SPEAKER BIOS

Meet the 2023 Conference Speakers

Chris Addy

Chris Addy is a Partner and Head of South East Asia with The Bridgespan Group. He is based in Singapore. Chris has been with Bridgespan for over a decade and in that time, has led the philanthropy practice, launched the impact investing practice, and managed the firms Boston office. He has worked on social issues across the United States, South/Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa, serving organizations such as The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Audacious Project, TPG’s The Rise Fund, Temasek’s ABC Impact, Project ECHO, Last Mile Health, The Drive Electric Campaign, the Tenure Facility, and the African Leadership Group. His topical experience includes education from early childhood to post-secondary completion, public health/healthcare, livelihoods, equity and justice, and climate/environment.

Chris earned his BS in Biology from the University of North Carolina and his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, where he was an FC Austin Scholar. Chris is a proud husband and father of two daughters and an avid outdoorsman and traveler.

Michelle Akande

Michelle Akande is Vice President and Head of Global Commercial Access Partnerships (GCAP) at Pfizer. GCAP scales access to Pfizer’s breakthroughs for the global emerging middle class and bottom of the pyramid through above country commercial sustainable innovative access and financing models. Michelle and her team work with traditional global health players, the capital markets, family offices, HNIs and others to deliver impact by leveraging instruments such as debt swaps, social impact bonds, trade financing, guarantees and a range of catalytic financing instruments Michelle has almost two decades of experience working across the pharmaceutical industry, global health and development finance. She spent over a decade in leadership positions at Janssen, the pharmaceutical companies of Johnson & Johnson, where she worked across market access and commercial operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. She spearheaded Janssen’s entrance into sub-Saharan Africa, introducing the company's oncology business to South and Southern Africa and establishing the company’s presence in Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria. She went on to serve as Country Manager for Nigeria Prior to joining Pfizer, Michelle was Vice President, Health Markets at MedAccess, which works with national governments, multilateral agencies, development finance Institutions, manufacturers and others to facilitate broader access to pharmaceuticals, health devices and services in low and middle-income countries through the deployment of innovative financial instruments and market shaping. Michelle started her career in international development and consulting and holds several degrees including an MSc, Health Policy from Imperial College in London and an MBA from Nottingham University Business School in the United Kingdom.

Jane Aronson

Jane Aronson is a pediatrician and a sought-after child health advocate with a lifetime of collaborative experiences in the nonprofit, academic, and private sector. Her medical specialties include HIV/AIDS, adoption medicine, pediatric infectious diseases, and global behavioral health.  Adept at building infrastructure for systems change, Jane successfully founded and managed a nonprofit, Worldwide Orphans, for 22 years. Her global team served over 150,000 children in 20 countries and under her leadership, 62 toy libraries were established in Bulgaria, Ethiopia, Haiti, Vietnam, and the United States. She also deployed over 412 service learners called “Orphan Rangers” to mentor trademarked Element of Play programs providing art, camp, crafts, dance, music, sport, theater, writing programs building in-country capacity and sustainability. Today, as Director of Global Behavioral Health Network for Children and Young People, Jane envisions more for kids who live in foster care around the world and she consults with orphanages in order to provide better health care for special needs children.

In addition to running several successful medical practices in both academic and private practice settings, Jane has been a visiting professor and guest lecturer at many universities and medical schools including, SUNY-Stony Brook, Cornell Weill Medicine, Columbia University, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Mount Sinai, UMDNJ-School of Osteopathic Medicine, Rutgers Medical School, NYU Langone, Tufts School of Medicine, SUNY Downstate.

David Aylward

David Aylward is an expert on the intersection of social innovation, public policy, communications and IT, finance, politics, and related fields on US and global health, particularly in understanding and designing the complex coalitions and systems required for systemic transformation. He is an Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the School of Medicine of the University of Colorado and a Senior Advisor at the Farley Health Policy Center where he is designing systems to help marginalized populations thrive. He is helping lead a broad coalition of leaders of communities, social services and health to address gross health disparities and transform the wellbeing of underserved people in Colorado. David has directed global health programs for Ashoka and the United Nations Foundation. He was the first Executive Director of the global mHealth Alliance. He has extensive experience with business and non-profit startups. David has a BA in Government from Dartmouth College, and a JD with High Honors from George Washington University Law School where he was a member of the Law Review. He is married with three children and ten amazing grandchildren.

Priyanka Bhasin

Priyanka Bhasin leads Acumen’s partnership engagement with corporations. Priyanka seeks to find synergies between corporate sustainability goals and Acumen’s work to drive meaningful impact on the lives of the poor. Priyanka has helped to build and sustain Acumen’s corporate portfolio of partners and has made corporate partner engagement a mainstay of our strategy.

Prior to joining Acumen, Priyanka was at Catchafire, a for-profit social venture that works to match professionals with nonprofits on meaningful skills based volunteering projects in order to build capacity for non profit organizations. Priyanka was also an Associate at Sanford C. Bernstein’s Private Wealth Management group. Priyanka has also worked as an entrepreneur, launching her own event planning company, catering to the niche market of South Asian weddings. Priyanka holds an MBA from NYU Stern as well as a BS in Industrial Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University.

Jeffrey Blander

Jeffrey Blander is a leapfrog innovator, strategic disruptor, and transformation specialist. Jeff is recognized for his exemplary leadership, innovative mindset, communication skills, and proven track record of success. Embedded within his DNA, is the belief in the game-changing power of the public, private, and nonprofit sectors working together. That by doing so, as local and global communities, we can reimagine sustainable financing for public health delivery systems, aggressively deploy new medical technologies, and accelerate equitable access to lifesaving services.

Jeff has over 25 years of professional experience and brings a unique perspective in shaping new ideas to tackle our biggest global challenges. Experience includes: Current positions as the Chief Innovation Officer and Coordinator, PEPFAR Program Management at the U.S. Department of State, supporting the global battle against two pandemics for HIV/AIDS and COVID-19. Jeff received his Doctorate and Masters Degrees from The Harvard School of Public Health and his Bachelor of Science from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Adeline Boatin

Adeline Boatin is an Assistant Professor in Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology at Harvard Medical School and an Attending at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Boston, USA. She received her undergraduate education at Harvard University, her medical degree at Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons and an MPH with a focus on international health at the Harvard T. Chan School of Public Health. She was trained in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Harvard Integrated Obstetrics and Gynecology Residency Program, where she also served as chief resident. She completed a two-year Global Health Research Scholarship at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) where she focused on innovative methods to improve obstetric care delivery and decision-making around caesarean delivery in resource-limited settings. In addition to obstetric and gynecologic clinical care and resident education at MGH she is an NIH-funded clinical researcher with a focus on reducing global reproductive health inequities. Her current research focuses on using wireless monitoring technology to overcome human resource limitations in post-operative care and the spectrum of quality of care around reproductive surgery in low and middle-income countries. She co-directs Research at the Program for Global Surgery and Social Change and is director of the MGH Global OB/GYN Program. She is also affiliate faculty of the MGH Center for Global Health. Adeline is a Ghanaian native and has lived, studied and worked in Zambia, Uganda, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Tricia Bolender

Tricia Bolender is a strategy consultant and executive coach who works with leaders who are changing the world. Her coaching bridges head and heart, helping clients lead courageously and be more loyal to their dreams than to their fears.

