Speakers

Portrait of Bertha Coombs

Bertha Coombs

Health Reporter
CNBC

Bertha Coombs is CNBC’s senior health care reporter, covering health care services and policy, as well as financial markets and business news stories throughout the business day. 

Her health care coverage at CNBC has ranged from covering the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the evolution of health care technology, and the continuing push to disrupt pharmacy models and lower drug costs, to the launch of the IRA Medicare drug price negotiations. 

Over twenty years at CNBC, Coombs has covered the tech sector from the Nasdaq Marketsite and general market news from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.  Before joining the network, she reported for the pioneering streaming business network, Yahoo Finance Vision. Prior to that, she served as a reporter for ABC News One and a substitute anchor for “World News Now” and “World News This Morning.”  She began her reporting career in local news as a Leo Beranek Fellow at WCVB-TV in Boston. 

Coombs is a graduate of Yale University. Born in Havana, Cuba, she speaks fluent Spanish. 

Portrait of Michael Dowling

Michael Dowling

President and Chief Executive Officer
Northwell Health

Michael Dowling is one of the health care industry’s most highly respected voices, achieving the No. 1 ranking in Modern Healthcare magazine’s 2022 list of the “100 Most Influential People in Healthcare.” As a health care executive over the past three decades, he has been a no-excuses advocate for reforms that have helped the industry become more patient-focused and committed to quality and safety. His willingness to take a stand on societal issues such as gun violence and immigration has earned widespread praise and recognition from peers and the news media. During his years in academia and government, Mr. Dowling has distinguished himself as a compassionate voice for those in need, developing and promoting innovative health and human services policies. 

As president and CEO of Northwell Health for 22 years, he has demonstrated invaluable leadership in overseeing a rapidly expanding clinical, research and academic enterprise with annual revenue of $18 billion. With a workforce of more than 85,000, Northwell is the largest health care provider and private employer in New York State, caring for more than two million people annually through a vast network of 21 hospitals, more than 900 outpatient facilities—including 220 primary care practices and 50-plus urgent care centers—along with home care, rehabilitation and end-of-life services. 

Hailing from Ireland, Mr. Dowling bridges borders and brings a global perspective to health care. In 2020, he received the Presidential Distinguished Service Award for the Irish Abroad, which recognized his contributions to Ireland and to Irish communities abroad, presented by the President of Ireland. He also received an honorary fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland and is a board member of the Foreign Policy Association. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Science, and the North American Board of the Smurfit School of Business at University College in Dublin, Ireland. He also earned his bachelor’s degree from University College Cork, and went on to receive honorary doctorates from Queens University Belfast and University College Dublin. Mr. Dowling was the Grand Marshal of New York City’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade in 2017, when he was also inducted into the Irish America Hall of Fame. 

Mr. Dowling has invested heavily in Northwell’s research arm, the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, home to 50 research labs, 3,000 clinical research trials, and 5,000 scientists and staff who are transforming the treatment of conditions like lupus, arthritis, sepsis, cancer, psychiatric illness and Alzheimer’s disease. Feinstein has gained stature as the global headquarters of bioelectronic medicine research, where physician scientists are tapping neural pathways that signal the body to heal itself, reducing reliance on prescription drugs. 

Under Mr. Dowling’s leadership, Northwell has also pursued a visionary approach to medical education, developing innovative curricula at its Zucker School of Medicine and the Hofstra Northwell School of Nursing and Physician Assistant Studies. Northwell’s graduate medical education programs have become one of the nation’s largest, training more than 1,900 medical residents and fellows annually. Further underscoring his commitment to education, Mr. Dowling’s first act when becoming Northwell’s CEO in 2002 was creating a corporate university, the Center for Learning & Innovation, which has helped instill a culture of lifelong learning among employees at all levels of the organization. 

Mr. Dowling’s highly visible leadership style enabled the health system to successfully navigate the intense challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, most notably in 2020 when the New York metropolitan area was at the epicenter of the epidemic’s first wave. Mr. Dowling detailed his and Northwell’s experiences in a book titled Leading Through a Pandemic: The Inside Story of Humanity, Innovation, and Lessons Learned During the COVID-19 Crisis. 

Northwell clinicians treated more than 350,000 COVID patients and the health system used its innovative culture to significantly expand bed capacity and leverage its resources to ensure adequate supplies of lifesaving drugs, ventilators, personal protective equipment and other essential provisions to protect patients and caregivers, including administering the nation’s first COVID vaccines in December 2020. 

