2017 Keynote Speakers

Dr. Vanessa Kerry

Vanessa Kerry, MD, MSc, is the co-founder and CEO of Seed Global Health, a non-profit that deploys US health professionals to serve as educators and faculty in resource-limited countries to build a pipeline of future in-country providers and educators, strengthen healthcare delivery capacity and provide a new type of global diplomacy. Dr. Kerry helped Seed Global Health establish the Global Health Service Partnership (GHSP), a public-private partnership with the Peace Corps, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the countries where the program works. Since 2013, GHSP has sent volunteers to Uganda, Malawi and Tanzania and trained over 10,000 doctors, nurses and health professionals.  The program now works in Swaziland and Liberia as well. She graduated from Yale University summa cum laude and Harvard Medical School cum laude, completing her clinical training at Massachusetts General Hospital. She earned her Master’s in Health Policy, Planning, and Financing from the London Schools of Economics and of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She is currently a physician at Mass General and serves as the Associate Director of Partnerships and Global Initiatives at MGH Global Health. She directs the Global Public Policy and Social Change program.

Molly Winter

Molly Winter is director of Recode.  She began working with Recode in 2010 to determine how to legalize a portable composting toilet business in Oregon so people could experience ecological sanitation first hand. Before joining Recode, she worked for four years in research and development for a founding B Corp that manufactures countertops from recycled glass. Molly reformulated their product line to meet MBDC’s Cradle to Cradle Gold Rating. Molly’s experience in lean green manufacturing led her to develop and maintain standard operating procedures.  She is a designer, researcher, and illustrator seeking to help others understand the science of waste treatment processes to help them make better decisions.  Molly has created visual explanations for organizations including Beacon Food Forest, People’s Food Coop, Public Laboratory, Medical Reserve Corp, and USA Today. Molly’s work has been featured in MIT’s Design Issues, CDC, Smith magazine, and Sustainability Review. Molly has given talks at TEdx Bend, Living Future Conference, Tiny House Conference, Oregon Onsite Wastewater Association and the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference.  Molly’s academic background includes RISD, BA from Oberlin College’s environmental studies program, and Cewas, a Swiss-based competence center linking sustainable water, sanitation and resource management with business development.

Find more information on this handout discussing several design principles that Recode and Molly Winter draw from when building sustainable water and sanitation systems!

Peter Laugharn

Peter Laugharn serves as President and Chief Executive Officer of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation. Peter is a passionate leader with 25 years of foundation and nonprofit experience internationally, with a focus on improving the well-being of vulnerable children. He was executive director of the Firelight Foundation from 2008 to 2014. Firelight identifies, funds, and supports promising African nonprofits serving vulnerable children and families in the areas of education, resilience, and health. Prior to Firelight, Peter served for six years as executive director of the Netherlands-based Bernard van Leer Foundation, a private foundation that works to improve opportunities for children up to age 8 who are growing up in socially and economically difficult circumstances. He was director of programs at the Foundation for three years before becoming executive director. Peter began his career at Save the Children, where he worked for 11 years in a variety of roles. Eight of those years, he was based in Bamako, Mali. Peter helped develop the Village Schools model, which promoted access to basic education, girls’ schooling, and community participation. The model helped 45,000 children go to school and raised the number of primary schools in the country by 40 percent. Peter was later Save the Children’s Mali Field Office director, West Africa Area director and then education advisor for Africa, providing technical assistance for programs in 10 countries.

A graduate of Stanford and Georgetown Universities, Peter holds a Ph.D. in education from the University of London. He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco from 1982 to 1984. Peter was a co-founder of the International Education Funders Group and the Coalition for Children Affected by AIDS, and he is a member of the National Advisory Board of the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University.

2017 Breakout Speakers

Joshua Bivins

Joshua Bivins is currently enrolled in the MBA program at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. This past summer Joshua joined Visa’s emerging technology group as a product management intern, working in business intelligence and risk products.  At Anderson he is involved in the Entrepreneur Association, serving as a director of events; High Tech Business Association; Entrepreneur Leadership Development Program; Black & Scholes Surf Club; and is a Management Development for Entrepreneurs Fellow. Prior to starting at Anderson, he worked at PayGoal, a financial technology startup based in New York City, as a member of their product development team. Before joining PayGoal, Joshua worked at OSIsoft for 5 years as a Program Manager and Field Engineer.  Joshua has extensive experience in cross-functional team leadership, product management, project management, and business development.  Joshua holds a degree in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering with high honors from the Georgia Institute of Technology and was a member of the Order of Omega Chemical Engineering Honor Society and Beta Theta Pi fraternity.