She received her BA from Harvard University and MBA from Columbia Business School. She is passionate about authentic leadership and living a purpose-driven life, and has spoken on this topic at TEDx, Yale, MIT, Columbia, and at the Unite For Sight Global Health & Innovation Conference for the last ten years.

Ned Breslin

Ned Breslin has led a series of national and global initiatives that have rethought outcomes, made it impossible to leave anyone behind and ultimately changed funding flows from philanthropic investment to sustained public finance.  He is a winner of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship (2011) and is breaking into new areas once again. 

Cal Bruns

Cal Bruns. In his first career, Cal spent 20 years across 5 continents as a highly awarded creative director with a global advertising agency Leo Burnett. Fifteen years ago he pivoted to co-found Africa's first Human-Centered Design firm, Matchboxology. By bringing those communities and individuals closest to challenges into the problem-solving process, they've helped global brands like Levi's® and international donors like USAID and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to improve our impact in public health, enterprise development, policy implementation, and positive behavior change. While living in South Africa for the past two decades, Cal has become somewhat of a global expert on empathy and human-centered design and Matchboxology has won international accolades for innovation and creative excellence.  

Boris Bulayev

Boris Bulayev is the CEO and Co-founder of Educate!, which he co-founded when he was 19. Under his leadership, the organization has grown to become the biggest youth skills provider in East Africa and has received various recognition, including a highlight by Bill Gates and recognition from the World Bank’s S4YE's Impact Portfolio, and The Brookings Institution as one of 14 case studies in their global scaling education learning initiative.

Corrado Cancedda

Corrado Cancedda is the Director of the Botswana University of Pennsylvania Partnership and Strategic Advisor for Academic Partnerships at the Center for Global Health of the Perelman School of Medicine, at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to his current position, he was an Associate Physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School. Corrado has over twelve years of experience in Global Health as a clinician, educator, researcher, implementer, leader, advocate, and scholar. He has lived and worked extensively in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria, Lesotho, Haiti, and Peru. His academic interest lies in the establishment, implementation, and evaluation of the impact of large-scale and multi-disciplinary Global Health Initiatives. He is especially interested in health workforce development and health system strengthening, with a particular focus on the notions of institutional capacity strengthening and sustainability.

Arachu Castro

Arachu Castro is Samuel Z. Stone Chair of Public Health in Latin America and Director of the Collaborative Group for Health Equity in Latin America at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, in New Orleans. She is a medical anthropologist trained in public health. Before joining Tulane in 2013, she was Associate Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Among other awards, Dr. Castro is the recipient of the 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship for her research on the management of HIV and syphilis during pregnancy in Latin America and the Caribbean. Currently, she researches the differential impact of obstetric violence on maternal and child health outcomes and the indirect effects of the management of the COVID-19 pandemic on access to health services for women, children, and adolescents. She has testified in the United States Congress and Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittees on the Western Hemisphere on COVID-19 vaccine access in Latin America and the Caribbean. Dr Castro is former President of the Society for Medical Anthropology. She’s a member of WHO’s Strategic and Technical Advisory Group of Experts for Maternal, Newborn, Child, Adolescent Health & Nutrition, the Executive Committees of the Health Equity Network of the Americas and the Sustainable Health Equity Movement, and of IPPF's International Medical Advisory Panel. She has published widely.

Dixon Chibanda

Dixon Chibanda is a psychiatrist based in Zimbabwe. He is the founder of the Friendship Bench and is director of the African Mental Health research Initiative. He is also an Associate Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical medicine attached to the Centre for Global Mental Health.

James Afful Clarke

James Afful Clarke graduated from the University of Ghana Medical School with an MBChB. After a year of internship at Korle Bu Teaching Hospital in Ghana, he worked as a General Practitioner and did a General Surgery Residency at the University of Saarland Medical Faculty, Germany, and thereafter practiced as a general surgeon in Ghana. In 1996, he obtained a Postgraduate Diploma in Ophthalmology from the West African Postgraduate Medical College and has since been a practicing ophthalmologist. He also holds a Master's in Public Health (MPH), and he also has a Diploma in Community Health and Tropical Medicine from the Institute of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in Berlin, Germany.

He founded and directs Crystal Eye Clinic in Accra, Ghana, where he provides outreach services in eye care and performs various surgical procedures, including corneal transplantation. He is the only ophthalmologist providing corneal transplantation in Ghana. He is also a member of Unite For Sight's Medical Advisory Board and leads Unite For Sight's programs in Ghana as Ghana Medical Director.

Charlotte Cole

Charlotte Cole is co-founder and executive director of Blue Butterfly, an education organization that uses children’s media to advance international development goals. For over twenty-five years, Charlotte has applied her expertise in curriculum design, educational content creation, and research in the support of large-scale educational media projects in more than thirty countries across the globe. Prior to co-founding Blue Butterfly, she was senior vice president of global education at Sesame Workshop in New York City where she oversaw the education, research, and community engagement activities associated with the company’s international co-productions of Sesame Street. She was a primary visionary for the advancement of education innovations such as the creation of Kami, the HIV-positive Muppet character who appears on the South African version of Sesame Street, the development of strong educational content designed to support girls’ education in countries such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh and India, and initiatives to promote respect and understanding across group divides in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, Kosovo and elsewhere. Charlotte received her doctorate in human development and psychology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is the editor of The Sesame Effect: The Global Impact of the Longest Street in the World published by Routledge.

Scott Corlew

Scott Corlew is faculty at the Program in Global Surgery and Social Change at Harvard Medical School.  He previously served as Chief Medical Officer for Interplast, now called Resurge International.  At Resurge, he worked to expand the burn programs and continue a re-direction toward surgical development and capacity building, working with programs to develop surgical capacity and delivery in South Asia, Central and South America, and sub-Saharan Africa.   

A plastic surgeon and general surgeon by training, his research interests are in the assessment and facilitation of surgical care delivery in low- and lower-middle income countries, and in economic evaluation of health care delivery.  His major specific role at PGSSC is in facilitating National Surgical, Obstetric, and Anesthesia Plans in LMICs, particularly in the Southern Africa Development Community.