In addition to his 2020 book about Northwell’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Mr. Dowling is the co-author of a 2020 memoir titled After the Roof Caved In: An Immigrant’s Journey from Ireland to America, which chronicles his poverty-stricken childhood in Ireland, his years as a social policy expert in academia and in New York State government, and his ascent to becoming one of the health care industry’s preeminent leaders. He is also the co-author of the 2018 book, Health Care Reboot: Megatrends Energizing American Medicine, about the trends that are driving the nation’s health care system toward greater quality, safety, access and affordability. 

Prior to becoming CEO, Mr. Dowling was the health system’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, playing a key role in initiating mergers and acquisitions that enabled Northwell to become New York’s largest integrated health system. Before joining Northwell in 1995, he was a senior vice president at Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield. Mr. Dowling served in New York State government for 12 years during the 1980s and early 1990s, including seven years as deputy secretary of human services to former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, state director of health, education and human services, and later, commissioner of the New York State Department of Social Services. He initiated numerous innovative programs aimed at expanding primary care access to the medically underserved and uninsured, and helping the state to combat the crack cocaine epidemic at that time. 

Before his public service career, Mr. Dowling was a professor of social policy and assistant dean at the Fordham University Graduate School of Social Services, and director of the Fordham campus in Westchester County. He was also a former instructor at the Harvard School of Public Health Center for Continuing Professional Education. 

Mr. Dowling has been honored with many awards and recognitions throughout his career, including: The Conference Board’s 2023 Committee for Economic Development Distinguished Leadership Award, the 2021 Glassdoor Employees’ Choice Award, the Columbia University School of Business’ 2020 Deming Cup for Operational Excellence, the 2012 B’nai B’rith National Healthcare Award, the National Center for Healthcare Leadership’s 2011 Gail L. Warden Leadership Excellence Award, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems’ 2011 CEO IT Achievement Award, the Ellis Island Honors Society’s 2007 Medal of Honor, the Foreign Policy Association Medal, the American Jewish Committee’s National Human Relations Award, the State University of New York’s Nelson A. Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy’s Distinguished Public Service Award, the Mental Health Association of New York State’s Outstanding Public Service Award, and the American Society for Public Administration’s Alfred E. Smith Award. 

Mr. Dowling is a member of the National Center for Healthcare Leadership, the Greater New York Hospital Association, the Healthcare Association of New York State (HANYS), the League of Voluntary Hospitals of New York, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), The Healthcare Institute and the Long Island Association and many other professional organizations. 

Portrait of Geoff Ling, MD

Geoff Ling, MD

Chief Executive Officer
Ling and Associates, LLC

Dr. Geoffrey Ling is a pharmacologist and physician and co-founder of On Demand Pharmaceuticals. Clinically, he is a professor of neurology, neurosurgery and anesthesiology and critical care medicine at Johns Hopkins University and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, and an attending neuro critical care physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He serves as the Chair of the Veterans Administration’s National Research Advisory Council.

Dr. Ling is a retired U.S. Army colonel after 21 years on active duty. He served as an intensive care physician with the 452nd CSH (combat support hospital) in OEF-Afghanistan (2003) and 86th CSH and 10th CSH in OIF-Iraq (2005). Also, COL Ling has had four in-theater missions as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff “Gray Team” to assess traumatic brain injury (TBI) care in both combat theaters (2009, 2011). The 10th CSH named him their first “Physician of the Month.” Dr. Ling was also a “requested by name” consultant to Congresswoman Gabby Gifford’s trauma team following her tragic attack.

He was the Founding Director of the Biological Technologies Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where he was previously a program manager and Deputy Director of the Defense Sciences Office. He served as an Assistant Director in the Science Division of President Obama’s White House Office of Science, Technology and Policy (OSTP). His BA with honors is from Washington University in St. Louis, MD from Georgetown University (elected to AOA) and his PhD in neuropharmacology is from Cornell University. He completed his neurology residency at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, neuro critical care fellowship at Johns Hopkins and research fellowship in neuropharmacology at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He is board certified in both neurology and neuro critical care. He has published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters.

Portrait of David Battinelli, MD

David Battinelli, MD

EVP and Physician-in-Chief
Northwell Health

David Battinelli, MD, is Northwell Health’s physician-in-chief on all clinical, research and education issues. This role follows a transition from his position as Northwell’s senior vice president and chief medical officer (CMO), in which he was responsible for the overall professional management of clinical, education, research and operational issues related to medical and clinical affairs.

Dr. Battinelli is also dean and Betsey Whitney Cushing Professor of Medicine at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell. A founding member of the Zucker School of Medicine, he previously served as the vice dean and earlier as the dean for medical education and chaired the committee charged with developing the new medical school’s curriculum.

