Board of Directors

Ann Marie Council, JD

Chair

Wendy Moore

Treasurer

Elizabeth McKewon, JD

Secretary

  • Ann Marie Council spent 25 years as a Senior Deputy City Attorney for the City of San Diego, working across nearly every unit in the office, from criminal prosecution and appellate work to gun violence response and probate conservatorships. Over time, her practice increasingly centered on a question that the legal system rarely asks: what happens to the people who keep showing up in the emergency rooms and criminal courts due to mental health issues, and how do we actually help them?

    That question led her to develop and lead the City Attorney's LIFT Program. LIFT was a groundbreaking initiative that brought together EMS, law enforcement, homeless outreach, and local nonprofit medical teams to give San Diego's first responders a legal pathway to access treatment for the city's most vulnerable residents.. The program successfully initiated over 20 probate conservatorships, resulting in a more than 90 percent reduction in associated 911 calls. She co-authored and co-managed a $3 million Proposition 47 grant supporting the SMART program, which provided housing, cognitive treatment, and drug treatment to individuals facing jail terms. She also developed the protocols for San Diego's Gun Violence Restraining Order unit, co-authored the city's municipal code banning novel synthetic drugs, and created the California Drug Matrix, a document categorizing over 250 controlled substances now used by prosecutors and law enforcement statewide and updated annually since 2015.

    Her legislative reach extends beyond San Diego. In the 2025 session alone, proposals she wrote served as partial basis for four California bills: Senate Bills 27, 331, and 367, and Assembly Bill 1105.

    Ann Marie's published work spans academic legal scholarship, policy analysis, and accessible public writing. Her recent publications on CARE Court and Welfare and Institutions Code Section 5200 have informed coverage in the Los Angeles Times and LAist, and have shaped conversations at the Steinberg Institute. She has presented before the League of California Cities, the FBI National Academy for Law Enforcement, and the California Fire, EMS, and Disaster Conference, among others.

    At Quarter Turn Strategies, she focuses on the question of what the law allows versus what systems actually do. She identifies underutilized legal pathways, highlights implementation gaps, and translates complex mental health law into actionable guidance for legislators, local governments, and the professionals who serve people in crisis.

    She holds a JD, magna cum laude, from California Western School of Law and a BA in Sociology from UC San Diego.

Aaron Meyer, MD

Behavioral Health Policy Advisor

Research Contributor

  • Aaron Meyer is a board-certified psychiatrist and family medicine physician whose career has been built around the populations that health systems most often fail: people with serious mental illness, substance use disorders, and complex social needs who cycle through emergency rooms, jails, and crisis services without ever receiving real care.

    He serves as a Health Sciences Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UC San Diego, where his clinical, teaching, and research work focuses on co-occurring disorders, conservatorships, and the intersection of psychiatric care with emergency and legal systems. He was the lead clinical witness before the California State Senate Health Committee on Senate Bill 43, one of the most significant reforms to California's mental health law in decades, and has presented his work before the American Psychiatric Association, the California Association of LPS Hearing Officers, and numerous academic and clinical audiences.

    He is the President of the San Diego Psychiatric Society and the current Governmental Affairs Committee Chair of the California State Association of Psychiatrists, where he helps shape the policy environment that governs psychiatric care statewide.

    His collaboration with Quarter Turn Strategies brings deep clinical expertise to research and publications at the intersection of mental health law, emergency response, and systems reform.

Emily Wood, MD

Intellectual Disability Policy Advisor

Clinical Assessor

Leadership

Ann Marie Council, JD

Chief Executive Officer

Behavioral Health Policy Advisor

Wendy Moore

Chief Operations Officer

Grant Specialist

  • Wendy Moore has spent more than two decades doing something that sounds simple but is anything but: getting resources for the people and organizations that protect everyone else. Her career has been built around first responders, the firefighters, paramedics, and emergency personnel who run toward danger so the rest of us don't have to, and making sure they have the organizational and financial infrastructure to do that work effectively.

     As Executive Director of the San Diego Fire-Rescue Foundation since 2010, she has led fundraising campaigns, secured grants of up to $700,000, built corporate partnerships, and launched events that netted as much as $150,000 in their inaugural year. Her consulting practice, W. Moore Consulting, has extended that reach across California and beyond, helping fire foundations in Orange County, Contra Costa County, and other jurisdictions launch and grow their own development programs.

     What the numbers don't capture is the combination of strategic intelligence, relentless energy, and genuine passion for public safety that colleagues across her career have described as contagious. She brings the same qualities to every engagement, whether she is managing a board, writing a grant, orchestrating a major event, or building a corporate partnership from a cold conversation to a five-figure commitment.