Sam Daley-Harris

Sam Daley-Harris founded the anti-poverty lobby RESULTS in 1980, co-founded the Microcredit Summit Campaign in 1995 with Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus and FINCA Founder John Hatch, and founded Civic Courage in 2012. Civic Courage helps non-profits transform their members into courageous citizen leaders and uses public speaking and the media to inspire Americans to engage powerfully with their democracy. Sam coached Citizens Climate Lobby its first 7 years and is author of Reclaiming Our Democracy: Healing the Break between People and Government. Ashoka founder Bill Drayton called Sam “one of the certified great social entrepreneurs of the last decades.”

Paul Ellingstad

Paul Ellingstad: Managing Partner, PTI Advisors. Paul advises and accompanies leaders who want to innovate and grow by effectively navigating breakthrough change. He is a veteran of the technology sector and worked at iconic brands Gateway, Compaq, and HP. Paul is now Managing Partner at PTI Advisors, where he works with clients in all three sectors, especially on the growing importance of sustainability and responsible business in society. He is a lifelong learner and a systems thinker. He is passionate about mentoring and believes that mentors normally learn more than they can ever possibly teach. Paul is a fellow in the Aspen Institute’s Business & Society Program, he serves as a director on several boards, he is a youth leadership advocate and a life-long member of the Scouting movement.

Kevin Frick

Kevin Frick is a health economist and professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, where he has been on faculty for nine years following more than sixteen years at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He has long had an interest in how economics motivates eye care-seeking behavior and the cost-effectiveness of interventions to promote eye health and refractive error correction. His research has included both domestic (e.g., age-related macular degeneration) and international projects (e.g., trachoma). For most of his nine years at the Carey Business School, he served as the vice dean for education. In that time, he led a multi-faceted team of professionals serving the students in a variety of roles including career development that was focused on both coaching for domestic and international professional development and employer relations for domestic and international jobs. Since stepping down as vice dean and returning to a teaching-based and research-based faculty role, he has had the opportunity to speak about mentorship, leadership in academia, advocacy, and lifelong learning.

Rebecca Hardin

Rebecca Hardin, Faculty Director for Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability, has long worked at the interface of environmental anthropology, community health and corporate political accountability. Her current research and teaching integrates Digital and Environmental Justice issues, and undergirds new approaches to the creation and iterative improvement of open educational resources for both classroom and organizational or civic learning about social and environmental sustainability.

Bethany Hedt-Gauthier

Bethany Hedt-Gauthier is a biostatistician specializing in health systems and implementation science research in sub-Saharan Africa. She leads a portfolio of research related to access to and quality of surgical care in rural district hospitals in Rwanda. Dr. Hedt-Gauthier is committed to improving partnerships in global health research, by innovating within her own practice and by leading research and advocacy on issues of power dynamics and inequitable research collaborations.

Laura Herman

Laura is a Partner in Dalberg’s New York office with nearly 20 years of experience in global development. Her expertise focuses on Global Health, Gender Equity and Inclusive Business, working with organizations across the social sector spectrum – corporations, private foundations, multilaterals and NGOs. She has worked on issues of strategy, stakeholder engagement, new market entry, and collaborative approaches to social change. Her work has included in-country research in dozens of countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to inform strategies, evaluate in-country operations of partners, assess impact and opportunities for new initiatives, and develop relationships for long-term strategic initiatives.

Prior to joining Dalberg, Laura was based in Singapore as VP of Strategy and Advocacy for the inclusive business unit at Essilor where she focused on developing new business models to bring eye glasses to the 2.5 billion people worldwide who need a pair of glasses and don’t currently have a way to access them. Laura started her career at Deloitte Consulting, focused on large scale organizational change initiatives. She is a former term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and an advisor to AshokaU. She was honored to be named one of the “50 Most Influential Social Innovators” and one of the “Women Super Achievers” by the World Sustainability Congress in 2018 and 2019.

Laura holds an MBA with a certificate in Public Management from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. She also holds a MA in International Policy from Stanford University and a BBA in International Business from the University of Michigan.

Brian Heuser

Brian Heuser is an Assistant Professor of the Practice of International Education Policy in the Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. He has research and work experience in more than 30 countries, including as a US Embassy Policy Specialist in the Republic of Georgia, where he worked on issues related to scientific and academic research conducted by tertiary institutions of the post-Soviet region. His research includes the role of universities in creating economic development, issues related to the relationships between global health policy and education policy, and cross-national differences in higher education functions.

Lisa Hirschhorn

Lisa Hirschhorn is Professor of Medical Social Science and Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and Senior Director for Implementation and Improvement Science at Last Mile Health. Trained in medicine and HIV, she is an expert in implementation research and improvement science, actively applying these methods to improve the quality and equity of care in resource-limited settings including maternal and child health, HIV, primary care, and non-communicable diseases. Her current work includes understanding national strategies to effectively implement evidence-based interventions to reduce deaths in children under 5 in low and middle-income countries, supporting research of task shifting and system redesign to improve hypertension care in Nigeria, evaluating peer navigators to expand testing and treatment for youth in Nigeria, measuring experiential quality for MCH care in Liberia, and expanding access to PrEP for women in Chicago. She has served in leadership positions in a number of initiatives including as commissioner for the Lancet Global Health Commission on high-quality health systems and consultant to WHO in work to measure and improve quality in fragile and conflict settings. She is also active in building research capacity in implementation science and patient-centered outcome research in low-resourced settings through active collaborations in Rwanda, Tanzania, Botswana, and Nigeria. Current COVID-related work includes supporting work to advise Liberia in effective and safe approaches to leverage CHW to respond to the pandemic while sustaining PHC, using implementation research to understand the response in South Korea and evaluating models able to sustain quality primary care during COVID response and exploring equity in the response and impact.

Katja Iversen

Katja Iversen is an executive adviser, author, board member and global advocate on sustainability, purpose driven leadership, global health and gender equality.  She is a sought keynote speaker and moderator, and she holds various board and executive advisory roles, including with the World Economic Forum, Women Political Leaders, 4LifeSolutions, Kings College Institute for Women’s Leadership, Goal Goals World Cup and Global Health 50/50.

Katja Iversen, who is Danish, has a background as a leader in civil society, the United Nations, and as a cross-cultural leadership trainer for Fortune 500 executives. She has been a member of Prime Minister Trudeau’s and President Macron’s G7 Gender Equality Councils, an advisor to the Clinton Global Initiative, on MIT Solve Challenge’s Women and Tech Leadership Group, and the President of the global NGO, Women Deliver. 

Katja is appointed a UN Food Champion and Copenhagen Goodwill Ambassador. She was one of the original members of 100Women@Davos, was named Dane of the Year in 2018, and included in Apolitical’s Top 20 of Most Influential People in Gender Policy in 2019. In 2018, her book on women and networking came out.

