Distinguished Speaker Series
The Distinguished Speaker Series is a free virtual event open to the public on the first Tuesday of each month from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. U.S. EST. The series consists of nationally and internationally renowned experts and leaders invited to share their perspectives on health services research, population health and public health.
2025 – 2026 Speakers
Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH
Dr. Galea is the inaugural dean of Washington University School of Public Health. He is the editor-in-chief of JAMA Health Forum. He was previously dean of Boston University School of Public Health. He is internationally recognized for his work on social and psychiatric epidemiology, particularly the behavioral health consequences of trauma. TIME magazine named him an epidemiology innovator, and Thomson Reuters/Clarivate named him one of the "World's Most Influential Scientific Minds" on multiple occasions.
Ann McKee, MD
Dr. McKee is internationally recognized for her work on Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy and other neurodegenerative diseases associated with repeated head trauma. Her work has been instrumental in identifying Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in athletes, military veterans, and others exposed to brain injuries, and she directs the world's largest brain bank dedicated to traumatic brain injury research. In 2018, TIME Magazine named her one of the world's 100 most influential people, as well as one of the 50 most influential people in healthcare.
Dixon Chibanda, MD, PhD
Dr. Chibanda is a professor of psychiatry and global mental health at LSHTM & University of Zimbabwe. He is internationally recognized for his work on scalable, evidence-based, and culturally rooted mental health interventions. He founded the Friendship Bench, a community-based mental health intervention that has been scaled across Zimbabwe with over million people having received therapy on a wooden park bench delivered by a trained community grandmother. The model has been replicated across the globe in different settings such as NYC, Washington DC, New Orleans, El Salvadore, Vietnam and more. He is a TED speaker, an ASPEN New Voices Fellow, and his book "The Friendship Bench: How fourteen grandmothers inspired a mental health revolution” was published this year reflecting the Friendship Bench journey and implementation.
Rainu Kaushal, MD, MPH
Rainu Kaushal, MD, MPH, is the Senior Associate Dean of Health Data Science, Chair of Population Health Sciences, and Nanette Laitman Distinguished Professor at Weill Cornell Medicine. A dual-trained internist and pediatrician, Dr. Kaushal is a leading expert in health services research and information science. Her work has shaped U.S. pediatric patient safety, health IT, and healthcare delivery. She founded INSIGHT Clinical Research Network, the nation’s largest urban clinical database, which has supported hundreds of research studies.
As a leader, Dr. Kaushal has driven major growth in the clinical research and population health enterprise at Weill Cornell Medicine, boosting funding, mentorship, and infrastructure while recruiting diverse faculty talent. She also expanded the educational programs, including three novel master’s programs, a joint executive MBA/MS program with the Cornell SC Johnson Graduate School of Management, and a doctoral program in population health sciences.
An accomplished scholar with more than 260 publications, Dr. Kaushal is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the Association of American Physicians, the American College of Medical Informatics Association, and a Crain’s Inaugural Notable Women in Healthcare.
Presentation Not Recorded
Dilan Ellegala, MD
Dr. Ellegala is internationally recognized for his work on global neurosurgery. He established Madaktari Africa, a nonprofit organization that transformed global health education and surgery, particularly in resource-limited settings, with the "Train-Forward" Model for complex brain surgeries. His journey of revolutionizing health care within Africa is documented by Tony Bartelme, a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, in the book A Surgeon in the Village.
Daniele Fallin, PhD
Dr. Fallin is internationally recognized for work on understanding the genetic, epigenetic, and environmental mechanisms underlying neuropsychiatric and developmental disorders, particularly autism, Alzheimer's disease, and schizophrenia. She was the inaugural principal investigator of the B'more Healthy Brain and Child Development study, one of 25 sites in the NIH's newly launched study, and she now serves as an associate director of the administrative core, guiding epidemiologic design. In 2023, she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.