While CMO, he also served as the chief operating officer for the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research where he oversaw all operational and budgetary issues for Northwell’s research enterprise growing extramural funding and endowments while improving overall efficiency and research productivity.

Previously, he served as the health system’s chief academic officer and senior vice president of academic affairs, in charge of all undergraduate and graduate educational programs, continuing medical education, and academic affairs and institutional relationships.

A board-certified internist, Dr. Battinelli came to Northwell Health from Boston Medical Center (BMC), where he served as vice chair for education, program director for the internal medicine residency program, and professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. He was also an active staff physician at BMC and the Boston Veterans Administration.

Dr. Battinelli is a past president of the Association of Program Directors in Internal Medicine. He has worked closely with and served on numerous committees for a variety of national medical organizations including the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine, American Board of Internal Medicine, American College of Physicians and the Accreditation Committee on Graduate Medical Education. In addition, he has lectured extensively on clinical education, faculty development of teaching skills and internal medicine, and is a noted speaker and author on these subjects.

Dr. Battinelli earned his medical degree from the Rutgers School of Biomedical and Health Sciences and a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Scranton. He completed his residency and chief residency at Boston City Hospital.

Portrait of Tara Narula, MD

Tara Narula, MD

Medical Contributor
NBC

Dr. Tara Narula is a board-certified cardiologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, an Associate Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Zucker School of Medicine, Hofstra/Northwell, the Associate Director of the Women’s Heart Program at Lenox Hill Hospital and Director of Communications for the Katz Institute of Women’s Health.  She is also a nationally recognized medical journalist. She is an NBC News Medical Contributor, the former CNN Medical Correspondent within CNN’s award-winning Health, Medical and Wellness team and previously was the Senior Medical Correspondent at CBS News reporting for all CBS News broadcasts and platforms including “CBS Mornings”, “CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell”, “CBS Saturday Morning”, “CBS Sunday Morning” and “CBS Streaming Network”. She has been a past contributor as well to O, Oprah Magazine. She joined Lenox Hill Heart & Vascular Institute of New York in 2010 and provides outpatient consultative care. After graduating from Stanford University with degrees in Economics and Biology, she was founder and CEO of her own small business, Sun Juice Inc. Subsequently she obtained her medical degree at USC Keck School of Medicine where she graduated with Alpha Omega Alpha Society Honors. Dr. Narula completed her residency in internal medicine at Harvard University/Brigham and Women’s Hospital and her fellowship training in cardiology at New York Presbyterian-Weill Cornell Medical Center. Dr. Narula is currently a fellow of the American College of Cardiology (FACC). She serves as a national spokesperson for the American Heart Association and the AHA’s Go Red for Women Initiative. She is co-director of a mentoring program for women in medicine called FaceofCardiology which serves to help guide women pursuing possible careers in cardiology. She is a recipient of a 2022 Emmy Award for Outstanding Live News Program CBS Mornings, the 2019 WomenHeart Nanette Wenger Award for Media and the Super Doctors Award for NYC 2014-2023. Her interests include women’s health, prevention, mental health and resilience. Her upcoming book on resilience is set to be published in the spring of 2024.

Portrait of Hon. Dr. Frank Anthony

Hon. Dr. Frank Anthony

Minister of Health
Guyana

Dr. Frank Anthony graduated from the People’s Friendship University, Russia, and has been practising medicine in Guyana since1993.  In 2000, he graduated with a Masters of Public Health from the Braun School of Public Health (Hebrew University), in Israel.  On his return to Guyana, he was appointed as the Executive Director of the Health Sector Development Unit, which was responsible for the reorganising of the health sector in Guyana. During his tenure, Dr. Anthony served as the Project Manager for the World Bank-funded program on HIV Prevention and Control, the Inter-American Development Bank-funded Health Sector Program, Basic Nutrition Program, Health Sector Policy and Institutional Development Grant and also the Global Fund Grant on HIV, TB and Malaria.

In addition to being in clinical practice over the years, Dr. Anthony taught at the University of Guyana as an adjunct professor in Public Health.  He also consulted for several organisations in the area of public health, and served as an elected member of the Guyana Medical Council.

Dr. Anthony possesses many years of parliamentary experience, and has served the people of Guyana as the Minister of Culture, Youth and Sports (2006-2015) and as the shadow Minister of Health (2015-2019).

