Black leaders, as well as a list of the state’s most influential Latino leaders. Almost immediately, we started hearing an important and very reasonable question: What about the state’s Asian American and Indigenous leaders?
We wanted to do those lists, but we wanted to do them right. It took us some time to build the authentic relationships within those communities, and to gain their trust. I’m glad and proud that we took that time and did that work; it resulted in us publishing those lists for the first time in 2020.
This week we are proud to present the seventh annual edition of Wisconsin’s Most Influential Asian American leaders.
Every year, with every list, I’ve intended to highlight the beauty of the diversity across our state. I want kids here in Wisconsin to see role models of people who are succeeding, to know that it’s possible for people of color to achieve great things here.
This week, we shine a statewide spotlight on the dedicated leaders of Wisconsin’s Asian and Asian American communities. The people we highlight this week are elected leaders, business leaders and community leaders, doing difficult, important work, often in the face of discrimination.
We are also aware that this list, like every other, is not comprehensive. It’s obvious just from the number of nominations that there are far more than 22 influential Asian and Asian American leaders doing good work in Wisconsin. We hope you will let us know about people in your community who we can include on future lists. For now, though, we just want to introduce you to a few of the people doing the work, often behind the scenes and without the accolades, across Wisconsin.
You might know a few of these names, but there’s a good chance that most of them will be new to you. I urge you to get to know them. Reach out to those living and working in your communities. Learn from them, network, and create partnerships. And spread the word — let others in your network know that we have people of all ethnicities living and working across Wisconsin to make sure everyone here can thrive.
Henry Sanders
CEO, 365 Media Foundation
Publisher, Madison365
Sharyl Kato
Sharyl Kato is the founder and executive director of The Rainbow Project, a Madison-based child and family counseling and community resource clinic, and a clinical adjunct professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. A third-generation Japanese American, Kato’s mother, maternal grandmother, and aunt were incarcerated for three years during World War II, while her grandfather, a community leader, was held separately from his family at a different facility. She grew up on the south side of Chicago and came to Madison for graduate school, where she has remained. A licensed professional counselor, she has worked as a child, adult, and family therapist for more than 40 years, with expertise in prevention, early intervention, crisis response, and the treatment of childhood and family trauma, including abuse, neglect, and exposure to domestic and community violence. She founded The Rainbow Project 45 years ago and is most known for its work restoring children and families who have experienced trauma, having served more than 40,000 children and families through a trauma-informed, culturally responsive model of care. Kato served as co-chair of the Wisconsin Organization of Asian Americans alongside Jan Miyasaki and was a member of the Pacific Asian Women’s Alliance. She served two terms as president of the Wisconsin Women of Color Network and, beginning in 2000, two terms as president of Wisconsin Women in Focus, a group that raises college scholarships for graduating high school students. Her honors include the YWCA Women of Distinction Award, the Wisconsin Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Heritage Award, and the International League of Women Trailblazer Award.
Brenda Yang
Brenda Yang is a member of the Dane County Board of Supervisors and serves as the Administrative Policy Advisor for the State of Wisconsin’s Higher Educational Aids Board in a senior leadership position that combines policy development, program administration, fiscal oversight, and operational management. The role serves as a key advisor to the Executive Secretary and helps ensure the agency’s student financial aid programs comply with state laws, administrative rules, and agency policies. Previously, she worked as the Assistant Director with the SuccessWorks program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Letters & Science, where she helped students transition into careers. She is a first-generation Hmong immigrant who grew up in Northern California and has lived in Dane County for the past 26 years. In her spare time, she provides advocacy and support to Southeast Asian community members facing immigration detention and deportation by connecting them to state and local representatives and help navigating complex legal and administrative systems to get them the proper support. In her past work, she served on the board for the YWCA of Madison and The Hmong Institute in helping to promote equity, access, and empowerment for communities and families in Dane County. She is also a huge advocate for language access and worked for the City of Madison as a language access and cultural awareness consultant to help Southeast Asian Families gain access to translation services and culturally relevant support. During the pandemic, she partnered with the City of Madison to create informational videos on need-to-knows about COVID-19 for the Hmong Community. She is an alum of Edgewood College.