Krishna Jafa

Krishna Jafa is the CEO of Medic, a tech-for-good nonprofit building open source tools for community health systems globally. As a physician, epidemiologist, and public health executive, Krishna brings 25 years of deep expertise in health system design and strengthening, digital health innovation, and complex global partnerships on the frontier of public health progress. As a visible and visionary leader in the movement for global health equity, Krishna builds community, creates space and momentum for change, and continues the legacy of values-driven leadership into Medic's second decade of work. Krishna previously held key leadership roles at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Population Services International, and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A deeply committed advocate for women’s and girls’ empowerment, health and reproductive rights, Krishna holds a Medical degree from Rajasthan University (India), an MPH from Harvard University (USA), is an alumna of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, and serves as an Advisory Council member of Last Mile Health and Board member of the Washington Institute of Coagulation.

Bobby Jefferson

Bobby Jefferson is DAI’s first-ever VP, Global Head of Diversity, Equity, Engagement, and Inclusion (DEEI) steeped in the issues of racial and social justice. He has reflected on those issues for two decades as a professional in the global development industry. He has lent his insights by serving on DAI’s Racial and Social Justice Initiative (RSJI) Steering Committee since its inception.

In 2020 Bobby joined the Board of Directors of the Society for International Development-Washington, (SIDW) D.C. Chapter, a position to which he was re-elected in 2021. As a member of SID-Washington’s Executive Committee, he has been instrumental in shaping the organization’s strategic thinking on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI): chairing the DEI Committee; establishing the Race, Ethnicity, and Diversity Workgroup; and setting in motion the DEI Strategic Plan. Bobby is a founding member organization of the Coalition for Racial & Ethnic Equity in Development (CREED) and a co-chair of the Council of International Development Companies (CIDC) new DEIA Committee. He participates in British Expertise International’s Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion Working Group.

Michelle Joseph

Michelle Joseph is an academic trauma and orthopaedic surgeon, Instructor in Global Health and Social Medicine at the Program in Global Surgery and Social Change (PGSSC) at Harvard Medical School. She graduated from University College London and trained on the Warwick Orthopaedic Programme. During her orthopaedic training, Michelle completed her PhD in Medicine, researching the biomechanics and conducting a randomised clinical trial in knee replacement surgery. In 2018, she was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and appointed as a National Institute Health Research Clinical Lecturer at the University of Warwick. In 2017, following her strong desire to work with populations facing limited access to health care and resources, Michelle was appointed to the board of trustees of an international NGO, Hope Health Action. Two years later, she was appointed as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Medical School where she is now academic faculty, turning her focus fully to global health, specifically global surgery and health equity.  Most recently, in addition to her other positions, Michelle has been appointed as the Stepping Strong Orthoplastics Fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. At the PGSSC, Michelle Joseph holds a co-leadership position as Chief Strategy and Health Equity Officer, leading health equity research and anti-racism training, for which she is one of the inaugural recipients of the American College of Surgeons – Board of Regents Innovative Grant for DEI and Anti-Racism.  Michelle is the Director of the Equity Research Hub, a platform that aims to make research more equitable. Michelle mentors a number of students in the USA, Haiti, Dominica, and Nigeria.

Jon Jureidini

Jon Jureidini is a child psychiatrist who also trained in philosophy (PhD, Flinders University), critical appraisal (University of British Columbia) and psychotherapy (Tavistock Clinic). He heads Adelaide University’s Critical and Ethical Mental Health research group (CEMH), which conducts research, teaching and advocacy to promote safer, more effective and more ethical research and practice in mental health; and the Paediatric Mental Health Training Unit (PMHTU), providing training and support to medical students GPs, allied health professionals, teachers and counsellors in non-pathologising approaches to primary care mental health. He is co-author of The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine. Wakefield Press, 2020.

Cleveland Justis

An accomplished organizational leader in the environmental and entrepreneurial arenas for the past 25 years, Cleveland Justis is principal at Potrero Group, a research-based strategy and management consulting for the 21st century social sector. Cleveland has held faculty positions at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, UC Davis Graduate School of Management, Georgetown University, and Dominican University. Cleveland has organized many conferences and programs and is a sought-after keynote speaker, having served in a keynote role at Net Impact, the Ahwahnee Conference, the Environmental Forum, and the Agricultural Institute of Marin. He received his MBA in strategic management and finance at the University of California, Davis Graduate School of Management his PhD in social entrepreneurship at UC Davis. Cleveland’s research interests include public/private partnerships, entrepreneurship, network analysis, and innovation. He currently directs the Executive Leadership Program at University of California, Davis.

Siobhan Kelley

Siobhan Kelley is the Director of Communications at Last Mile Health, an organization that partners with governments to save lives in the world's most remote communities by training professionalized community health workers. She joined Last Mile Health in 2013 as a Global Health Corps fellow and was the founding member of the Communications team, where she now oversees the organization's brand, thought leadership, and storytelling. Siobhan also serves on the organization’s gender mainstreaming and anti-racism working groups. Prior to Last Mile Health, she was on the founding team for Partners In Health’s community organizing initiative, PIH Engage, and was a community organizer for a number of global issues. She graduated with a BA & MA in International Development and Social Change from Clark University.

Firdaus Kharas

Firdaus Kharas is a world-renowned creator of mass communications, speaker, consultant, and thought leader on creativity and communications. He is a global leader in using animation for social change. He is the author of Creativity: The Key to a Remarkable Life.

Kaveh Khoshnood

Kaveh Khoshnood is an Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Yale School of Public Health and executive committee member at Yale Council on Middle East Studies. He is co-founder of Yale Violence and Health Study Group and a faculty member of the Program on Conflict, Resiliency, and Health at the Yale MacMillan Center. He is trained as an infectious disease epidemiologist and has more than three decades of domestic and international experience in HIV prevention research among people who use drugs and other at-risk populations. Kaveh’s research interests include: 1) epidemiology and prevention of HIV/AIDS, 2) research ethics and 3) humanitarian health. His projects are primarily in China, Lebanon, and Bhutan. He teaches courses on public health ethics and global health and is developing a new course on humanitarian health.

Felicia Knaul

Felicia Knaul (BA, University of Toronto; MA, PhD, Harvard University) is Director, Institute for Advanced Study of the Americas and Professor, Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami. A health and social sector economist, Felicia maintains a synergistic program of research and advocacy. She has produced over 250 publications and books including a memoir on her cancer experience. Felicia spearheads research networks, co-chairs both the Lancet Commission on Cancer And Health Systems and the Lancet Commission on Gender-based Violence and Maltreatment of Young People, is a member of the Lancet Commission on Breast Cancer and chaired The Lancet Commission on Global Access to Palliative Care and Pain Relief. As director of the Harvard Global Equity Initiative, she founded the Global Task Force on Cancer Care and Control and led the publication of the book "Closing the Cancer Divide” in 2012 that inspired research, policy, and advocacy. She is founding President of Tómatelo a Pecho, a non-governmental organization dedicated to women’s cancers and health, and leads research on health systems with the Mexican Health Foundation. She has extensive experience living and working in the Americas, including in governmental leadership positions in Mexico and Colombia.