Dr. Anthony has functioned in various capacities including as a Member of the Constitution Reform Commission, Member of the University of Guyana Council, Vice-Chair of the Ethnic Relations Commission, Chairman of Georgetown Prisons Visiting Committee, Member of the Guyana Medical Council among others.   He currently serves as a Member of the Executive Board of the World Health Organization, Member of the UNAIDS Board, Member of the Financial Intermediary Fund for Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response and Chair of the Guyana Global Fund Country Coordinating Mechanism.

Portrait of Jonathan Berkowitz, MD

Jonathan Berkowitz, MD

Medical Director, Center for Emergency Services
Northwell Health

Jonathan Berkowitz, MD, is the medical director for Northwell Health’s Center for Emergency Medical Services and Centralized Transfer Center. He is a dual board-certified emergency and EMS physician with a background in programming, interested in aligning the clinical, technological and operational to deliver the IHI Quadruple Aim. The Centralized Transfer Center was a three-year project to build a single logistics center dedicated to managing patient movement within one of the nation’s largest integrated healthcare delivery networks. The CTC was instrumental during the pandemic as over 1,500 COVID patients required transfer to ensure operational continuity. Dr. Berkowitz has long been an advocate of programs that endeavor to deliver out-of-hospital integrated care by utilizing technology and paramedicine and leveraging healthcare system resources. He is also the chief of the Division of Prehospital and Disaster Medicine in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Zucker School of Medicine, an academic department focused on generating research and strives for thought leadership on healthcare in the out-of hospital environment.

Portrait of Eric Cioè Peña, MD, MPH

Eric Cioè Peña, MD, MPH

Director of Global Health
Northwell Health

Eric Cioè-Peña MD MPH is the Founding Director of the Center for Global Health of Northwell Health and the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell. He is an assistant professor of Emergency Medicine. He served as the first ACEP lead ambassador to El Salvador. He is a graduate of SUNY Downstate Emergency Medicine Residency program and the Columbia University International Emergency Medicine Fellowship. He has worked in Botswana, Dominican Republic, and El Salvador on health systems development projects, trauma care and humanitarian assistance following the 2010 Haiti earthquake. He has a Masters in Public Health and Humanitarian Assistance from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

Dr. Cioè Peña is leading an initiative at Northwell and Hofstra to unify and consolidate Global Health programming to be integrated and horizontally focused. His work is centered currently on breaking down siloes in a large University system and an even larger Health system with over 70,000 employees, 23 hospitals and 12 schools and colleges at the University. Dr. Cioè Peña is currently redeployed with Northwell at a 108-bed COVID alternate care facility in conjunction with the State of New York as the Deputy Chief Medical Officer. Dr. Cioè Peña is the past president of the Global Emergency Medicine Academy of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine and is also the past president of the International Emergency Medicine fellowship consortium. He served on the Public Health and Injury Prevention committee and is a fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians.

Portrait of Mikael Dolsten, MD, PhD

Mikael Dolsten, MD, PhD

Chief Scientific Officer and President, Worldwide Research, Development and Medical
Pfizer Inc.

Mikael leads the Worldwide Research, Development and Medical (WRDM) organization at Pfizer, which is responsible for the development of all compounds through proof of concept, and provides pharmaceutical sciences, safety and medical support to the entire R&D pipeline and all marketed medicines and vaccines. WRDM comprises all Pfizer research units, including Oncology, Internal Medicine, Inflammation & Immunology, Vaccines and Rare Disease, as well as the Centers for Therapeutic Innovation. The Vaccines R&D team leads scientific efforts from discovery through registration of novel vaccines. Mikael also has worldwide responsibility for Pfizer’s medical, safety and external R&D innovation, as well as science-based teams in pharmaceutical sciences, drug safety R&D, and large and small molecule discovery and development.

Mikael earned his Ph.D. in tumor immunology and M.D. from the University of Lund in Sweden, where he was Adjunct Professor in Tumor Immunology and is a Visiting Professor to advise on science and technology strategies. He serves on the PhRMA Research & Development Leadership Forum as well as on the PhRMA Foundation Board of Directors. He is a member of the board of Agilent Technologies, Research! America, and Vimian. Mikael is a member of the Board of Overseers for the Scripps Research Institute and a Foreign Member of The Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. Since 2014, Mikael had co-chaired the Accelerating Medicine Partnership with National Institutes of Health (NIH) previous Director, Francis S. Collins, and now with Acting Director, Lawrence Tabak. Mikael advised the Obama Administration on R&D as well as then Vice President Biden’s Cancer Moonshot Initiative to accelerate cancer research.

Mikael is a named inventor on several patents and has published approximately 150 articles in international journals.

