SPEAKER BIOS

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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.

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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 Investment Officer, Innovative Financing and Sustainable Investing and the Chief Innovation Officer, Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator and Health Diplomacy, 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.

Elizabeth Bradley

Elizabeth H. Bradley has served as President of Vassar College since July 2017. She has led the College to establish new programs and partnerships in India, Rwanda, and China to bring the model of liberal arts higher education to these settings. In addition, Vassar has collaborated with Columbia University to create a 5-year BA-MPH program for Vassar students. She created the first Masters of Health Administration on the African continent with the Clinton Health Access Initiative and pioneered a model of scale up with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Prior to becoming the President of Vassar, she was on the faculty at Yale and was most recently the Brady-Johnson Professor of Grand Strategy and Faculty Director of the Yale Global Health Leadership Institute. Her research has focused on quality of hospital care and large-scale health system strengthening efforts within the US and abroad including in China, India, Ethiopia, Liberia, Ghana, Rwanda, and the United Kingdom. She has published more nearly 320 peer-reviewed papers and has co-authored three books including The American Healthcare Paradox: Why Spending More Is Getting Us Less. She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2017 and she is a member of the Council of Foreign Affairs.

Elizabeth graduated phi beta kappa from Harvard in economics magna cum laude, earned an MBA from the University of Chicago, and a PhD in health economics from Yale University.

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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.

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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.

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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

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James 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.

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Gary Cohen

Gary Cohen is a co-founder and President of Health Care Without Harm (www.noharm.org), the international campaign for environmentally responsible healthcare. HCWH is working to prevent disease and illness in society by assisting the healthcare sector to understand the links between a healthy environment and healthy people and helping hospitals become more environmentally sustainable as well as anchors in their communities for resilience, equity and community wellness. HCWH is focused on mobilizing the health sector globally to address the climate crisis as a medical emergency. HCWH has member organizations and partners in 70 countries. He is President of Practice Greenhealth, a U.S. membership affiliate of HCWH with over 1300 hospital members. He is also the co-founder of Greenhealth Exchange, a sustainable purchasing cooperative in the U.S. healthcare sector.

Andrea Coleman

Andrea Coleman is co-founder of both Two Wheels for Life and Riders for Health, Andrea is also a former motorcycle racer. She has dedicated her life to using motorcycles for humanitarian causes and both she and the organizations she has built have won countless awards.

Dean Cycon

Dean Cycon founded Dean’s Beans Organic Coffee Company in 1993 after working as an environmental and indigenous rights lawyer. He set out to prove that a for-profit business could create meaningful change through ethical business practices rooted in respect for the earth, the farmer, our co-workers and the consumer.

Dean spent over a decade as an indigenous rights and environmental lawyer before bringing those skills to the coffee industry by co-founding Coffee Kids, the coffee industry’s first non-profit development organization, in 1988. Yet after designing and managing the development arm of Coffee Kids for five years, Dean decided that charity wasn’t enough – until businesses changed their fundamental operating principles there would be no meaningful impact on the lives of the farmers. He founded Dean’s Beans Organic Coffee in 1993 with the mission of using specialty coffee as a vehicle for positive social, economic and ecological change at origin.

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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.

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Mackinnon Engen

Mackinnon Engen is Executive Director of Watsi. She has a passion for helping people and organizations come together to tackle complex challenges and create measurable, sustainable impact.

As a global health and humanitarian professional, her experience has spanned the UN, international and local NGOs, and academic sectors. For nearly ten years she helped to oversee international program development for a surgical NGO with a dual focus on safety and quality of care for patients and capacity development of medical professionals. At the UN, she worked to ensure more timely humanitarian assistance reached those most in need as well as helped to coordinate the Secretary-General’s response to the Global Food Crisis. Her research efforts have included topics of organizational leadership and effectiveness, economic impact of health interventions, emergency food security, and humanitarian impact of climate change.

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Rebecca Hardin

Rebecca Hardin is an environmental and educational anthropologist who has worked primarily in Africa and North America on human/wildlife interactions, corporate/community politics in concession economies, and the links between local and transnational environmental justice movements. She is currently an Associate Professor, School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan, where she directs curricular innovation programs leveraging digital media and software innovation to enhance face to face learning and move curricular materials beyond the classroom to address environmental challenges at civic, professional, and advocacy levels.