MaiVue Xiong
MaiVue Xiong is the executive director of the Pablo Foundation, an Eau Claire-based grantmaking nonprofit focused on housing, health, education, and community sustainability in the greater Chippewa Valley. She has led the foundation since January 2020, overseeing grant programs that have supported local nonprofits, libraries, schools, and pandemic-relief efforts. She also serves in an of counsel role at the law firm Bakke Norman, where she advises businesses and financial institutions on transactional, corporate governance, and compliance matters. A member of the “1.5 generation” of Hmong Americans whose parents resettled in Eau Claire and became small-business owners after the Secret War, Xiong grew up in the city before earning her law degree from the University of Wisconsin Law School. She returned to Eau Claire in 2010 to practice law and became the first Hmong woman attorney in the city. Her community involvement has included serving as a judge for Downtown Eau Claire Inc.’s Jumpstart Downtown business competition and as a faculty judge and presenter for the UW Law School’s lawyering skills course.
Eden Inoway-Ronnie
Eden Inoway-Ronnie is chief of staff and senior special assistant to the provost at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a position she has held since 2011. She manages the flow of work in the Office of the Provost and serves as a primary liaison to the offices of the chancellor and vice chancellors, as well as to deans, directors, and shared governance bodies. Her responsibilities include managing faculty and academic staff grievance and appeal procedures, coordinating the Deans Council and Provost’s Executive Group, and chairing or serving on campus-wide committees. She also administers several grant processes, including the Brittingham Fund and Evjue Foundation grants to UW–Madison, and has worked on institutional accreditation, student outcomes assessment, transfer initiatives, and diversity programs. Inoway-Ronnie has worked in the Office of the Provost for more than two decades, joining as a post-doctoral academic planner in 1997 and serving as special assistant to the provost from 2001 to 2011 before assuming her current role. Earlier in her career, she worked as a paralegal at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia. She earned her bachelor’s degree in sociology and anthropology from Carleton College and both her master’s and doctorate in educational policy from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She later served on Carleton College’s Board of Trustees and as an at-large member of its alumni board.
Dr. Glenn Fung
Dr. Glenn Fung is chief data and AI officer at Exact Sciences, the Madison-based cancer-screening and diagnostics company, where he leads artificial intelligence development and strategy. He has more than two decades of experience in machine learning, generative AI, and optimization across the healthcare, insurance, and retail sectors, and serves on the advisory board of the Wisconsin School of Business’s AI Hub for Business at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Before joining Exact Sciences in 2025, Fung held senior AI and data science roles at Elevance Health, Liberty Mutual Insurance, and American Family Insurance, where he spent nearly eight years as chief machine learning research and innovation scientist. Earlier in his career, he was a principal research scientist at Amazon and a principal key expert at Siemens Medical Solutions. He has authored more than 100 scientific papers and holds over 30 patents, and has served on advisory boards for UW–Madison’s Grainger Institute for Engineering and the Institute for Foundations of Data Science. Fung earned a master’s in applied mathematics and optimization from Universidad Simón Bolívar in Venezuela and both a master’s and a doctorate in computer science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Qin Tian
Qin Tian is a Mandarin Chinese teacher at Middleton High School, where she teaches five classes of more than 110 students at levels ranging from introductory Mandarin through AP Chinese. In April 2026, Tian was named a recipient of the Heartland Chinese Teacher Award from the U.S. Heartland China Association, which recognizes excellence in Chinese language teaching across 21 states; she was the only recipient from Wisconsin that year, selected from nominations spanning 17 cities in 14 states. She joined the Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District during the 2024-25 school year, part of a district program that begins Mandarin instruction at the middle school level and that she has described as the largest in Dane County. She collaborates with the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and partners with the Chinese American Museum of Chicago to connect students with Chinese language and culture, and helped organize the district’s annual Lunar New Year celebration. She was previously named the 2024 Wisconsin Chinese Language Teacher of the Year and was a 2025 Herb Kohl Educational Foundation Teacher Fellowship finalist. Tian has more than 13 years of experience in education in China and the United States, and her students have placed first and second in state-level Mandarin speaking competitions.