Sarah Broadbent 

Sarah Broadbent is a full-time MBA student at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.  Before beginning her MBA program, Sarah worked at several agencies developing digital marketing and sales training solutions for major pharmaceutical and automotive clients.  She is passionate about marketing and plans to leverage her experience in the technology industry after completing her MBA.  Sarah graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UC Santa Barbara with degrees in Spanish and Political Science.  As part of her undergraduate degree, she studied politics in an immersive program at the Universidad de Granada in Spain.

Ross Donaldson

Featured on CNN, BBC, NPR, and other media outlets, Dr. Donaldson has worked around the globe, frequently in areas of conflict and disaster, and has been the lead architect of national emergency care plans in several countries. Triple-boarded in emergency medicine, emergency medical services, and clinical informatics, he is the Director of the Emergency Medicine Global Health Program at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and Associate Professor of emergency medicine and epidemiology respectively in the UCLA Schools of Medicine and Public Health. Dr. Donaldson is also the critically acclaimed author of The Lassa Ward, a memoir about international humanitarian work, and Founder and Editor-in-Chief of WikEM, the world’s largest emergency medicine open-access reference resource. Dr. Donaldson has been the principal investigator on approximately $20 million dollars’ worth of grants and is a recipient of the Humanitarian Award from the California chapter of American College of Emergency Physicians.

Omai Garner

Dr. Omai Garner is a Health Sciences Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at UCLA and serves as Associate Director of Clinical Microbiology and Director of Point of Care Testing for the UCLA Health System. He received his PhD from UC San Diego in Biomedical Sciences and did his Clinical Microbiology Fellowship at UCLA. Dr. Garner is Board Certified by the American Board of Medical Microbiology. Dr. Garner's research focuses on novel Point of Care Devices for infectious disease diagnosis in the developing world. He also serves as the Chairman of the Board for the Social Justice Learning Institute of Inglewood, California. 

Mary Gauvain

Mary Gauvain is Professor of Psychology at UC Riverside and has served as Co-Director of the UCD-UCR One Health Center. She received her BA from UC Irvine, MA from Stanford University, and PhD from the University of Utah, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the City University of New York, Graduate Center and the Oregon Social Learning Center. Her research, funded by the NIH and Spencer Foundation, examines social and cultural influences on cognitive development. She is currently the PI on an NSF IGERT award entitled Water SENSE: Social, Engineering, and Natural Science Engagement. She is the author of numerous publications as well as The Social Context of Cognitive Development  (Guilford, 2001). Her current research examines how children in the developing world participate in community health practices, and recent studies focus on children’s comprehension of water and food contamination in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Sebastian Linnemayr

Sebastian Linnemayr is a Senior Economist at the RAND Corporation and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. His current research focuses on the use of economic incentives and the application of insights from behavioral economics to improve complex, chronic health behaviors. He travels frequently to Uganda where he is implementing several interventions funded by the National Institutes of Health to increase medication adherence among people living with HIV. Linnemayr joined RAND after completing his position as postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Doe Mayer

Doe Mayer is Professor and Mary Pickford Chair of Film & Television Production in the School of Cinematic Arts at USC. She holds a joint appointment with the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.  Mayer has been working in film and television for the past 30 years and has produced, directed and provided technical support for hundreds of productions in the United States and more than twenty developing countries in Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands and the Americas. Much of this programming has been in the areas of family planning, basic education, health and nutrition promotion, HIV/AIDS prevention, population and women’s issues.  

Her teaching areas of film specialization include documentary production, health communication, media and social change, and creativity.  Mayer is currently the Co-Principal Investigator and producer for a film and media campaign project (2013-2018), funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, with the goal of helping Latinos in the US identify serious mental illness and seek help. She also recently completed a series of short documentaries on immigrant health issues as Executive Producer (2015). Mayer has been awarded three Fulbright Faculty Fellowships in Fiji (1995), the Netherlands (2009) and Australia (2011).  Her current research interests include a deeper study of the power of story in changing people attitudes and behavior around health issues and why empathy, identification and stickiness have become such important issues in the field globally.  

Oladele Ogunseitan

Oladele (Dele) Ogunseitan is professor of Public Health and founding Chair of the department of Population Health and Disease Prevention at the University of California, Irvine. He is also professor of Social Ecology. He earned his Doctorate at the University of Tennessee, and his Master of Public Health degree at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also earned a certificate in International Health. He earned a certificate in teaching by case-method at Harvard School of Public Health. He is alumni faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He researches the nexus of industrial development, environmental quality and human health. His articles have appeared in Science, The Lancet Global Health, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, Environmental Health Perspectives, Journal of Industrial Ecology, and Environmental Science & Technology. Awards from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Global Forum for Health Research have funded his research. 

