IDC 2010 - Panel speaker bios

SAT, 4/10, 9:30 - 10:50 AM. Location: TBD

Global health is a complex and multidisciplinary field that ranges from such macro principle as national systems and policies to individual needs. Technology lies at the heart of Global Health and spans vertically across the field of global health. We seek to bring together an amazing repertoire of practitioners who come from diverse fields and varied backgrounds but all work directly with global health technologies. By learning more about the technical challenges of developing appropriate technologies, implementing their use, and ensuring their accessibility, we hope to elucidate ways that global health technologies can perform better in the future to achieve development goals. We hope to learn from the successes and failures of these leading practitioners to understand how global health technologies can better be leveraged to improve global health.

Biographies

Aya Caldwell is the Program Manager at CIMIT's Global Health Initiative (GHI). As a Program Manager, Ms. Caldwell implements evaluations, coordinates programs, and conducts research to further the goals of GHI's mission. Ms. Caldwell also served as a Maternal Child Health Consultant to the International Organization of Migration (IOM) to conduct an outcome evaluation on an asphyxia training program in Aceh, Indonesia. In 2009 Ms. Caldwell traveled to the Annual World Health Care Congress to present at the "Extremely Affordable Health Innovations" poster competition. GHI's poster on the intervention and outcome study for Birth Asphyxia in Aceh, Indonesia won in the Maternal and Child Health category. Prior to joining CIMIT, Ms. Caldwell worked in finance as a research analyst focusing on private equity deals in emerging markets. She graduated from Dartmouth College in Anthropology and Asian Middle Eastern Studies, completing her Anthropology thesis work in Guatemala City, Guatemala analyzing theories of development using a women’s cooperative as a case study. Ms. Caldwell has had extensive overseas experience in Mali, Indonesia, Morocco, Guatemala, and Japan.

Dr. Ryan is the current CEO of Diagnostics For All and was formerly the President and CEO of AVANT Immunotherapeutics, Inc., a publicly traded biopharmaceutical company developing vaccines. Dr. Ryan is also Research Professor of Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine and serves on its Board of Visitors. She serves on a number of boards including Waltham Technologies Inc., AMRI Global, IQuum, the Business Advisory Board of BIO Ventures for Global Health, the Scientific Advisory Board of Genocea, Inc. She is past Chair of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, served on its Board (1996-2008), as well as the Board of the Biotechnology Industry Organization. She is a member of the Massachusetts Life Sciences Collaborative Leadership Council, and the Climate Change and Green Energy Council. Dr. Ryan holds a Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular Biology from Cambridge University and BS degrees in Zoology, Microbiology and Chemistry from Bristol University. She received an Honorary Doctor of Science Degree from Bristol University in 2009. She was a Howard Hughes Investigator, NIH MERIT Awardee and an Established Investigator of the American Heart Association. In 2007, she received the Albert Einstein Award for outstanding achievement in the life sciences and was the recipient of the Cartier Women’s Initiative Award in 2009. In 2002 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II awarded her the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for her services to the research, development and promotion of biotechnology. She has written over 500 original papers and 11 books.

Darin Lee Zehrung is a program manager and portfolio leader with the PATH Technology Solutions Global Program. His major responsibilities include: serving as the portfolio leader for Vaccine Delivery Technologies; directing the Disposable-Syringe Jet Injector Project; and serving as a project manager, technical resource, and senior advisor to multiple Technology Solutions health technology development projects. He is also a long-standing member of the PATH Research Ethics Committee. Mr. Zehrung has a Bachelor of Science degree from Western Washington University (WWU) and is currently a Master of Business Administration (MBA) candidate (WWU).

Division of Global Health and Human Rights, Department of Emergency Medicine, MGH

Thomas Burke, MD, FACEP is Chief of the MGH Division of Global Health and Human Rights within the Department of Emergency Medicine, and faculty at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Burke has extensive experience in the public health arena as a senior emergency physician, a faculty member and researcher, and as a leader in the nonprofit sector directing medical education work overseas since 1994.

Dr. Burke's efforts through his Division have been principally focused on women and children's health and human rights. Current and recent past programs include efforts in Zambia, Liberia, Southern Sudan, Mali, Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda. Additionally, the Division is developing a community peace index as well as embarking on action-based research on sex trafficking of girls and women on several continents.

Dr. Burke's many extraordinary experiences include seven years in the U.S. Army with several overseas deployments and serving as the doctor for the FBI Hostage Rescue Team at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho. He was director of the emergency department in the U.S. Army's Landstuhl Regional Medical Center during the Bosnian crisis and helped care for 28,000 refugees in Guantanamo Bay in 1995. Dr. Burke successfully started three companies (clinical applied trials and land development) and, in the mid-1990s, ran an NGO that developed medical education systems in Eastern Europe.

Prior to joining the MGH, Dr. Burke was Associate Clinical Director of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and a faculty member for the hospital's Division of International Health and Humanitarian Programs. He also held a Director’s position within the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative at the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr Burke has published numerous articles in The New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the American Journal of Emergency Medicine, Academic Emergency Medicine, 911 News, Annals of Emergency Medicine, Critical Decisions in Emergency Medicine, the British Journal of Midwifery, and other peer reviewed journals. He is an author of Topics in Pediatric Emergency Medicine and has also recently co-authored articles on organ trafficking. Dr. Burke serves on several boards, including Americans for UNFPA, the Bianca Jagger Foundation for Human Rights, and he has close ties to numerous national and international leaders.

Amit Srivastava, Ph.D. is Instructor in Pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Srivastava’s primary interests include developing innovative technology to enhance health care delivery in resource-poor setting around the world. Dr. Srivastava leads two NIH-funded translational research projects – 1) the development of novel nebulizer devices to deliver aerosolized vaccines and drugs and 2) the development of point-of-care biological monitoring to assess anti-tuberculosis therapeutic adherence. These projects are being pursued in conjunction with collaborators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Srivastava was a member of the teaching faculty at Carnegie Mellon University and is currently an Instructor at MIT’s D-Lab, a program dedicated to the design of technology appropriate for the developing world. In addition, Dr. Srivastava helps run MIT’s Innovations in International Health (IIH) program and he teaches a course at MIT in global health technology design: "D-Lab Health: Medical Technologies for the Developing World".

Dr. Srivastava earned his Ph.D. in Genetics and Cell biology from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. He obtained a M.S. in Biotechnology from University of Baroda and a B.S. in Microbiology from the University of Bombay, in India.