 

Portrait of David Feinberg, MD

David Feinberg, MD

Chairman
Oracle Health

As Chairman of Oracle Health, David Feinberg, M.D., is committed to making healthcare more accessible, affordable and equitable. His work advances thought leadership and strategy related to unleashing the healing power of data through an open and connected healthcare ecosystem.

Previously, David served as president and CEO of Cerner, now Oracle Health, where he led teams delivering tools and technology to improve the patient and caregiver experience.

As a pediatric psychiatrist, David built his early career around helping children and families. He served as president and CEO of both UCLA Health and Geisinger Health prior to assuming leadership of Google Health in early 2019.

His work at UCLA provided David a clear view of how patient satisfaction translates to clinical success. His focus on the patient experience increased UCLA’s patient satisfaction scores from the 28th to the 99th percentile.

At Geisinger, David led a complex turnaround that made Geisinger one of the nation’s most innovative healthcare providers, including a first-of-its kind clinical program that made DNA sequencing a routine part of patient care. David also guided Geisinger’s transition to value-based care using Cerner’s population health platform, HealtheIntent, integrated with a non-Cerner EMR.

At Google, David leveraged Google’s technology, talent and search capabilities to tackle healthcare’s most important challenges. Under David’s leadership, Google was at the forefront of using Artificial Intelligence and mobile platforms to improve healthcare and – in partnership with Ascension Health – produced Care Studio, a tool that organizes patient records for healthcare clinicians at the point of care.

David began his career at UCLA, researching and publishing in the areas of addiction and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. He took on additional leadership responsibilities, including becoming the Medical Director of the Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital. By implementing rigorous service metrics and patient satisfaction measures and completing a financial turnaround, UCLA’s neuropsychiatric hospital is now considered the premier psychiatric hospital in the western United States.

David earned his M.D. from Chicago Medical School in 1989, finishing at the top of his class and is a member of the Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society. He also holds an economics degree from the University of California-Berkeley and an MBA from Pepperdine University.

Portrait of Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

Director-General
World Health Organization

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was elected WHO Director-General for a five-year term by WHO Member States at the Seventieth World Health Assembly in May 2017. In doing so, he was the first WHO Director-General elected from among multiple candidates by the World Health Assembly, and was the first person from the WHO African Region to head the world’s leading public health agency.

Born in the Eritrean city of Asmara, Dr. Tedros graduated from the University of Asmara with a Bachelor of Biology, before earning a Master of Science (MSc) in Immunology of Infectious Diseases from the University of London, a Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD) in Community Health from the University of Nottingham and an Honorary Fellowship from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Following his studies, Dr. Tedros returned to Ethiopia to support the delivery of health services, first working as a field-level malariologist, before heading a regional health service and later serving in Ethiopia’s federal government for over a decade as Minister of Health and Minister of Foreign Affairs.

As Minister of Health from 2005 to 2012, he led a comprehensive reform of the country’s health system, built on the foundation of universal health coverage and provision of services to all people, even in the most remote areas.

Under his leadership, Ethiopia expanded its health infrastructure, developed innovative health financing mechanisms, and expanded its health workforce. A major component of reforms he drove was the creation of a primary health care extension programme that deployed 40,000 female health workers throughout the country. A significant result was an approximate 60% reduction in child and maternal mortality compared to 2000 levels.

As Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2012 to 2016, he elevated health as a political issue nationally, regionally and globally. In this role, he led efforts to negotiate the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, in which 193 countries committed to the financing necessary to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

Prior to his election as Director-General of WHO, Dr. Tedros held many leadership positions in global health, including as Chair of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, Chair of the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, and Co-chair of the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health Board.

At the 75th World Health Assembly in May 2022, Dr Tedros was re-elected for a second five-year term.

Portrait of Jill Kalman, MD

Jill Kalman, MD

Senior Vice President, Chief Medical Officer and Deputy Physician-In-Chief
Northwell Health

Jill Kalman, MD, is the senior vice president and chief medical officer and deputy physician-in-chief.

Dr. Kalman joined Northwell in May 2014 as associate medical director in the Office of the Chief Medical Officer, and as the associate medical director at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. She later served as the executive director of Lenox Hill Hospital and was responsible for the quality of patient care, safety and day-to-day operations. Under Dr. Kalman’s leadership, Lenox Hill elevated its reputation as a regional, national and global destination for top quality tertiary care. She and her team significantly expanded the breadth of clinical programs, successfully recruited physician talent and grew patient volume. She was instrumental in successfully leading the Lenox Hill response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its recovery efforts, and achieving 91st percentile in the most recent Workforce Engagement Survey. Lenox Hill also received coveted Magnet status last year for its commitment to nursing excellence.