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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..

Bobby Jefferson

Bobby Jefferson is a leader in digital health technology. He serves on the Board for health technology startups THINKMD, ClickMedix, DataElevates, Covelocity. Health, Simprints and the Society for International Development-Washington (SID-W). He performs technology reviews of early-stage companies, startup innovations, and early-stage social ventures to apply digital health solutions to address global health supply chain and cybersecurity issues in international development. He has performed technology due diligence of pre-revenue startups, early-round innovators and collaborates as a mentor with tech incubators and business accelerators. Bobby uses private-sector solutions to support international development projects for the U.S. Agency for International Development and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Cleveland Justis

Cleveland Justis An accomplished organizational leader in the environmental and entrepreneurial arenas for the past 25 years, Cleveland Justis is principal at the Potrero Group. 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.

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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.

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Jim Koch

James L. Koch is Founder Emeritus of Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship (formerly Center for Science, Technology, and Society), and Professor of Organization Analysis and Management, Emeritus. He was Dean of Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business from 1990 to 1996 and co-founded both the Tech Museum Awards—Technology Benefiting Humanity (2001) and the Global Social Benefit Incubator (2003).  He served as Acting Dean of Engineering in 2007, and in 2008 developed the Center’s sector strategy in safe water access (with Al Hammond) and off-grid energy (with Andy Lieberman). From 2012-2018 he was Don C. Dodson Distinguished Service Professor. With Eric Carlson, he is co-author of Building a Successful Social Venture (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2018).

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

Nick Preneta

Nick Preneta has worked with SOIL in Haiti for over the past 11 years to develop container based sanitation solutions for complex urban environments. As SOIL's Chief Operating Officer, he oversees the development of a household toilet service that currently serves 8000 individuals but that has plans to expand to 5-fold over the coming years. Nick has experience implementing programs in emergency as well as development contexts, and has also worked as a consultant for programs in Sierra Leone and Madagascar. Nick holds a masters degree in Public Health from Tufts University. 

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.

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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.

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 as president of Autism Speaks and 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. He earned a bachelor's degree in communications at Rowan University.

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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.

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.

Richard Skolnik

Richard Skolnik is the former Director for HNP for the South Asia Region of the World Bank. He taught global health at George Washington and Yale and was the Executive Director of the Harvard PEPFAR program. He is the author of Global Health 101 and the instructor for the Yale/Coursera course Essentials of Global Health.

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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. m2m employs and trains local women living with HIV as Mentor Mothers—frontline health workers who work in under-resourced and over-burdened health facilities and communities to educate and support women and their families to access healthcare, start on any treatment they need, and stay in care. From an initial focus on prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, m2m now deploys its proven peer-based model to address broader family health needs, including early childhood development, adolescent sexual and reproductive health, orphans, and vulnerable children programming, management of non-communicable diseases, and, increasingly, more clinical services. 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 11 million women and children under two, created jobs for over 11,000 women living with HIV as Mentor Mothers, and empowered millions of their peers to achieve positive health outcomes for themselves and their families.

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Krisha Udayakumar

Krishna Udayakumar is the founding Director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center, focused on generating deeper evidence and support for the study, scaling, and adaptation of health innovations and policy reforms globally. He is also Executive Director of Innovations in Healthcare, a non-profit co-founded by Duke, McKinsey & Company, and the World Economic Forum to curate and scale the impact of transformative health solutions globally. At Duke University, he holds the rank of Associate Professor of Global Health and Medicine and is a core faculty member of the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy. He also serves as Associate Director for Innovation of the Duke Global Health Institute.

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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.

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Sten Vermund

Sten H. Vermund is Dean of the Yale School of Public Health, the Anna M.R. Lauder Professor of Public Health, and Professor of Pediatrics at the Yale School of Medicine. He is a pediatrician and infectious disease epidemiologist with his appointment in the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases. His research focus is on diseases of low- and middle-income countries, and on health disparities in the U.S. His research has focused on health care access, adolescent reproductive health, and prevention of HIV transmission, both mother-to-child and among adolescents/adults. As with so many other public health faculty, his most recent work has focused on the COVID-19 pandemic. Sten has founded two non-governmental organizations in Zambia and the other in Mozambique and Nigeria. He served as the principal investigator of the HIV Prevention Trials Network from 2006-2012 and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine.