David U. Himmelstein is a distinguished professor of public health at CUNY’s Hunter College and a lecturer in medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he was previously a professor of medicine. He also serves as a staff physician at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. Prior to his move to CUNY, he practiced primary care internal medicine and served as the chief of social and community medicine at a public hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has authored or co-authored three books and more than 150 journal articles, including widely cited proposals for single-payer healthcare reform, and studies of patient dumping (which led to the enactment of an EMTALA law that banned that practice), the high administrative costs of the US healthcare system, medical bankruptcy (co-authored with Senator Elizabeth Warren), and the mortal consequences of uninsurance. He co-founded, with Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, Physicians for a National Health Program, whose 22,000 members advocate for non-profit, single-payer national health insurance. Himmelstein graduated from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, and completed a medical residency at Highland Hospital in Oakland, California, and a fellowship in General Internal Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Steffie Woolhandler is a Distinguished Professor at The City University of New York’s Hunter College, a primary-care doctor in the South Bronx, and a Lecturer in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where she was formerly Professor of Medicine.  A native of Louisiana, she graduated from LSU Medical School in New Orleans, and completed an internal medicine residency at Cambridge Hospital and  a research fellowship in General Internal Medicine at Harvard.  During her stint as a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow at the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) she worked with Senator Paul Wellstone and then-Congressman Bernie Sanders. She has published more than 150 journal articles, reviews, chapters and books on health policy and is a leading advocate of non-profit national health insurance for the United States  She, along with Dr. David Himmelstein co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program. Among her influential scholarly articles are studies on patient dumping (which led to a federal ban on that practice, medical bankruptcy (co-authored with Elizabeth Warren), waste in hospitals and in medicine more generally , the lethality of being uninsured and proposals for single payer health reform.

@swoolhandler

Altaf Saadi is a neurologist and fellow at the National Clinical Scholars Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she focuses on promoting healthcare leadership in health policy, health services, and community-partnered research. Her fellowship is also supported by the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. She completed her neurology training at the Partners Neurology Program at Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s Hospitals in Boston, where she also served as chief resident. During her residency, Saadi’s interest in health equity led her to work in resource-limited settings in Zambia, Tanzania, and the Navajo Nation; with Boston Healthcare for the Homeless; and with the Doctors Without Borders telemedicine program. Currently, she serves as a volunteer member of the Physicians for Human Rights’ Asylum Network, providing medical and psychological forensic evaluations for asylum seekers. Her research and advocacy focus on health inequities and disparities among racial/ethnic minorities, immigrants, and refugees, and enhancing diversity within the medical workforce. Most recently, her work has focused on understanding how hospitals and healthcare facilities can ensure that all patients feel safe when accessing health care regardless of their immigration status, including publishing a recent viewpoint in JAMA entitled, “Making the Case for Sanctuary Hospitals.” She is a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Medical School, where she graduated cum laude and received the Dean’s Community Service Award.

@AltafSaadiMD

Zinzi Bailey is a social epidemiologist focused on cancer health disparities as well as the health impacts of and policy solutions for structural and institutional discrimination, especially at the intersection of public health and criminal justice. She is also interested in the use of data and indicators in equitable policy and management. Bailey is currently an assistant scientist at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine’s Jay Weiss Institute for Health Equity at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center. She was the director of research and evaluation at the Center for Health Equity in the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene from 2015 to 2017. Bailey received a DSc in social and behavioral sciences from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an MSPH with a concentration in global epidemiology from Emory University.

@zinzinator

Davida Schiff is a general academic pediatrician and health services researcher focused on understanding how substance use in pregnant and parenting women impacts the health of children and families. She is the medical director of the HOPE Clinic (Harnessing support for Opioid use in Pregnancy and Early childhood) at Massachusetts General Hospital, a multidisciplinary program in caring for women and families from the time of conception through the first two years postpartum. Her scholarship has focused on understanding the stigma toward pregnant and parenting women with opioid use disorder, creating and implementing a specialized curriculum for trainees caring for substance-exposed dyads, assessing the impact of hospital and professional guidelines around supporting breastfeeding in mothers with OUD, and evaluating a novel police-led addiction treatment referral program in Gloucester, MA. Her work has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Pediatrics, JAMA Pediatrics, Academic Pediatrics, Journal of Substance Abuse and Treatment, and Substance Abuse, among other journals. She is an instructor in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Schiff completed her undergraduate training at Columbia University, medical training at the Boston University School of Medicine, pediatrics residency in the Boston Combined Residency Program at Boston Medical Center and Boston Children’s Hospital, general pediatrics research fellowship at Boston Medical Center, and master’s program in health services research from the Boston University School of Public Health.

@davida_schiff

Marion Nestle is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University in the department she chaired from 1988 to 2003. She is also a professor of sociology at NYU and a visiting professor of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell. Previous positions were at Brandeis University and the UCSF School of Medicine, where she was associate dean. Prior to joining NYU, Nestle was senior nutrition policy advisor in the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Department of Health and Human Services. Her research examines the scientific and societal influences on dietary choices and their health consequences. She is the author of several prize-winning books, among them Food Politics, Safe Food, Why Calories Count, and Soda Politics. Nestle’s next book is Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat (Basic Books, October 2018). Her work has received many awards, including honorary degrees from Transylvania University in Kentucky and the City University of New York’s Macaulay Honors Program. From 2008 to 2013, she wrote a monthly “Food Matters” column for the San Francisco Chronicle. She blogs almost daily at www.foodpolitics.com, and her twitter account has been ranked by Science Magazine, Time magazine, and The Guardian as among the top ten in health and science. She earned a doctorate in molecular biology and an MPH in public health nutrition, both from the University of California, Berkeley.

@marionnestle 

Adam Gaffney is a physician, writer, healthcare researcher, and advocate. He is an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a pulmonary and critical care physician at the Cambridge Health Alliance. Gaffney has authored or co-authored articles in numerous medical journals, including the Lancet, the British Medical Journal, and the American Journal of Public Health, and his writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, the New Republic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, USA Today, and elsewhere. He is the author of the recent book, To Heal Humankind: The Right to Health in History (Routledge, 2017). Gaffney is president-elect of the single-payer advocacy organization Physicians for a National Health Program.

@awgaffney

Richard L. Berke is the founding executive editor of STAT, a Boston-based national publication that covers health, medicine, and the life sciences. He was previously a longtime reporter and editor at The New York Times, where he served as White House correspondent, chief political correspondent, Washington editor, national editor, video content editor, and assistant managing editor. More recently, Berke was executive editor at Politico. He was a visiting lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and has been a longtime member of the senior advisory committee at Harvard’s Institute of Politics. Berke has been a regular on television, with frequent appearances on programs ranging from Washington Week to The Today Show to Charlie Rose. He holds a BA in political science from the University of Michigan and an MS in journalism from Columbia University.

@rickberke

Joia Mukherjee is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and chief medical officer of Partners In Health, an international medical charity dedicated to providing a preferential option for the poor in health care. She is an internist, a pediatrician, an infectious disease doctor, and a public health specialist. Mukherjee has been the chief medical officer of PIH since 2000, supporting its efforts to provide high-quality, comprehensive health care to the poorest and most vulnerable in partnership with local communities and health officials in Haiti, Rwanda, Lesotho, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Peru, Mexico, Russia, Kazakhstan, and the Navajo Nation. Mukherjee’s clinical foci include HIV, multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, mental health, Ebola, human resources for health, and health systems strengthening. As an innovator, teacher, and mentor, she has been involved in leveraging the clinical implementation experience of Partners In Health to develop the field of Global Health Delivery at Harvard Medical School. She teaches healthcare professionals and emerging leaders in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where she directs the Masters of Medical Science program in Global Health Delivery. She also teaches Global Health Delivery, social medicine, infectious disease, and human rights to medical students, residents, and fellows at a wide variety of US and international institutions. Her scholarly work is focused on generating a body of evidence to inform the development of healthcare delivery systems that can effectively address the burden of disease in resource-poor settings. Mukherjee serves on the board of directors of Village Health Works (Burundi), the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, and Project Muso (Mali). She advises many other organizations in their efforts to deliver health care with a human rights approach to the poorest of the poor.