Gene Kwan

Gene Kwan is an Assistant Professor and Cardiologist at Boston University School of Medicine and an Associate Director for Cardiovascular Research and Training at Partners In Health. He has been active in developing and studying integrated chronic disease platforms in Rwanda and Haiti since 2008. His current work raises awareness for chronic diseases of poverty in rural low-income countries and provides an evidence base for thoughtful interventions to improve health and wellbeing for the most vulnerable patients.

Ana Rowena Mallari

Ana Rowena Mallari is Co-Founder and CEO of QuestBridge, a social venture connecting America's brightest low-income students to the nation's best universities and life opportunities. QuestBridge works to revolutionize the way leading colleges and universities recruit talented low-income students, and the way these students approach their educations and futures. The QuestBridge partnership includes 48 of the nation's best colleges and universities, including Yale, Stanford, Princeton, MIT, Amherst, and Pomona. Ana has previously held positions as Co-Founder and former VP of Content at Shmoop.com, management consultant at McKinsey & Co., and consulting scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund. Ana speaks nationally to university, corporate, non-profit, and general audiences on topics such as access to higher education, the abundance of untapped talent in America, diversity and inclusion, high-impact social innovation, and making the most of college and early career. She serves on the Board of iSing Silicon Valley, and as an Advisor to D&I In Practice, Service2School for veterans, and numerous other companies and nonprofits. Ana holds a BA in Human Biology from Stanford and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

Anatole Manzi

Anatole Manzi serves as Deputy Chief Medical Officer in charge of Clinical Quality and Health Systems Strengthening at Partners In Health (PIH). In his current role, he liaises with PIH-supported countries to develop and implement quality improvement and health systems strengthening strategies. His work involves engineering innovative solutions to integrate equity and quality management with clinical practice. He also serves as Director of PIH’s Learning Collaborative aiming at strengthening COVID-19 contact tracing and expanded public health response through learning and exchange series targeted to expert implementers as part of the US Public Health Accompaniment Unit. Manzi is the founder of Move Up Global, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, striving to improve access to better health and education in remote and resource-constrained communities. His research focuses on evaluating healthcare quality improvement and innovative interventions to eradicate Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) in resource-limited settings. He is assistant professor of global health at University of Global Health Equity and Lecturer on Medicine in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Regan Marsh

Regan Marsh is the Senior Technical Lead for Partners In Health’s US Public Health Accompaniment Unit, working to support the COVID-19 public health response. She is also Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School and faculty in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She has worked with PIH since 2008, in Malawi, Haiti, Sierra Leone, Rwanda and Liberia to strengthen health equity with a focus on emergency systems and health systems strengthening. At the Brigham, she co-leads the Emergency Department health equity initiatives and, since 2020, has helped lead PIH’s domestic COVID-19 response, supporting public health departments in testing, contact tracing, and vaccination to stop the pandemic.

Marie H. Martin

Marie Martin serves as the Associate Director for Education and Training at the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health (VIGH) and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy in the Vanderbilt School of Medicine (VUSM). At VIGH, she is responsible for curricular and academic program development in global health at Vanderbilt and abroad. Dr. Martin directs the Global Health track of the Vanderbilt MPH Program, oversee the Graduate Certificate in Global Health, teach multiple courses in global health across the university, and chairs the Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s (VUMC) Global Health Education Committee. Her current grant-funded work in Zambia, Liberia and Ethiopia is focused on faculty development, mentorship, and health science education strengthening. Prior to her current role, she was as a Fulbright Scholar to Japan in international education, directed a multi-site international service-learning program, and managed the first parliamentary internship program in the Czech Republic under the European Union. She was recently awarded the 2021 Consortium of Universities in Global Health (CUGH) Velji Global Health Award for Teaching Excellence and the 2022 Margaret Cuninggam Mentoring Award.

Kala Mehta

Kala Mehta is an Associate Adjunct Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. Kala focuses her research on both domestic and international vulnerable populations. Her early work examines disparities in older adult health. Her more recent work focuses on the intersection of social entrepreneurship and health in a global context. From 2011-2014, she was a faculty affiliate of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she led a research evaluation on the impact of a management and transportation intervention on health in Zambia. Her current research evaluates a large maternal and child health intervention in Bihar, India.

Kala received her DSc. in Epidemiology from the Erasmus University Medical School in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and has obtained post-graduate specialization in epidemiology and clinical research from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the University of California, San Francisco.

Rorisang Mhlaba

Rorisang Mhlaba is Head of School at Ubuntu Pathways in Gqeberha, Eastern Cape, South Africa, a nonprofit institution in the Township that focuses on holistic education supporting scholars and their families with academic, psychosocial, and high-quality medical services.  She is passionate about serving and working with people with underprivileged backgrounds to be part of the solution and working from cradle to career with scholars and their local community enabling a long-term solution to poverty in South Africa. Rorisang has a Bachelor’s Degree in Health Sciences in Physiology and Psychology and a Postgraduate Degree in Education.

 

D.C. Moore

D.C. Moore is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Griot International Partners (GIP), a growth equity investor in African SMEs in the industrials and infrastructure sectors. GIP takes an operational approach in supporting management in order to realize significant commercial and impact returns. GIP seeks investments that support inclusive and decarbonized growth across the African continent. Before starting GIP in 2019, D.C. was the CIO of Consolidated Infrastructure Group Limited (CIG) based in South Africa. His responsibilities included M&A and investments and supporting executives in developing and executing strategy in the power, waste management, rail and construction sectors. He invested over $106 million and raised over $115 million in debt. Prior to CIG, D.C. was at McKinsey serving clients in the infrastructure and industrials sectors. He also spent time as an engineer at Lockheed Martin and Motorola. D.C. received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering with Honors from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2000. In 2005, he graduated from Wharton with an MBA in Finance.

Julie Mountcastle

Julie Mountcastle is Head of School, Grade 2/3 Teacher, and a member of the founding team of Slate School in North Haven, Connecticut, where she developed and leads the school’s unique curiosity-driven curriculum. Julie has been an educator since 2001 and has been at the forefront of child-centered education. Before becoming a teacher, Julie was a professional actress and appeared in plays and musicals on Broadway, on London's West End, and in regional theatre across the country, and she is a passionate advocate for arts in the classroom.