     At Quarter Turn Strategies, Wendy provides the operational and development expertise that turns policy work into sustainable programs. She holds a Professional Certificate in Nonprofit Management from the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and a certificate in The Equity Journey from the Nonprofit Leadership Alliance. She is a member of the Grant Professionals Association and the Association of Fundraising Professionals.

Policy & Research Team

Jordan Lowery, JD

Research Contributor

  • Jordan Lowery brings something rare to the work of mental health policy reform: she has handled it from multiple angles in the field. As a Deputy City Attorney for the City of Sacramento, she currently serves as counsel to public safety departments and as a primary legal resource for city departments working with people experiencing homelessness. Before that, at the County of Shasta, she managed conservatorship hearings and trials, CARE Court implementation, and felony cases, giving her hands-on experience with the legal machinery that most policy discussions only theorize about.

    She also serves as an Adjunct Professor at UC Davis School of Law, where she brings that practical expertise into the classroom and contributes to the next generation of attorneys who will navigate these systems.

    Her collaboration with Quarter Turn Strategies reflects a shared conviction that the gap between mental health law on paper and mental health law in practice is where the real work happens.

    Jordan earned her JD from the UC Irvine School of Law and her Bachelor of Arts from UC Davis.

Alan Moazzam, MD

Research Contributor

  • Alan Moazzam MD MBA FACP is a board-certified internal medicine physician who specializes in caring for hospitalized patients. Dr. Moazzam completed his residency in internal medicine at USC Los Angeles County Hospital. He earned his medical degree at Saint Louis University, in St. Louis, MO and his Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry from UCSD.

    He currently serves as a Health Sciences Associate Clinical Professor with the Division of Hospital Medicine at UCSD. He is chair of the Physician Steering Committee for the Institute of Healthcare Engineering at Jacobs School of Engineering.

    He is a clinical mentor and advisor to the Institute of the Global Entrepreneur (IGE) at UCSD, where he advises teams wanting to commercialize their medical technology. He is a Physician Affiliate to the Jacobs Center for Healthcare Innovation, where he works with researchers to develop AI-based clinical support tools and AI innovations for UCSD's healthcare ecosystem.

    His research interests include night shift work and its effects on human physiology, wearables, and inpatient overnight care. He is a member of the Executive Committee for UCSD's Center for Circadian Biology and Medicine. Dr. Moazzam is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the Society of Hospital Medicine. Prior to joining UC San Diego Health, Dr. Moazzam was a hospitalist at Huntington Memorial Hospital, in Pasadena, Calif.

  • Emily Wood arrived at mental health policy the way most clinicians do: by watching the same people cycle through the same broken systems, and deciding that treating individuals wasn't enough. She completed the MD/PhD program at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, earning her doctorate from the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience with research conducted at the National Institutes of Health. She went on to complete psychiatry residency and child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, and is board-certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in both general and child and adolescent psychiatry. That scientific foundation informs how she reads the evidence on treatment, involuntary care, and systems design, as well as where she pushes back on policy that outpaces it.

    Her public-sector work spans the full arc of Los Angeles County's public mental health infrastructure, from youth in the juvenile halls to adults with serious mental illness at the LA County Jail, one of the largest jail-based mental health programs in the world. That experience gave her close familiarity with the legal frameworks governing psychiatric detention, competency, diversion, and conservatorship, as well as a clear-eyed view of the gap between what the law permits and what systems actually do. She has been an active voice in California mental health policy through the Southern California Psychiatric Society and the California State Association of Psychiatrists, providing legislative testimony and engaging directly with the development of SB 43, CARE Court, and Proposition 1. She also teaches mental health to Superior Court judges through the Judicial Council of California's Center for Judicial Education and Research.

    At Quarter Turn Strategies, Dr. Wood brings deep clinical expertise to questions about how psychiatric care intersects with emergency response, criminal justice, and the legal infrastructure designed to serve people with serious mental illness and neurodevelopmental disorders. She identifies where clinical knowledge is absent from policy decisions, and how this affects outcomes. She currently serves as Medical Director of Spectrum Psych LA and as Clinical Assistant Professor at Charles R. Drew University, where she teaches neuroscience to psychiatry residents and fellows.

Summer 2026 Interns

Ariana R. Grube-Rubino

UNC Greensboro

Brighton Burton

UC San Diego

Nico Huiner

Bates College

Sejal Moorjani

UC Riverside

Lavender Perry

Occidental College