Fadia Afaneh
Fadia Afaneh is director of operations at Bayview Foundation, a Madison nonprofit that provides affordable housing and community programming for a largely immigrant and refugee population on the city’s near west side, a role she has held since 2023. She came to the position after a career in education spanning teaching, school administration, and consulting. Before joining Bayview, Afaneh spent several years in the virtual-education sector, serving as high school principal and then head of school for the Wisconsin Virtual Academy, an online public school based in the McFarland School District, where she helped guide families through remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier, she worked for six years in the Chicago Public Schools, holding roles including English lead teacher, English department chair, freshman administrator, and dean of curriculum and instruction at John Marshall Metro High School and Harper High School, where she led teams credited with sharp increases in freshman on-track rates. She later worked as an educational consultant with Starks Educational Consulting. Afaneh earned a bachelor’s degree in English and secondary education from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a master’s in educational leadership and administration from Concordia University Chicago, along with Type 75 principal certification. Her recognitions include the Golden Apple Teaching Scholar award and a Gold EPAS Teacher Award.
Dekila Chungyalpa
Dekila Chungyalpa is the founder and director of the Loka Initiative at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a capacity-building and outreach program for faith leaders and Indigenous culture keepers working on environmental and climate issues. Launched in 2018 and based at the UW–Madison Center for Healthy Minds, Loka works with Evangelical Christians on creation care, Indigenous leaders including tribal elders from the Great Lakes region, Tibetan Buddhist monastics in the Himalayas, and faith communities in the Madison area, and develops research and resources on how eco-anxiety and climate distress affect BIPOC, youth, and Global South communities. Before founding Loka, Chungyalpa spent more than a decade at the World Wildlife Fund, where she founded and directed Sacred Earth, a program building partnerships between conservationists and faith leaders across the Himalayas, the Mekong, Brazil, and East Africa. Earlier at WWF she directed the organization’s Greater Mekong program—living in Laos and testifying before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on the effects of hydropower development on the Mekong River—and served as senior program officer for the Eastern Himalayas, managing field projects across Nepal, Bhutan, India, and the Tibetan Plateau. From 2014 to 2018 she was an associate research scientist at Yale University, where she had been named the 2014 Dorothy S. McCluskey Visiting Fellow in Conservation at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. She holds a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies from the College of Wooster and a master’s in environment and international development from American University, and has contributed chapters to books on religion, ethics, and climate change, including a volume of the Dalai Lama in conversation with leading climate thinkers.
Dan Tokaji
Dan Tokaji is the Fred W. & Vi Miller Dean and Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School, where he serves as the school’s chief academic and executive officer, overseeing faculty and staff, strategic planning, fundraising, budget, curriculum, and student academic affairs. A leading scholar of election law, his research addresses voting rights, free speech, and democratic inclusion, and he has published more than 50 law review articles, book chapters, and other papers. Tokaji became dean in 2020. From 2003 to 2020, he was on the faculty at Ohio State University, where he served as associate dean for faculty and held an endowed chair in constitutional law, and he has also taught at Harvard Law School, Hong Kong University, and Oxford University. He is the author of Election Law in a Nutshell and a co-author of the casebook Election Law: Cases and Materials, and his recent scholarship examines digital disinformation, electoral institutions, and the role of law schools in strengthening democracy. A former civil rights lawyer who litigated free speech, racial justice, and voting rights cases, he is frequently cited by national news outlets on election law. Tokaji graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College with an A.B. in English and American literature and philosophy, earned his J.D. from Yale Law School, and clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Dr. Manohar Singh
Dr. Manohar Singh is the 12th chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh, leading the university’s academic and administrative operations. His stated priorities include program innovation, expanding graduate and international education, strengthening enrollment, and deepening academic, corporate, and community partnerships, with a leadership approach grounded in shared governance and inclusive excellence. Before joining UW–Oshkosh, Singh served as interim president of Western Connecticut State University, where he oversaw strategic planning, fiscal and enrollment stability, and the expansion of graduate and professional offerings during a period of institutional transition. He previously served as dean of the School of Graduate and Professional Studies at Southern Connecticut State University, where he led growth in graduate education and expanded access for adult and professional learners, and earlier held deanships and senior leadership roles at other public universities. A first-generation college graduate and an American Council on Education Fellow, Singh has contributed scholarship in finance, economics, and corporate governance. He holds a Ph.D. in finance from Southern Illinois University–Carbondale, a master’s in economics from the University of Waterloo, and undergraduate and graduate degrees in economics from Punjab University in India.