Ziyanda Ndyoko

Ziyanda Ndyoko is the External Relations (ER) and Job Skills Training (JST) Manager at Ubuntu Pathways a NPO based in Zwide, Port Elizabeth. Ziyanda has been in the NPO space for the past 5 years focusing on development particularly on youth development.

She holds a degree in International Relations and Media Studies from the University of the Witwatersrand and a Master’s degree from Shanghai University in International Trade. During her time at the University of the Witwatersrand, she got chosen to be a part of the prestigious African Presidential Roundtable. This is a platform that allows for discourse amongst former African heads of states together with the youth about issues affecting African youth and other issues affecting Africa as a whole. In 2010, Ziyanda was selected by the China Scholarship Council to attain her Master’s degree in Shanghai, China where she stayed for 3 years.

Santa Ono

Santa J. Ono is the 15th President & Vice-Chancellor of the University of British Columbia. Installed as President and Vice-Chancellor in 2016, he also serves as Chair of the U15 Group of Universities, on the Board of Directors of Universities Canada, and as Past Chair of Research Universities of British Columbia. He is also a member of the Boards of Fulbright and MITACS. He has also served on the Boards of the American Council on Education and the Council on Competitiveness and as Chief Innovation Advisor to the Province of British Columbia. Prior to his appointment as President and Vice-Chancellor of UBC, Dr. Ono served as the 28th President of the University of Cincinnati and Senior Vice-Provost and Deputy to the Provost at Emory University. A molecular immunologist educated at the University of Chicago and McGill, he has taught at Johns Hopkins, Harvard University and University College London. He has advised national and regional governments on higher education and mental health. He has also advised companies such as GSK, Johnson & Johnson, Merck and Novartis on R&D. He has served on a number of editorial boards, including Immunology, The Journal of Biological Chemistry, The Journal of Immunology and The Journal of Allergy & Clinical Immunology. He has been inducted as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, the National Academy of Inventors, USA and the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars.

Gary Oppenheimer

Gary Oppenheimer is a nationally recognized game changer in the landscape of food waste, hunger and disruptive innovations.  He is also a CNN Hero, a World Food Prize nominee, Points of Light winner, lecturer /  keynote speaker (including two TEDx talks), and the founder / executive director of a nationwide nonprofit called AmpleHarvest.org (yes… that’s its real name).   A self-described aging geek, he pioneered in microcomputers and communications in the 1970’s and was a thought leader in the electronic mail space in the 1990s.  
As director of a community garden in 2009, he learned about the waste of food in many plots and created a local program called “Ample Harvest” to get the surplus harvest to local food pantries.  Realizing this waste of food was a nationwide problem that resulted from misinformation and missing information, he created this cloud based solution to educate, encourage and enable America’s 62 million growers to share their ample harvest with one of 8,000 local food pantries in all 50 states.  As most food pantries are hosted by a house of worship, he also created a program for the faith community called Faith Fights Food Waste to enable clergy of all faiths to give faith specific food waste sermons – including garden food donations.  He is now working on expanding AmpleHarvest.org to Indian Country – to help assure that Tribal reservations nationwide benefit from the work AmpleHarvest.org has been doing in 4,200 communities for the past 13 years. He is a strong believer in the idea that to do the impossible, you must first believe it isn’t.

Wendy Ostroff

Wendy Ostroff is an applied developmental and cognitive psychologist and Associate Professor in the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies at Sonoma State University, where she teaches future teachers. The author of the books, Understanding How Young Children Learn (2012, ASCD) and Cultivating Curiosity in K-12 Classrooms (2016, ASCD), and numerous articles on children’s learning, she is passionate about innovative and emergent pedagogies, and state of the art teacher education. She leads workshops and professional development events worldwide on curiosity, cognition, and the brain.

Daniel Palazuelos

Daniel Palazuelos is a global health implementer-educator who holds positions at Harvard Medical School (HMS), the Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), and Partners In Health (PIH). He started his career in global health equity by living and working with community health workers (CHWs) in impoverished communities in Chiapas, Mexico, and these grassroots experiences have deeply influenced his approach to addressing the biggest challenges in global health. Over the last decade, he helped to launch Compañeros En Salud - México (PIH's program in Mexico), the Financing Alliance for Health (which helps governments design and fund ambitious, affordable, and at-scale community health programs), and the Community Health Impact Coalition (a five-year quality initiative by some of the field’s most innovative implementers to catalyze the adoption of high-impact community health systems design).

Tim Peck

As an Executive Portfolio Director of Health at IDEO, Tim Peck thinks about big societal problems and organizing teams and technologies to solve them. In particular, he is interested in designing experiences at the end-of-life, connected health, and combating loneliness and isolation. Tim’s been practicing human-centered design for over a decade, having lived in a nursing home for 3 months to research and found Call9, a health technology company which saved the lives of seniors and millions of healthcare dollars. Having personally experienced critical illness himself, he has an intimate knowledge of medicine as a patient and a provider. Tim is attuned to the rigors of leadership, especially after leading a team of 39 talented residents through a year that included the Boston Marathon bombings. Tim holds a medical degree from New York University School of Medicine, and was chief resident at Harvard Medical School. He is a serial entrepreneur whose mission is to guide the health industry to become more human-centered. Outside of work, you’ll find Tim in Brooklyn running very slowly while training for his next marathon with his wife, or working on the family farm outside Louisville, Kentucky.

Allyson Pollock

Allyson Pollock is clinical professor of public health at Newcastle University and honorary professor at UCL. She was director of Newcastle’s Institute of Health & Society, and has set up and directed research and teaching units at Queen Mary University of London and the University of Edinburgh, establishing some of the UK’s leading undergraduate and postgraduate teaching in global health. Prior to that she was Head of the Public Health Policy Unit at UCL and Director of Research & Development at UCL Hospitals NHS Trust. She trained in medicine in Scotland and became a consultant in public health medicine in 1991. Her research interests include regulatory science, rational medicines use, and access to medicines; health service reorganisation, marketisation and PFI / PPPs; and childhood injuries and the epidemiology of trauma. She is the author of NHS plc and Tackling rugby, and co-author of The New NHS: a guide

Natacha Poggio

Natacha Poggio is a social impact designer, educator, strategist, and passionate advocate of design for social change. She teaches Graphic Design at the University of Houston-Downtown, in Texas. In 2008, she founded Design Global Change, a collaborative of designers working to contribute innovative solutions to social issues; her social impact initiatives have garnered recognition, most notably she is a two-time recipient of the prestigious "Sappi Ideas that Matter" award creating socially responsible design work.