Dr. Kalman was also the medical director for the office of patient and customer experience for Northwell Health, in which she leads the initiative for the physician’s role in the patient experience.

Dr. Kalman is an expert in congestive heart failure and has published extensively in that area. She began her career on faculty at Mount Sinai Hospital. She also started and developed the Heart Failure Program at Beth Israel Medical Center, and was subsequently recruited to New York University Medical Center as director of the Cardiomyopathy Program and chief of cardiac services of Tisch Hospital.

In 2007, she returned to Mount Sinai as the director of the Cardiomyopathy Program, where she oversaw quality, patient safety and health care delivery initiatives, broadly across the medical center. She was the physician leader for readmission reduction initiatives, and the medical director of the Preventable Admissions Care Team (PACT), an innovative transitional care program that focuses on complex patients and their psychosocial drivers of readmission. Dr. Kalman has dedicated her career to improving the quality and quantity of life in patients with all stages of heart disease and has extensive experience managing patients with advanced heart disease.

After graduating with honors from the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Kalman received her medical degree from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She completed her internal medicine residency, chief residency and cardiology fellowship at the Mount Sinai Medical Center, including a research fellowship in heart failure and cardiac transplantation.

Portrait of Vinod Khosla

Vinod Khosla

Founder
Khosla Ventures

Vinod Khosla is an entrepreneur, investor and technologist. He is the founder of Khosla Ventures, a firm focused on assisting entrepreneurs to build impactful new energy and technology companies. Vinod grew up dreaming of being an entrepreneur, despite being from an Indian army household with no business or technology connections. Since the age of 16, when he first heard about the founding of Intel, he dreamt of starting his own technology company.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, Vinod failed to start a soymilk company to service the many people in India who did not have refrigerators. Instead, he came to the U.S. to further his academic studies and received a master’s degree in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. Eventually, his startup dreams led him to Silicon Valley, where he received a master’s degree in business administration from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

Upon graduation, Vinod co-founded Daisy Systems, the first significant computer-aided design system for electrical engineers. The company went on to achieve significant revenue, profits and an IPO. Then, driven by the frustration of having to design the computer hardware on which the Daisy software needed to be built, Vinod started the standards-based Sun Microsystems in 1982 to build workstations for software developers. As the founding CEO of Sun, he pioneered open systems and commercial RISC processors. Sun Microsystems was funded by Vinod’s longtime friend and board member John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (KPCB).

In 1986, Vinod joined KPCB as a general partner. While there, he played a crucial role in taking on Intel’s monopoly by building and growing semiconductor company, Nexgen, which eventually was acquired by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Nexgen/AMD was the only microprocessor to have significant success against Intel. Thereafter, Vinod helped incubate the idea and business plan for Juniper Networks to take on Cisco System’s dominance of the router market. He also was involved in the formulation of the early advertising-based search strategy for Excite. In addition to his many other contributions at KPCB, he helped transform the moribund telecommunications business and its archaic SONET implementations with Cerent Corporation, which was acquired by Cisco Systems in 1999 for $7.2 billion.

In 2004, driven by the need for flexibility to accommodate four teenaged children, the desire to be more experimental and to fund sometimes imprudent “science experiments,” Vinod formed Khosla Ventures to focus on both for-profit and social impact investments. His goals remain the same: work and learn from fun and knowledgeable entrepreneurs, build impactful companies by leveraging innovation and spend time with a partnership that makes a difference. Vinod has a passion for nascent technologies that have beneficial effects and economic impact on society. While he only serves on the boards of a few select companies, he works closely with most KV companies as they face transitions or key decisions.

Vinod’s greatest passion is being a mentor to entrepreneurs building technology-based businesses. He is driven by the desire to make a positive impact through scaling new energy sources, achieving petroleum independence and promoting a pragmatic approach to the environment. He also is passionate about social entrepreneurship with a special emphasis on microfinance as a poverty alleviation tool. He is a supporter of many microfinance organizations in India and Africa. He also has been experimenting with innovations in education and global housing.

Vinod also is a charter member of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), a non-profit global network of entrepreneurs and professionals that was founded in 1992 and has more than 40 chapters in nine countries today. He is a founding board member of the Indian School of Business (ISB). Vinod holds a bachelor of technology degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, India, a master’s degree in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a master’s degree in business administration from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

 

Portrait of Tom Manning

Tom Manning

Chairman
Ascertain

Tom Manning is a board director, corporate advisor, educator, and former S&P 400 Company CEO.  