Diana Pathammavong
Diana Pathammavong is a digital and social content creator at Goodwill Greater Milwaukee and Chicago, where she manages the organization’s social media and built its influencer program from the ground up. In the program’s first year, she worked with more than dozens of influencers to raise awareness of Goodwill’s mission and reshape public perception of the organization. She joined Goodwill in 2022 after earlier marketing roles at Western States Envelope & Label, Guardian Credit Union, the Wisconsin Institute of Certified Public Accountants, and Umansky Motor Cars. Pathammavong is active in Milwaukee’s nonprofit and civic community, with a focus on developing future leaders, empowering women, and supporting children in underserved communities. She serves on the board of COA Youth & Family Centers and previously served as vice president and a board member of the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network’s Greater Milwaukee chapter and as diversity and inclusion chair for WGIRLS Milwaukee. She mentored through the Wisconsin Women’s Network and is a member of ElevAsian, where she has helped plan AAPI Heritage Month and Restaurant InvAsian events. Her volunteer work spans organizations including SEA Literacy, the Milwaukee Diaper Mission, the Cinderella Project, Social X MKE, Milwaukee Habitat for Humanity, and the Kinship Community Food Center. She holds a bachelor’s degree in public relations from Marquette University.
Maixia Thao
Maixia Thao is the principal of Samuel Gompers Elementary School in the Madison Metropolitan School District, a small neighborhood school on the city’s north side serving roughly 220 to 270 students in prekindergarten through fifth grade. She began her career at Gompers and returned to lead the school, where she is helping guide its planned transition to a new building. Under her leadership, Gompers has partnered with Children’s Theater of Madison through the Madison Public Schools Foundation’s Adopt-a-School program to build an arts-integration residency reaching every grade level. Before returning to Gompers, Thao served as assistant principal at Sherman Middle School, where she is credited with helping rebuild staffing and school systems during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, and she was part of establishing the Hmong bilingual program at Lake View Elementary. Her own roots in Madison’s youth-development network run deep: as a high school student, she was a member of the inaugural 2004 cohort of Madison School & Community Recreation’s Leaders in Training program, where she learned to lead activities and build trust in communities.
Colleen Bies
Colleen Bies is the regional project director for the Northeast Wisconsin office of the Wisconsin Women’s Business Initiative Corporation (WWBIC), a statewide economic development nonprofit that provides business education, mentoring, and access to capital for small business owners, particularly those in underserved communities. She joined WWBIC in 2021 and administers grant and lending programs across the region. She is also the founder of Colleen Bies Photography, a Neenah-based wedding and boudoir studio serving northeast Wisconsin and the Milwaukee area, and previously opened a tea shop in downtown Appleton. The daughter of Hmong refugees who fled Laos after the Vietnam War, Bies grew up in Oshkosh in a family of nine children. At 17, she enlisted in the military, serving 12 years in the Army National Guard and deploying to Iraq twice while earning a bachelor’s degree in business administration and an MBA, before leaving a corporate finance career for entrepreneurship. She was the photographer for the Color-Brave Photo Project: Black and Brown Faces, a New Narrative, a traveling exhibit organized by Tracey Robertson and FIT Oshkosh that documented people of color in Oshkosh, and she delivered a 2019 TEDxOshkosh talk on why children of immigrants work so hard. Her recognitions include being named one of Fox Valley’s Future 15.