Linda Reinstein

Linda Reinstein became a public health advocate after her husband, Alan, was diagnosed with mesothelioma in 2003. One year later, she co-founded the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO) dedicated to preventing asbestos exposure to eliminate all asbestos-caused diseases through education, advocacy, and community initiatives. Recognized as leader, Reinstein has been a strong voice for educational campaigns and policy in the U.S. and around the world. Serving as ADAO’s President and CEO, she organizes the only annual international educational conference in the U.S. solely dedicated to awareness and prevention. During the past 18 years, Reinstein has draft and pass legislation and mounted success legal actions in ADAO v. EPA.

Emma Robbins

Emma Robbins is a Diné artist, activist, and community organizer. As Executive Director of the Navajo Water Project, part of the human rights nonprofit DigDeep Water, she is working to create infrastructure that brings clean running water to the one in three Navajo families without it. In addition, she is the creator of The Chapter House, an Indigenous women-led community arts space, designed for Natives and welcoming all. All of her work is centered around education, Indigenization, and community collaboration. Emma Robbins completed her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art History in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has been featured in The Washington Post, Harper’s Bazaar, NPR, and on Erin Brockovich’s podcast, and has lectured at Yale, Brown, MIT and Skoll. She is an Aspen Institute Healthy Communities Fellow, serves on the Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and is a recipient of an Environmental Leader Award. Robbins is a mother, has two dogs, and splits her time on Tongvaland (Los Angeles) and the Navajo Nation.

Ash Rogers

Ash Rogers is the Co-Chief Executive Officer of Lwala Community Alliance (Lwala). Lwala's work in Western Kenya has driven a 300% increase in contraceptive use and 64% decrease in under-5 deaths. Now, Lwala is on an ambitious path to influence how 1 million people access health care and demonstrate that locally-driven solutions are uniquely positioned to transform systems. Ash comes to Lwala from the Segal Family Foundation (SFF), where she served as Director of Operations, overseeing a $12m portfolio of 180 grantee organizations across 20 Sub-Saharan African countries. Prior to SFF, Ash was a Global Health Corps Fellow in Uganda. Ash has worked with organizations including the U.S. State Department, Komo Learning Centers, and HELP International – the common focus being developing tools to support grassroots innovators. She holds a Master of Public Administration from the University of Washington and a Bachelor of Arts from Brigham Young University.

Mark Roithmayr

Mark Roithmayr is Chief Executive Officer of the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF), and his primary focus is securing the resources needed to find effective drugs for Alzheimer's disease. He is a seasoned nonprofit executive with experience in both start-ups and mature organizations. His areas of expertise include strategic planning, fundraising, volunteer development, and brand-building. He has helped to increase the ADDF’s revenue three-fold to $60 million and was instrumental in securing Bill Gates, as well as Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott, as donors to the organization’s venture philanthropy efforts.

Mark was previously Chief Relationship Officer at the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. There, he helped launch its venture philanthropy initiative, directed its 56 national chapters, and led annual fundraising of over $200 million. Prior to joining the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in 2013, he served for seven years as president of Autism Speaks. As that organization's first president, he shepherded its growth from a start-up into the world's largest autism research and advocacy organization. During his tenure, Autism Speaks invested more than $170 million in research, resulting in discoveries about the genetic and environmental factors that lead to autism as well as effective treatments for it. Earlier in his career, Mark held several executive positions with the March of Dimes. He earned a bachelor's degree in communications at Rowan University.

Lisa Russell

Lisa Russell is an Emmy® Award-winning filmmaker, curator, and Founder of Create2030 who has 15+ years producing films and curating creative events that lie at the intersection of arts, social justice, and global development.

An established global speaker and thought leader, she is an FXB Board Member, SheDecides Global Champion, EarthxFilm Advisory Council Member, UN/NGO contracted storyteller and arts curator, Fulbright Specialist, writer and is a regular presenter at film festivals, storytelling summits, leading universities, international conferences, and youth leadership programs.

As a first-time screenwriter, Lisa's award-winning feature-length script, "A Revolutionary Act" has placed in many of the top Hollywood and film industry screenplay festivals including the prestigious Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting, WeScreenplay Diverse Voices, Screencraft Drama Competition, and others and has secured an award-winning producer to begin production in 2022.  Her episodic television series, "America's TRC" made it to the second round of the Sundance Episodic Lab.  She is currently working on her second feature-length script, "Madame Secretary General" and is committed to bringing untold global health and development stories to the big screen. Lisa is launching her first NFT collection called Arts Envoy NFT and is using NFTs and Web 3.0 to connect artists and creators with UN/NGO actors in support of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs.)

Adam Schwartz

Adam Schwartz is the Director of Health at BRAC USA, where he oversees the organization’s health portfolio.

Prior to joining BRAC USA, Adam worked as a researcher and clinician in Botswana and India, with a focus on health systems strengthening, primary care expansion and mHealth implementation. A physician by training, Adam splits his time between BRAC USA and Bellevue Hospital Center in New York City, where he is a primary care doctor. He is also on the faculty at the New York University School of Medicine.

Adam received his M.D. from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and completed his residency training in internal medicine at Weill Cornell Medical Center/New York-Presbyterian Hospital. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University.

Alexandra Scott

Alexandra Scott is the President of the Global Environment and Technology Foundation (GETF), a leading non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating social impact through designing and delivering dynamic public-private partnerships around the world. In this role, she supports the CEO to drive strategy and growth across the organization, focusing on GETF’s growing Health Practice and serves as Director of Program Delivery for Project Last Mile (PLM), a partnership between USAID, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Global Fund, the Coca-Cola Company and its Foundations, a leading example of how private sector engagement can improve availability of medicines leveraging expertise of the Coca-Cola system across Africa. She graduated with a B.S. in International Health from the Georgetown University School of Nursing and Health Studies, a Masters in Global Human Development from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and an executive certificate in Nonprofit Management from the Georgetown University Center for Public & Nonprofit Leadership.

Katherine Semrau

Katherine Semrau is an epidemiologist and the Director of the BetterBirth Program at Ariadne Labs, a joint health innovation center at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. Her program aims to improve the quality of care, minimize complications, and end the preventable deaths of women and infants through effective implementation of evidence-based, scalable solutions at the frontline of care. Katherine is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Epidemiologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in the Division of Global Health Equity.

Suneeta Sharma

Suneeta Sharma leads the Americas' health practice and serves as the Project Director of the USAID-funded $185 million Health Policy Plus (HP+) Project. She has more than 20 years of experience working closely with developing country stakeholders to create practical health policy and financing tools and solutions that work in the field to promote equitable access to services, especially for the poor and vulnerable communities. She served as the Managing Director of Futures Group India and the Chief of Party of Innovations in FP Technical Assistance project focusing on design, testing, evaluating, and scaling up innovative public private partnership models.