Tom currently serves as Chairman of Ascertain, an AI joint venture between Northwell Health, one of the largest healthcare systems in the U.S., and Aegis Ventures, a leading venture incubation studio.  He is also on the boards of Cresco Labs, one of the largest medical and adult-use cannabis companies in the U.S., where he is Executive Chairman; CommScope (NASDAQ), a leading telecom and network technology manufacturer and Fortune 500 company; and ChinData (NASDAQ), the leading hyperscale data center firm powering the cloud in the Asia Pacific region.  

He chairs the Board of the Chicago Philharmonic Orchestra and serves as a director of The Basics, a pioneering firm in early childhood education.  He is an Executive-in-Residence at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago and has served on the adjunct faculty at The University of Chicago Law School, where he taught courses on corporate governance, private equity, China, and innovation.

Tom is the former Chairman and CEO of Dun & Bradstreet (“D&B”), a former S&P 400 Company and the global leader in corporate information and data analytics.  Prior to D&B, Tom worked and lived in Asia for nearly 20 years, serving as CEO of Cerberus Asia Operations & Advisory Limited, a subsidiary of Cerberus Capital Management, CEO of Capgemini Asia, a leading information technology services company, and CEO of Ernst & Young Consulting Asia.  He was a senior partner with Bain & Company in Silicon Valley and was also a practice leader with McKinsey & Company early in his career.

In the past, he served as a Director at Dun & Bradstreet and at five public companies in China – Clear Media, iSoftStone Holdings Limited, Asiainfo-Linkage, Gome Electrical Appliances Company, and the Bank of Communications – and seven private equity-backed companies in China, India, and the United States.

As a Senior Fellow in the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University from 2019-2021, Tom launched a social enterprise incubator called Harvard Square Labs, which works on a pro bono basis with clients seeking to scale up and accelerate their organizations.  

Tom speaks Mandarin and holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a bachelor’s degree in East Asian Studies from Harvard College.  A patent-holder and noted speaker on China, corporate governance, and globalization, he has been published, quoted, or profiled in various media, including Chief Executive, CNBC, Industry Week, NPR, IHT, Businessweek, Financial Times, WSJ, South China Morning Post, Journal of Private Equity, and Pepperdine Law Review.  

Throughout his career, Tom has emphasized innovation as a venture founder, investor, and advisor.  He has been associated with innovations in numerous fields, including health care, business services, and consumer products.  Early in his career, he was extensively involved in the health field as one of the founders of McKinsey’s health care consulting practice and as the CEO of a telemedicine company, whose core patent has been cited in over 1,000 subsequent inventions.

Portrait of Geeta Nayyar, MD

Geeta Nayyar, MD

SVP, Chief Medical Officer
Salesforce

Dr. G is Salesforce’s Chief Medical Officer. She’s a rheumatologist and nationally-recognized leader in health IT, bridging the divide between clinical medicine, business, and digital health.  As a Board Member of the American Telemedicine Association and the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, she helps steer decision-making at some of the nation’s most influential medical organizations.  Her work and expertise have earned her appearances on CNN, PBS and been featured in CNBC and the Huffington Post.

Portrait of Stanley Prusiner, MD

Stanley Prusiner, MD

Nobel Laureate; Director, Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases & Professor of Neurology
University of California, San Francisco

Stanley B. Prusiner is Director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases and Professor of Neurology and Biochemistry at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). He received his B.A. in Chemistry in 1964 and his M.D. in 1968 from the University of Pennsylvania. After completing his military service as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Public Health Service at the National Institutes of Health and his neurology residency training at UCSF, he joined the UCSF faculty in 1974 and set up a laboratory to study brain diseases.

Prusiner discovered an unprecedented class of pathogens that he named prions. Prions are proteins that acquire an alternative shape that becomes self-propagating. As prions accumulate, they cause neurodegenerative diseases in animals and humans. Prusiner’s discovery lead him to develop a novel disease paradigm: prions cause disorders such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans that manifest as (1) sporadic, (2) inherited and (3) infectious illnesses. When proposed, many scientists considered Prusiner’s concept of “infectious proteins” as well as his proposal that a single protein could possess multiple biologically active shapes or conformations to be heretical. Based on his seminal discovery that prions can assemble into amyloid fibrils, Prusiner proposed that the more common neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases may be caused by prions. Remarkably, a wealth of evidence continues to accumulate arguing that prions cause not only these common degenerative diseases, but also ALS, the frontotemporal dementias (FTDs), chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and multiple system atrophy (MSA). Much of Prusiner’s current research focuses on developing therapeutics that reduce the levels of the specific prions responsible for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, MSA, the FTDs, CTE and CJD.