Monis Khan
Monis Khan is a member of the Ozaukee County Board of Supervisors, representing District 20, where he serves on the board’s Health and Human Services Committee. He is also the secretary-treasurer and a founding board member of the Muslim Caucus within the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. Professionally, he is the editor-in-chief of Bucks+, a first-of-its-kind podcast network created by the Milwaukee Bucks and Good Karma Brands. His belief in the power of storytelling inspired a career in media and entertainment that began as a Coro Fellow in Public Affairs at the Coro Center for Civic Leadership. After completing his fellowship in 2012, he worked as an international news journalist and television producer for Al Jazeera English, where his work earned a Webby Award. He then covered the intersection of race, culture, and sports as a video producer at ESPN, and served as vice president of development at P3 Media, where he was an associate producer on the feature-length documentary film Take No Prisoners, which premiered at SXSW in 2025. Khan holds an MBA from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and a bachelor’s degree from Washington University in St. Louis.
Huong Nguyen-Hilfiger
Huong Nguyen-Hilfiger is the chief data officer for the Division of Public Health at the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, where she also serves as director of the Office of Health Informatics. She leads the division’s informatics workforce and statewide data-modernization efforts, focused on using data and analytics to improve population health outcomes. She joined the department in 2021 and was named to the de Beaumont Foundation’s 40 Under 40 in Public Health in 2025. Before entering public health, Nguyen-Hilfiger held roles at UW Health in population health management and business planning and analytics, and earlier worked on electronic health record implementation and quality improvement at Columbia University Medical Center, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, and Epic. From 2018 to 2020, she served as a Dane County supervisor representing District 14, winning re-election in 2019 before declining to seek another term, and she previously served on the board of the Madison Public Library. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biology and psychology from Macalester College and a Master of Public Health in health policy and management from Columbia University.
Mary Lou Yang
Mary Lou Yang is a member of the Green Bay Area Public Schools Board of Education, elected to an at-large seat in April 2026. A GBAPS parent, she campaigned on addressing disparities, supporting educators, and improving transparency and family engagement in the district. Yang has been active in Green Bay civic life and education advocacy. She serves on the board of the NEW Community Clinic, where she chairs its awareness and engagement committee, and is board secretary of the Hmong Center of Green Bay. She has served on the Green Bay School Boundaries Committee and the Brown County Truancy and Attendance Task Force, led anti-bullying initiatives, organized free children’s clothing giveaways for local families, and advocated at the state level for public schools and health care, including in support of legislation that became 2023 Wisconsin Act 266. Her endorsements in the school board race included the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO and Wisconsin Progress.
Pratima Gandhi
Pratima Gandhi is the vice chancellor for finance and administration at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, where she serves as the university’s chief financial officer. She returned to that role on July 1, 2026, after serving nearly a year as the university’s interim chancellor. Gandhi was named interim chancellor in July 2025, succeeding Thomas Gibson after he became chancellor of UW–Milwaukee, and led the university—which enrolls more than 8,500 students across campuses in Stevens Point, Wausau, and Marshfield—through a yearlong leadership transition until Dr. Robert Brinkmann was selected as the permanent leader of the campus. Gandhi joined UW–Stevens Point in 2020 as vice chancellor for finance and administration, overseeing a division that includes financial operations, budget and planning, human resources, facilities, capital planning, risk management, sustainability, parking, and campus police, and she is credited with helping return the university to financial stability and overseeing campus improvements including a new student health and wellness center and the revitalization of the university library. Before coming to Stevens Point, Gandhi spent more than two decades as chief financial officer and treasurer at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, and earlier worked in treasury management and internal audit at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. She holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Indiana University and has more than 25 years of experience in higher education administration.
Raja Sundararajan
Raja Sundararajan is executive vice president and chief strategy officer at Alliant Energy Corporation, the Madison-based utility holding company. In that role, he leads the development of the company’s corporate strategy and its Energy Blueprint, and oversees government affairs, renewables and business development, product offerings, marketing, communications, and supply chain. He joined Alliant Energy in 2023. Sundararajan has nearly two decades of experience in the energy industry. Before Alliant, he spent his career at American Electric Power, where he held roles in corporate finance, investor relations, and market risk before becoming vice president of transmission strategy and then of regulatory services. In 2019 he was named president and chief operating officer of AEP Ohio, and he later served as senior vice president of regulatory and customer solutions and then executive vice president of external affairs. Earlier in his career, he worked as a senior product engineer at General Motors. He has served on several nonprofit boards, including the United Way of Central Ohio, the Columbus Zoo, and the Central Ohio Transit Authority. Sundararajan earned a bachelor of technology in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, a master’s in mechanical engineering from the University of Maryland, and an MBA from the University of Michigan.