Jon Fielder, MD
Dr. Fielder is internationally recognized for his work on strengthening mission hospitals throughout Africa. During the expansion of antiretroviral treatment under the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, he assisted in the establishment of HIV clinics in Kenya and the country's largest HIV clinical training program. He is the author of Tuberculosis in the HIV Era, a practical manual for front-line health workers that has been widely adopted in Africa. While in Malawi in 2010, he and a college friend founded African Mission Healthcare, a non-profit organization that strengthens mission hospitals and has given $70 million to 47 partners in 18 countries. Its efforts have resulted in one million patient visits. The African Mission Healthcare was co-winner of the 2017 Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity.
Amber Barnato, MD, MS, MPH
Dr. Barnato is internationally recognized for her work on understanding the causes and consequences of variation in end-of-life intensive care unit and life-sustaining treatment use among seriously ill older adults. She oversees the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care and is leading the development of the Dartmouth Health Equity Atlas. She established and directed the Clinical Scientist Training Program at the University of Pittsburgh and founded the Dartmouth Health Equity Research Pathways Program at Dartmouth. She has previously served as Vice President of the Society for Medical Decision Making and as a 2024-2025 Fellow of the Ivy + Faculty Advancement Network.
Bruce Biccard, MBChB, PhD
Dr. Biccard is the incoming Head of Nuffield Division of Anaesthetics at Oxford University. He is the editor-in-chief of Southern African Journal of Anaesthesia and Analgesia and author of the impactful book, Safer Surgery for Africa: Challenges and Solutions. He is currently Professor and Second Chair in the Department of Anaesthesia and Perioperative Medicine at Groote Schuur Hospital and the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is internationally recognized for his work on perioperative outcomes and global surgery. He is Principal Investigator of the African Surgical Outcomes Study (ASOS), the ASOS-2 Trial, and co-led the African Covid-19 Critical Care Outcomes Study. He is the Immediate Past President of the South African Society of Anaesthesiologists.
Ashish Jha, MD, MPH
Dr. Jha is internationally recognized for his work on pandemic preparedness and response, including groundbreaking research around Ebola, as well as health policy research and practice. President Joe Biden appointed him as White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator, describing him as “one of the leading public health experts in America.” He is the recipient of the Massachusetts Public Health Alliance Paul Revere Award in 2022, Fortune’s World’s 50 Greatest Leaders and Johnson & Johnson Research!America Meeting the Moment for Public Health Award in 202, and Boston Globe Bostonian of the Year in 2020.
Richard Platt, MD
Dr. Platt is internationally recognized for his work on developing systems and capabilities for using routinely collected electronic health information to support public health surveillance, medical product safety assessments, comparative effectiveness and outcomes research, and quality improvement programs. He co-leads the coordinating center of the NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory and leads its Distributed Research Network. He is the immediate past President and Chair of the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute. He chaired the FDA Drug Safety and Risk Management advisory committee, the NIH Epidemiology and Disease Control study section, and co-chaired the CDC Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Center for Infectious Diseases.
Sheila Davis, MSN, DNP
Dr. Davis is internationally recognized for leading the Ebola Response Team in West Africa from 2014 to 2016 and later assisting in the rebuilding of health services in Liberia and Sierra Leone. She led the crisis response in Haiti after Hurricane Matthew in October 2016 and in Lima, Peru, after spring floods in 2017. She is the first nurse to lead Partners in Health, a global nonprofit organization dedicated to providing equitable health care to underserved populations around the world. She is the recipient of the Helen G. Drinan Visionary Leader Award in 2025 and the American Nurses Association of Massachusetts Living Legend Award in 2020.
Megan Ranney, MD, MPH
Dr. Ranney is the inaugural dean of Yale School of Public Health, since it became a fully independent graduate institution in 2024. She is internationally recognized for her work on interventions to prevent violence and related behavioral health problems. She is a co-founder and senior strategic advisor at the American Foundation for Firearm Injury Reduction in Medicine. She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine for her scientific contributions in the fields of firearm injury prevention and digital health, as well as for translating health policy and behavioral science theory to COVID-related risk reduction. She is the recipient of the Ira Hiscock Award in 2024 for outstanding leadership in public health, the RockHealth Top 50 in Digital Health Award in 2023, and Rhode Island's Woman of the Year in 2021.