Prusiner’s contributions to scientific research have been internationally recognized: He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and a foreign member of the Royal Society, London. He is the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Potamkin Prize for Alzheimer’s Disease Research from the American Academy of Neurology (1991); the Richard Lounsbery Award for Extraordinary Scientific Research in Biology and Medicine from the National Academy of Sciences (1993); the Gairdner Foundation International Award (1993); the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (1994); the Wolf Prize in Medicine from the State of Israel (1996); the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1997); and the United States Presidential National Medal of Science (2009).

Prusiner is the author of over 500 scientific research and 300 review articles, and editor of 11 books on diseases caused by prions. Prusiner’s recently published single-author book Madness and Memory, which chronicles his discovery of prions, has received wide acclaim. He holds 50 issued or allowed United States patents, all of which are assigned to the University of California. He has delivered over 150 honorary and over 725 invited lectures. Currently, Prusiner is the President-elect of the American Neurological Association.

Portrait of Lonny Reisman, MD

Lonny Reisman, MD

Former Chief Medical Officer of Aetna; Founder
HealthReveal

Lonny is Founder and former Chief Executive Officer of HealthReveal.  HealthReveal is a clinical AI company dedicated to mitigating avoidable consequences for patients who suffer from chronic disease. Previously, Lonny served as Aetna’s chief medical officer for six years. During his tenure at Aetna, he was responsible for the company’s clinical strategy to improve the health of Aetna’s members and helped build a better healthcare system supported by evidence-based accountability by every participant. He led healthcare system change through Aetna’s clinical thought leadership, Innovation Labs, clinical policy and integrated system design. 

Lonny is a recognized leader in health information technology, patient safety and evidence-based medicine and has published numerous clinical, peer-reviewed articles. He has spent his career confronting the challenges in healthcare and emphasizes that issues related to cost and quality must be addressed by supporting greater adherence to evidence-based standards of care. By replacing traditional information silos, Lonny has focused on new ways for information to be easily used and easily shared throughout the healthcare system. Drawing on expertise from across the healthcare and technology industries, Lonny helped align Aetna’s capabilities in clinical research, payment reform, health information technology, health information exchange, and patient and provider collaboration to drive innovations that lead to better health outcomes and lower costs. 

Prior to his CMO position, Lonny was Chief Executive Officer of ActiveHealth Management. He co-founded ActiveHealth Management, now an Aetna subsidiary, following nearly 20 years of experience as a physician and consultant to large employers concerned about healthcare quality and costs. Lonny led the development of the ActiveHealth CareEngine® System, a clinical decision support technology platform that received a U.S. Patent in 2004. Lonny is a member of the Harvard Medical School Health Care Policy Committee; the New York eHealth Collaborative Board of Directors; the East Coast CMO Executive Summit Committee; and the American College of Cardiology Science and Quality Committee. From 1991 to 1998, Lonny was a principal in the Managed Care Group of William M. Mercer where he led numerous consulting engagements with Fortune 500 corporations, healthcare providers, suppliers and payers that focused on managing the demand for healthcare resources. 

Lonny was an attending physician at New York Hospital and St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center between 1987 and 1999, and was a cardiology fellow at the University of Chicago from 1985 to 1987. He received his undergraduate degree from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and his medical degree from Tel Aviv University.

Portrait of Stacey Ellyn Rosen, MD

Stacey Ellyn Rosen, MD

Senior Vice President, Katz Institute for Women’s Health
Northwell Health

Stacey E. Rosen, MD is the senior vice president for the Katz Institute for Women’s Health, the Partners Council Professor of Women’s Health and Professor of Cardiology at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell. Dr. Rosen is a leading expert in the field of cardiovascular disease in women and oversees women’s health services at Northwell Health with a focus on the elimination of healthcare disparities through comprehensive clinical programs, gender-based research, community partnerships and education.

Dr. Rosen has been a practicing cardiologist for over 30 years and co-authored the new book, Heart Smarter for Women: Six Weeks to a Healthier Heart published in 2022. She also co-produced her first documentary titled “Ms. Diagnosed” which premiered at the Cinequest film festival in 2020.

A longtime volunteer for the American Heart Association (AHA), she has served in leadership roles at the local, regional and national level. In 2018, she received the AHA’s Women in Cardiology Mentoring Award and in 2021, she received the AHA’s Physician of the Year Award.

Dr. Rosen is a graduate of the six-year medical program at Boston University School of Medicine and is a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology, the American College of Physicians, and the AHA.

She is a recipient of numerous media, industry and healthcare awards and is regularly called upon by the media as an expert on women’s heart health.

Follow Dr. Rosen on twitter @DrStaceyRosen