Rev. Erica Liu
Rev. Erica Liu is the executive director and pastor of Pres House, a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) campus ministry serving students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She has served Pres House since 2004 and stepped into the executive director role in 2024. A second-generation Taiwanese American who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, she is an ordained Presbyterian minister. When Liu arrived in Madison, Pres House was largely dormant; under her leadership it has grown into an active campus center that reaches hundreds of students a year, expanding to include not only worship and pastoral care but also the Pres House Apartments, a community-focused student housing development, and Candid, a holistic wellness initiative. Over that period the organization’s annual budget grew from roughly $160,000 to more than $2.2 million. Beyond Pres House, Liu has been active in campus and denominational life, serving as president of the University Religious Workers of UW–Madison and on the board of trustees of McCormick Theological Seminary, and she has taught and led at national conferences on collegiate ministry, multicultural ministry, and Asian American young adult formation. She holds a bachelor’s degree in mass communications from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary. A longtime taekwondo practitioner, she earned her third-degree black belt in 2025.
Kristy Vang
Kristy Vang is the chief executive officer of the Hmong Wisconsin Chamber of Commerce, a Milwaukee-based nonprofit that supports small businesses and economic development in underserved communities. She was named CEO in February 2026 after serving as the chamber’s executive vice president and interim executive director, and earlier as its director of operations and finance, roles she had held since joining the organization in 2023. A certified accounting and finance professional, Vang has spent her career in nonprofit financial management. Before the Hmong Chamber, she was finance and property director at City on a Hill Milwaukee, finance director at Girl Scouts of Wisconsin Southeast, and director of accounting at Jewish Family Services, where she worked for more than eight years. She serves as board treasurer of the Fondy Food Center, a board advisor to the Asian Real Estate Association of America’s Greater Milwaukee chapter, and an advisory committee member for the Old World Wisconsin Foundation. Vang earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she is also pursuing a master’s degree in nonprofit management and leadership.
January Vang
January Vang is the interim general manager of the City of Madison Water Utility, which provides drinking water to Wisconsin’s capital city. An accountant by training, she stepped into the role after serving as the utility’s finance manager, and previously spent nearly a decade as finance and administration manager for the City of Madison Parks Division, beginning in 2015. Vang has built her career in accounting and public finance. Before joining the City of Madison, she was a revenue auditor with the Wisconsin Department of Revenue, an accountant with Vision Service Plan in California, and an auditor and tax auditor with Gilbert Associates in the Sacramento area. She has served as treasurer of the Madison Professional & Supervisory Employees Association since 2018. Vang holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration and accountancy from California State University, Sacramento, and a Master of Public Administration from the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh.
Kent Yan
Kent Yan is the owner of Plato Commercial Real Estate in Madison, where he represents both landlords and tenants in commercial sales and leases. Many of his clients are entrepreneurs of color working with limited startup capital, and he has helped find homes for a wide range of local businesses and organizations, including Mishqui Peruvian Cuisine, Little Tibet, Anesis Family Therapy, Savanna Beauty Supply, the Wisconsin Latino Chamber of Commerce, and the Latino Academy of Workforce Development. In a typical year he closes around 60 deals. Yan grew up working in his parents’ downtown Madison Chinese restaurant, Yan’s Soupçon, and became interested in real estate as a child when his family bought a property on University Avenue for the business. He studied real estate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and has worked in the Madison market throughout his career. Beyond brokering deals, he counsels clients on city of Madison grant and loan programs for renovating or purchasing property, sometimes helping them complete applications, and has begun teaching clients the fundamentals of investing and building long-term wealth.
Who’d we miss? Email [email protected] to let us know who should be on next year’s list!