Previous Distinguished Speaker Series Presentations
- 2024-25 Distinguished Speaker Series
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The Distinguished Speaker Series is a free virtual event open to the public on the first Tuesday of each month from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. U.S. EST. The series consists of nationally and internationally renowned experts and leaders invited to share their perspectives on health services research, population health and public health.
2024 – 2025 Speakers
June 4, 2024
Sara Bleich, PhD
Harvard UniversitySara Bleich, PhD is the inaugural Vice Provost for Special Projects at Harvard University, director of the social sciences program and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Professor of Public Health Policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and a faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. With more than 180 peer-reviewed publications, she is a policy expert and researcher who specializes in diet-related diseases, food insecurity, and racial inequality. Prior to this, Dr. Bleich served in the Biden Administration as the Director of Nutrition Security and Health Equity at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service and as the Senior Advisor for COVID-19 in the Office of the Secretary at USDA. As a White House Fellow during the Obama Administration, she worked at USDA as a Senior Policy Adviser for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services and on First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative. Dr. Bleich was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2023 and holds a B.A. in psychology from Columbia University and a PhD in health policy from Harvard University.
July 2, 2024
Dorry Segev, MD, PhD
New York UniversityDorry Segev, MD, PhD, is Professor of Surgery and Population Health and Vice Chair of Surgery at NYU, and the founding director of the NYU Center for Surgical and Transplant Applied Research. With an undergraduate degree in computer science and a graduate degree in biostatistics, Dr. Segev focuses on novel statistical and mathematical methods for simulation of medical data, analysis of large healthcare datasets, and large multi-center innovative clinical trials and cohort studies. Dr. Segev has published over 900 peer-reviewed research articles, and is ranked #1 worldwide in organ transplantation expertise and influence by ExpertScape. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, a recipient of the prestigious Global Thinker Award by Foreign Policy Magazine, and was named an Innovator of the Year by TIME Magazine. He has written two successful Congressional bills and received Letters of Commendation from President Barack Obama and Dr. Anthony Fauci.
August 6, 2024
Victor M. Montori, MD
Mayo ClinicVictor M. Montori, MD is the Robert H. and Susan M. Rewoldt Professor of Medicine at Mayo Clinic. An endocrinologist, health services researcher, and care activist, Dr. Montori is the author of more than 750 peer-reviewed publications and is among the most cited researchers in clinical medicine and in social science. He is a recognized expert in evidence-based medicine, shared decision making, and minimally disruptive medicine. He works in Rochester, Minnesota, at Mayo Clinic's KER Unit, to advance person-centered care for patients with diabetes and other chronic conditions. He is the author of the book Why We Revolt, and is leading a movement, a Patient Revolution, for Careful and Kind Care for all.
September 3, 2024
Devi Sridhar, PhD
University of EdinburghDevi Sridhar is a Professor at the University of Edinburgh Medical School and holds a Personal Chair in Global Public Health. She is the founding Director of the Global Health Governance Programme and holds a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award. She was previously Associate Professor in Global Health Politics and a Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford University and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University. She was also a visiting Associate Professor at LMU-Munich and guest lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Public Health Foundation of India. Her books include ‘Preventable - How a pandemic changed the world & how to stop the next one’ (Penguin, 2022), ‘Governing Global Health: Who Runs the World and Why?’ (OUP, 2017) and ‘the Battle against Hunger: Choice, Circumstance and the World Bank’ (OUP, 2007) and she has published in Nature, Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet and the British Medical Journal. She served on the board of Save the Children UK, on the World Economic Forum Council on the Health Industry and co-chaired the Harvard/LSHTM Independent Panel on the Global Response to Ebola. She holds a DPhil and MPhil from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and a B.S. from the University of Miami in the Honors Medical Program. Her work is concentrated in three areas: international health organizations, financing of global public health and developing better tools for priority-setting.
October 1, 2024
Georges Benjamin, MD
American Public Health AssociationGeorges C. Benjamin is known as one of the nation’s most influential physician leaders because he speaks passionately and eloquently about the health issues having the most impact on our nation today. From his firsthand experience as a physician, he knows what happens when preventive care is not available and when the healthy choice is not the easy choice. As executive director of APHA since 2002, he is leading the Association’s push to make America the healthiest nation.His academic career has consisted of a full range of endeavors from teaching and policy research to academic program development and management. Benjamin has combined his practice and academic experience as an emergency physician with public health to become one of the nation’s experts in public health emergency preparedness.
November 5, 2024
Nakela Cook, MD, MPH, MD
Patient-Centered Outcomes Research InstituteNakela L. Cook, MD, MPH, is the executive director at PCORI. She is a cardiologist and health services researcher with a distinguished career leading key scientific initiatives engaging patients, clinicians and other health care stakeholders at some of the nation’s largest health research funders. Cook leads PCORI’s research, engagement, dissemination and implementation, and research infrastructure development work. She also provides oversight to a growing number of programs and initiatives designed to create a more efficient, effective, equitable and patient-centered system of health. Under her leadership, and with extensive engagement of stakeholders, PCORI established a bold strategic vision to address the challenges, including social determinants of health, facing patients and communities in our nation’s complex, fast-changing health system. Prior to her current role, Cook served as senior scientific officer and chief of staff at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), the third largest institute of the National Institutes of Health. At NHLBI, she spearheaded the development and implementation of its strategic plan as well as initiatives in cardiovascular outcomes, precision medicine, data science, sickle cell disease and women’s health. Cook earned her medical degree from Harvard Medical School and a Master of Public Health in health care policy and management from Harvard School of Public Health. She completed her clinical training at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and is an alumna of the Commonwealth Fund/Harvard University Fellowship in Minority Health Policy. Throughout her career, Cook has worked to enhance diversity and equity in research and care delivery and has been a leader in efforts to reduce disparities in health access and outcomes. She has received numerous awards for her excellence in clinical teaching and mentorship as well as her leadership of complex scientific initiatives and programs.
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December 3, 2024
David H. Rehkopf, PhD
Stanford University
Presentation Not Recorded
January 7, 2025
John Browne, PhD
National Health Services Research Institute, IrelandProfessor John Browne is a health services researcher at the School of Public Health, University College Cork, Ireland. His primary interest interested is ways to improve the quality and safety of healthcare. After completing his PhD at Trinity College Dublin he worked at the Health Services Research Unit of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) from 1998 to 2008, where he oversaw the development of the NHS Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) programme and the acute care clinical guidelines programme for the National Institute for Clinical Excellence. He was also the Principal Investigator on the Health Research Board funded 'SIREN' programme (Study of the Implementation of Reconfiguration on Urgent and Emergency Care Networks). He is a Senior Editor at BMJ Quality & Safety. His vision for how to make progress within the academic field of healthcare quality is summarised in this recent editorial https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/33/3/141.
February 4, 2025
Tumaini R. Coker, MD, MBA
University of Washington
Presentation Canceled
March 4, 2025
Mark Holmes, PhD
University of North Carolina at Chapel HillMark Holmes, PhD is Thomas W. Lambeth Distinguished Chair of Public Policy at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. He also serves as the Director of the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research. His work focuses on rural health, healthcare access, and the financial sustainability of healthcare providers. With a keen interest in how geographic and policy factors shape healthcare systems, Dr. Holmes has contributed significantly to the field through research on hospital closures, rural health disparities, and innovative healthcare delivery models.
April 1, 2025
Joseph Betacourt, MD, MPH
The Commonwealth FundJoseph R. Betancourt, M.D., M.P.H., is the president of the Commonwealth Fund. A national leader in health care policy, equity, quality, and community health, Betancourt formerly served as the senior vice president for Equity and Community Health at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and as founding director of the Disparities Solutions Center. He has devoted his career to improving the quality and value of health care for diverse populations.
May 6, 2025
Mike English, MBBChir, MRCP, MD
University of Oxford