He serves on the Board of Directors of the University of California Global Health Institute, and he is a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Association of Schools and Programs in Public Health (ASPPH). He is a member of the Hoover Medal Board of Award, and was named a League of Materials Superhero by the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS) Foundation. His honors include the American Council of Education (ACE) Leadership Excellence award from the international OpenCourseWare Consortium; the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation Research Fellowship at the Marine Biological Laboratory; and the Jefferson Science Fellowship of the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine.  He previously served on the State of California’s Green Ribbon Science Panel. He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the State of California’s Community Protection and Hazardous Waste Reduction Initiative. He is a Director of Evaluation for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-funded Orange County Partnerships to Improve Community Health (OC-PICH) to reduce the burden of chronic diseases broadly and to eliminate disparities in preventive health care in particularly vulnerable communities. He is currently on secondment as a Foreign Affairs Officer in the Office of International Health and Biodefense, U.S. Department of State, Washington, DC.

Michael Ong

Michael K. Ong, M.D., Ph.D. is the Director for UCLA Connected Health, which oversees all telemedicine, telehealth, and mHealth activities for the UCLA Health System. Dr. Ong is an Associate Professor at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine in Los Angeles, California, and a staff physician at the Greater Los Angeles VA Health Care System where he is the research leader for its section of hospital medicine. His research interests focus on improving the delivery of appropriate and efficient health care by general internal medicine physicians. His research has applied this focus in several areas of general medicine, including health system-based care, mental health, and tobacco control.

Manisha Shah

Manisha Shah is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. She is also a Faculty Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a Faculty Affiliate at UC Berkeley’s Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), and a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). She received her Ph.D. in agriculture and resource economics from UC Berkeley.

Shah is a development economist whose primary research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of applied microeconomics, health, and international development.  She has written several papers on the economics of sex markets in order to learn how more effective policies and programs can be deployed to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections.  Shah is currently leading a randomized controlled trial to evaluate methods to improve sexual and reproductive health outcomes of adolescents in Tanzania. She also works in the area of child health and education. Research shows that early life investments in human capital explain a great deal of variation in later life educational attainment, earnings, and employment. Her work in this area attempts to better understand determinants of child health and cognitive development. She has led a randomized evaluation of a sanitation intervention in rural Indonesia to quantify the causal impact of improved sanitation on child health outcomes. She is also working in rural India to understand how policies as well as other shocks to income impact human capital investment decisions primarily among children and adolescents. Much of her research involves primary data collection and fieldwork, and she has worked extensively in Mexico, Ecuador, Indonesia, India, and Tanzania.

Woutrina Smith

Woutrina Smith BA, DVM, MPVM, PhD uses One Health approaches to investigate the epidemiology and transmission dynamics of zoonotic pathogens locally in California as well as internationally at multiple project sites in Africa and Asia. As a molecular epidemiologist working at the interfaces of humans, animals, and their shared environments, waterborne fecal pathogens as well as milk- and airborne transmitted zoonotic agents are of particular interest when considering individual and population health issues.

Victor Tabbush

Victor Tabbush, PhD, is Professor Emeritus at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. His doctorate is in Economics from UCLA. He has been director of the Office of Executive Education Programs and has served as Senior Associate Dean and Director of the Anderson School's Fully Employed MBA and the Executive MBA programs. He specializes in healthcare economics and in healthcare leadership and management capacity building. He is the founding director of the UCLA Management Development Institute that builds management and leadership capacity of health systems in sub Saharan Africa and of the Johnson & Johnson Health Care Executive program that serves U.S. community clinics and AIDS service providers. He has been a core faculty member in both the Blue Shield Foundation Clinic Leadership Institute Program and the California Health Care Foundation Leadership Program since the inception of both programs. In 2016 he joined a team from JHPIEGO at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health to train surgical teams in Ethiopia in management and leadership.

He continues to direct programs sponsored by The Scan Foundation and by the Colorado Health Foundation to build management and leadership capacity of community-based organizations that provide long-term services and supports for the elderly and disabled. He has recently collaborated with The Scan Foundation and the American Geriatric Society to conduct research on the subject of the business case for person-centered care for low-income seniors with multiple chronic conditions. He was invited in 2015 to be a peer reviewer for the World Health Organization on its World Report on Ageing and Health. He has won Outstanding Teaching Awards in all three of UCLA’s MBA programs -- in the Full-Time MBA Program (2000), the UCLA Executive MBA program (1998), and the Fully-Employed MBA program (1996).
Professor Tabbush continues an active research agenda and is a frequently published author in journals such as the Archives of Internal Medicine, Neurosurgical Focus, and Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology. He has a full history of public service including chairing the Official Salaries Authority of the City of Los Angeles, as Commissioner for the California Worker's Compensation Insurance Commission, and as a Commissioner for the Los Angeles City Civil Service Commission. He currently serves on the External Advisory Group of the Maternal and Newborn Health Unit of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, and on the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine Program in World Health.