Suneeta earned a Master’s and a Doctorate degree in economic administration and financial management from the University of Rajasthan, and a Master’s degree in health policy and administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Robin Allinson Smalley

Robin Allinson Smalley - After an Emmy Award-winning career as a television producer/director/writer, Robin uprooted her family from Los Angeles to South Africa to co-found mothers2mothers (m2m), an NGO that unlocks the power of women to dramatically improve the health and wellbeing of women, children, and adolescents. As m2m’s first Executive Director and currently its Co-Founder and Chief Connector,  Robin has helped guide the organization through this extraordinary growth, from a tiny grassroots start-up to an international organization operating in ten sub-Saharan countries that has reached over 13 million women and children under two, created jobs for over 12,000 women living with HIV as Mentor Mothers, and empowered millions of their peers to achieve positive health outcomes for themselves and their families. 

Laura Stachel

Laura Stachel, Executive Director of We Care Solar, is a social entrepreneur working at the nexus of clean energy access and maternal health care. After working as a clinical obstetrician-gynecologist for 14 years, she pursued graduate studies in public health. Laura’s ethnographic research on maternal mortality in Nigeria in 2008 alerted her to the deleterious effects of energy poverty on maternal and newborn health outcomes. For her dissertation, Laura analyzed the experiences of hundreds of clinicians working in facilities with and without solar electricity. She co-founded We Care Solar in 2010 to advance solar energy for maternal health care in the global south. We Care Solar launched the Light Every Birth initiative, founded on the principle that every woman has the right to safe childbirth in a well-lit health center. Laura holds an MD from the University of California, San Francisco and an MPH and DrPH from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health. She was active in the UN Foundation’s Sustainable Energy for All Initiative and co-chaired a Working Group on Energy and Health.

Daniel Student

A cultural, environmental, and social sector leader for over fifteen years, Daniel Student is a Senior Consultant for Potrero Group, a research-based strategy and management consulting for the 21st century social sector. His previous leadership positions included serving as Executive Director for Plays & Players Theatre and Administrative Director for International Performing Arts for Youth. Daniel has also served as a theater director of over thirty plays and an actor in numerous independent films, from which he draws facilitation and innovation skills to bring to his client work. Daniel's Potrero Group clients have included Outdoor Afro, North Cascades Institute, Audubon Delta, and Chabot Space & Science Center, for which he has led strategic planning, new program development, board transformation and executive search. Notably, Daniel led Potrero Group’s engagement through Resources Legacy Fund to provide program management to the development of California Natural Resource Agency’s 30x30 strategy to conserve thirty percent of the state's lands and coastal waters by 2030. He received his MBA in innovation and strategic management at the University of California, Davis Graduate School of Management.

Eliza Squibb

Eliza Squibb uses textile design to bridge the worlds of art and science. Her textiles designs for health campaigns in West Africa, including cervical cancer prevention in Mali and infant vaccination in Niger, have received two “Grand Challenge Explorations” grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Eliza’s research in traditional art practices and artisan entrepreneurship has taken her to Tunisia and the Peruvian Amazon, where she organized design workshops in Yine-Yami, Shuar, and Shipibo indigenous communities. Based in Providence, Rhode Island, Eliza is a co-instructor for D-Lab Design, a course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that connects innovative global start-ups and nonprofits with teams of student engineers.

Chris Underhill

Chris Underhill works as a social entrepreneur in the field of quality of life and health, he is a mentor and a thinker in the field of community and development. He has developed a number of social enterprises, for example, Thrive, an organization working in gardening, disability, and community (www.thrive.org.uk) and ADD International (www.add.org.uk), working in the developing world with disabled people creating systems of representation, advocacy, and policy creation. He has created several organizations in the field of global mental health, e.g. BasicNeeds (www.basicneeds.org) which promotes the Model for Mental Health and Development created by Chris in 2000. He runs his own mentoring practice called Mentor Services (www.mentorservices.org.uk) and presents on health, quality of life, mental health, and resilience. Chris is co-founder of a new organization benefitting social entrepreneurs: The Council of Elders for Social Entrepreneurs. He is a Skoll Foundation awardee in Social Entrepreneurship, an awardee in Social Entrepreneurship of the Schwab Foundation, and a Senior Fellow of Ashoka and has been honored with an MBE by HRH the Queen for his work in disability.

Seth Wanye

Born in Ghana, Seth Wanye had his medical education in Ukraine and Russia specializing in Ophthalmology. After his training he returned to Ghana to start his medical career under difficult circumstances. He worked in various capacities including teaching in the medical school of the University for Development Studies, the only ophthalmologist in Northern Region of Ghana serving over 2.4 million people until recently. He coordinated the Ghana Trachoma control program since 2005 and led the field team to eliminate trachoma from Ghana. He currently also coordinates the post trachoma certification surveillance team. He has done fellowships at the Yale Eye Center, Wake Forest University Eye Center and the Kentucky Lions Eye Center of the University of Louisville. He is the founder and medical director of Friends Eye Center and a long standing Unite for Sight partner in Ghana. He is also a member of the Unite for Sight Medical Advisory Board. His passion is helping the poor and vulnerable regain or preserve their vision by bringing eye care services to the doorstep of people leaving in hard-to-reach villages in Northern Ghana in the form of a mobile eye clinic.

Charles Wiysonge

Charles Shey Wiysonge is the Director of Cochrane South Africa at the South African Medical Research Council and a Professor of Epidemiology at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He is a member of various advisory committees in the fields of research, vaccination, and evidence-based policy in Africa and globally. Professor Wiysonge’s previous positions include serving as the Deputy Director of the Centre for Evidence-based Health Care at Stellenbosch University, Project Manager of the Vaccines for Africa Initiative, Chief Research Officer at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, Research Officer at UNAIDS, Geneva, and Deputy Director, Expanded Programme on Immunisation, Cameroon.

Ruston Yanko

T. Ruston Yanko is Director, National Community Health Systems at Last Mile Health. Ruston is a public health technician with more than ten years of experience utilizing scarce resources and innovation to improve the health and wellbeing of Liberians. He has provided technical support to the Liberian health system at the district, county, and national levels to ensure the provision and sustenance of quality health services at all levels of the health continuum.

Ruston has a Masters of Science degree in Nursing Education and a Masters in Public Health, with an emphasis on Epidemiology and Biostatistics. As a fellow of the West African College of Nursing, he designs and leads programmatic activities for the chapter providing technical support at the sub-regional level specifically with the Faculty of Administration, Management and Education. Ruston served in various capacities in the pre-service education hierarchy as a preceptor, clinical supervisor, lecturer, clinical coordinator and Assistant Dean of Health Sciences. His passion is bridging the gap between theory and practice to build a vibrant health system, starting from the classroom.