@JoiaMukherjee

Martin McKee is a professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where he founded the European Centre on Health of Societies in Transition, a World Health Organization Collaborating Centre. He is also research director of the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies and past president of the European Public Health Association. McKee has published more than 970 academic papers and 44 books. His contributions to European health policy have been recognized by, among others, election to the UK Academy of Medical Sciences and the US National Academy of Medicine and by the award of honorary doctorates from Hungary, the Netherlands, and Sweden and visiting professorships at universities in Europe and Asia. He was awarded the 2003 Andrija Stampar Medal for contributions to European public health, the 2014 Alwyn Smith Prize for outstanding contributions to the health of the population, and the 2015 Donabedian International Award for contributions to quality of care. In 2005, McKee was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. McKee qualified in medicine in Belfast, Northern Ireland, with subsequent training in internal medicine and public health. He has an active following on Twitter.

@martinmckee 

Carol Hills is a Senior Producer, reporter, and host for PRI’s The World, public radio’s flagship international news show based at WGBH and co-produced with the BBC World Service. She helped launch the program in 1996 and was one of its founding editors. Over the years her reporting has taken her to Europe, India, Nigeria, Vietnam, and Cuba.  Hills’ journalistic interests range from foreign policy, global politics, public health, and immigration, to popular culture. Her current priority is to produce news stories that reach across as many political bubbles and silos as possible using a wide array of broadcast and digital platforms. Hills is also intent on challenging the received wisdom of her own silo: public radio and its online journalistic equivalents. In recent years she has introduced global satire as a serious subject of coverage on PRI’s The World. Her reporting on political cartoonists, standup comics, and graffiti artists from Moscow to Mogadishu have shown that suppression of satire is often the first sign that a government is moving in an authoritarian direction. Hills holds a BA in history from the University of Vermont and a MA in international relations from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. In 2001-2002 she was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Her previous positions include creating a CPB award-winning weekday public radio news program for the Northwest and producing radio and television news for The Christian Science Monitor. Hills got her start in journalism at WGBH on The Ten O’Clock News with Christopher Lydon.

@globalcartoons

Lello Tesema is a general internal medicine physician. She is the director of Population Health for the Los Angeles County Correctional Health Services in the Department of Health Services; assistant professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the University of Southern California, and a Gehr Fellow at the Gehr Family Center for Health Systems Science. Tesema’s research and policy interests include examining the health effects of incarceration and implementing interventions that promote successful diversion and reentry. She completed her medical school training at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, her residency at Cambridge Health Alliance, and her Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles.

@LTesema

David U. Himmelstein is a distinguished professor of public health at CUNY’s Hunter College and a lecturer in medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he was previously a professor of medicine. He also serves as a staff physician at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. Prior to his move to CUNY, he practiced primary care internal medicine and served as the chief of social and community medicine at a public hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has authored or co-authored three books and more than 150 journal articles, including widely cited proposals for single-payer healthcare reform, and studies of patient dumping (which led to the enactment of an EMTALA law that banned that practice), the high administrative costs of the US healthcare system, medical bankruptcy (co-authored with Senator Elizabeth Warren), and the mortal consequences of uninsurance. He co-founded, with Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, Physicians for a National Health Program, whose 22,000 members advocate for non-profit, single-payer national health insurance. Himmelstein graduated from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, and completed a medical residency at Highland Hospital in Oakland, California, and a fellowship in General Internal Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Steffie Woolhandler is a Distinguished Professor at The City University of New York’s Hunter College, a primary-care doctor in the South Bronx, and a Lecturer in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where she was formerly Professor of Medicine.  A native of Louisiana, she graduated from LSU Medical School in New Orleans, and completed an internal medicine residency at Cambridge Hospital and  a research fellowship in General Internal Medicine at Harvard.  During her stint as a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow at the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) she worked with Senator Paul Wellstone and then-Congressman Bernie Sanders. She has published more than 150 journal articles, reviews, chapters and books on health policy and is a leading advocate of non-profit national health insurance for the United States  She, along with Dr. David Himmelstein co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program. Among her influential scholarly articles are studies on patient dumping (which led to a federal ban on that practice, medical bankruptcy (co-authored with Elizabeth Warren), waste in hospitals and in medicine more generally , the lethality of being uninsured and proposals for single payer health reform.

@swoolhandler