Heather Panahi was appointed to the Commission by Senate President Karen Spilka in November of 2025. A veteran educator with a Masters of Arts in Social Studies Education, she has spent over 25 years dedicated to young women’s education and leadership. Her work as a teacher at an all-girls’ institution has resulted in many opportunities, including building and coaching a nationally-ranked all-girls Model United Nations team, training students to work in local polling stations, facilitating social justice-focused, immersive student travel experiences to South Africa and Morocco, and co-creating SISTERS, a program that seeks to build meaningful international collaborative partnerships between female students in the U.S. and South Africa, as participants explore together the challenges and successes of women and girls globally. In 2010, she was selected to serve as an educational representative of the US Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs’ TEA-IREX program. In this role, she traveled to Ghana to share teaching strategies and best pedagogical practices with West African educators. She has also traveled to Hangzhou, China and Tokyo, Japan to work with educators in curriculum development. In 2017, she was the recipient of her school’s prestigious Rhinehart Faculty Chair for the Humanities. Ms. Panahi is a lifelong women’s activist and advocate. For five years, she served as a commissioner on the MetroWest Commission on the Status of Women, where she helped to create the MWCSW’s Athena Council, an organization made up of teen girls, who help to inform and advise the Metrowest Commission about the challenges facing adolescent girls in the MetroWest region. She is also the co-founder of Books, Beats and Brushes—an English language, arts and music program for refugee women and their children. Ms. Panahi is a published author and an aspiring photographer.