Chris Tarnay

Dr. Christopher Tarnay is a Urogynecologist and the Division Chief in Female Pelvic Medicine and Reconstructive Surgery.  He is an Associate Professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA in the Departments of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Urology.  Dr. Tarnay also serves as associate program director for the fellowship in FPMRS.  Currently he is Chief of Staff at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.  Since 2008, Dr. Tarnay has served as Medicine for Humanity’s Medical Director and lead surgeon in Uganda.  He has been instrumental in establishing partnerships with local doctors and trainees, as well as relieving the tremendous burden of obstetric fistula on women and communities in Uganda.  In 2016, Dr. Tarnay assumed the role of President of Medicine for Humanity.

George Tolomiczenko

Dr. Tolomiczenko’s experience as a clinician, researcher, teacher and administrator helps him in his Administrative Director role to guide and run the Health, Technology and Engineering program at the University of Southern California (HTE@USC).  After an interdisciplinary undergraduate degree at Caltech, he earned a doctorate in Clinical Psychology at Boston University. As both a scientist and clinician working at medical institutions affiliated with Harvard University, his focus shifted to public health and policy issues involving homelessness and mental illness. His Masters in Public Health from Harvard University covered healthcare management and improvement. He then moved home to Toronto, where he earned an M.B.A. to inform his efforts devoted to creating and funding programs and partnerships enabling disease-focused basic research, knowledge translation and adapting chronic disease models. Since returning to California in 2010, he has served to develop USC’s interdisciplinary collaborative strengths applied to medical device and process innovation. He teaches courses designed to form and train teams linking engineering and medicine to create innovative and licensed technology and start-up companies targeting needs at home and abroad. 

Student Speakers

Kali Basman - "Visionaria Network: Indigenous Women's Empowerment"

Kali Basman has designed clean energy curricula for international programs and supports the management and development of environmental education and sustainable development campaigns in Latin America. She is currently a fellow for the United Nation Association’s regional conference on Global Health, an international Yin Yoga teacher, and a graduate student in Environmental Health at UCLA's Fielding School of Public Health, where she is pursuing an MPH with a concentration on Gender.

Ipsita Dey - "Domestic Violence Interventions: Anthropological Perspectives on Sustainable Development"

Ipsita Dey is an undergraduate fourth-year Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics major pursuing a minor in Anthropology at UCLA. Ipsita is currently working on her senior honors thesis, for which she is studying domestic violence in South Asian immigrant communities. She spent the summer of 2016 volunteering and completing ethnographic research at Saheli Asian Women's Refuge in Manchester, UK. Her work focuses on the post-traumatic rehabilitation and reconstruction of transnational identities among domestic violence survivors. Ipsita also volunteers as the Lead Ethnographic Research Associate for Fellowship for International Service in Health, where she is leading an anthropological field study on the embodiment and narratives of health in Maclovio Rojas, Mexico. Additionally, Ipsita works as: a student research assistant and study director for clinical studies at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, a Volunteer Fellow for the UCLA Volunteer Center, and a student activist for the Community Service Commission at UCLA. She recently co-developed a health based phone app, “Silver Linings,” which functions as a self assessment tool for mental health patients. Ipsita is passionate about sustainable local and global development, and in the future hopes to use her unique interdisciplinary education to study promising community-based social interventions

Eyad Gharaibeh - "Beyond Barrier's — A Syrian Refugee's Perspective of Healthcare"

Eyad Gharaibeh is a second-year medical student at the University of Kansas Medical Center. This past summer, he received a Clendening Fellowship to conduct field research in Istanbul, Turkey, where he visited safety net Syrian clinics and surveyed Syrian refugees about their barriers to accessing quality affordable healthcare. Prior to medical school, he received a bachelor of science in neurobiology from the University of Kansas and dedicated his time researching his own bleeding disorder, Glanzmann thrombasthenia, at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and The Rockefeller University in New York City. Eyad aspires to become a hematologist/oncologist focused on improving access and quality of healthcare to underserved populations in the United States and globally. He believes that optimism, hard work, and gratitude are the essential ingredients for manifesting any dream..

Fiona Obiezu - "Electronic Graveyard"

Fiona Obiezu is a Nigerian American who was born in Nigeria and grew up in Los Angeles California. She graduated from USC with a Bachelor of Science in Health Promotion and Disease Prevention and is currently pursuing her Masters in Global Medicine. Fiona currently works as a Research Assistant at USC, under Dr. Kaori Noridomi. Her work comprises of molecular Computational Biology focused on the autoimmune disease Myasthenia Gravis. In addition to her research background, Fiona is very interested in preventative care and has channeled this passion into her work as a Wellness Advocate as well as her weekly volunteer services at a local community clinic. She is also part of the MUDA Africa organization, which is dedicated to sustaining Africa's environment. Fiona will continue to use her time, knowledge and experience to improve lives and communities for people at home and overseas.