Allison Brashear, MD, MBA
Vice President for Health Sciences and Dean of the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, University at Buffalo
An internationally renowned neurologist and researcher in movement disorders, Allison Brashear, MD, MBA, joined the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences as vice president for health sciences and dean in 2021.
Over the past three decades, she has made an impact as an expert in ATP1A3-related diseases, a spectrum of rare neurologic disorders and has continuously been RO1 funded by the National Institutes of Health since 2008. She is currently the principal investigator for the Clinical Genetic and Cellular Consequences of Mutations in ATP1A3 project and has served as the principal investigator on more than 40 clinical trials in cervical dystonia and spasticity, leading to three FDA-approved medications.
Prior to UB, Brashear was dean of the University of California, Davis School of Medicine, as well as a professor and the Walter C. Teagle Endowed Chair of Neurology at Wake Forest School of Medicine.
Brashear earned her medical degree and completed her neurology residency at Indiana University School of Medicine. She earned her MBA at Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. She completed the Association of American Medical Colleges Council of Deans fellowship program in 2014 and has completed leadership programs at Harvard University, Drexel University and University of California, Berkeley.
Brashear is a trustee of the McKnight Brain Research Foundation and was recently elected to the Association of American Medical Colleges Council of Deans Administrative Board. She has been a lifelong champion of diversity, inclusion and patient-centered care.
Josh McHugh
Editor in Chief, The Future of Health / CEO, Attention Span Media
Josh’s experience at the intersection of technology, media and business began at Forbes, where he chronicled the brainiacs and billionaires behind the turn-of-the-century tech upheaval as an associate editor while opening Forbes’s Bay Area office. A contributing editor at Wired for six years, Josh briefly expired while volunteering in a NASA hypergravity endurance experiment. He has also written for Vanity Fair, Outside and shelfloads of other publications, and served as editor in chief of 2017’s Future of Medicine report. Josh graduated from Yale with a BA in English and holds an executive education certificate in Sustainable Capitalism and ESG from Berkeley Law.
Garrett Law
Strategy Editor, The Future of Health, Co-founder of Attention Span
Garrett leads strategy development for Attention Span’s clients in food, health and nutrition. An Emmy-winning technologist, Garrett honed his savvy as VP, CFO and general manager of KHIZ-TV Los Angeles as the youngest GM in LA television. He oversaw all operations of the station and company, executing its successful turnaround and engineering overhaul. Before KHIZ, he helped launch Global Outsight—a biotech and media strategy and M&A consultancy in Cambridge, Massachusetts—and was on the staff of the mayor of Boston as the analyst for the Boston Fire Department. He is a Harvard graduate who studied engineering and the History of Science. Garrett is chairman of the Cancer Nutrition Consortium, a volunteer firefighter, and served on the boards of Find the Cause Breast Cancer Foundation and Project Hope Alliance.
David E. Duncan
Executive Editor, The Future of Health / Journalist and Author
David Ewing Duncan is an award-winning science journalist and the best-selling author of 11 books published in 21 languages, and an entrepreneur and advisor. He has written over 500 articles and columns for Wired, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Scientific American, The Atlantic, Fortune, National Geographic, and many others, and is a former commentator for NPR. He has won numerous awards, including Magazine Story of the Year from AAAS and three nominations for National Magazine Awards. David has been on the faculty of Singularity University and is a member of the SF Writers Grotto. David is the creative director at Cure.
Jonathan D. Sonis, MD, MHCM
Emergency Physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Section Head,The Future of Health
Jonathan is the Chair of the Mass General Brigham Enterprise Emergency Medicine Quality and Safety Council, Chair of Quality and Safety for the MGH ED, and Associate Medical Director for Emergency Medicine at CRICO, Harvard’s patient safety and medical malpractice company. Dr. Sonis is also the Co-Director of Patient Experience for the MGH ED. He has extensive leadership experience related to quality improvement, provider and staff communication, and patient experience, and he lectures and publishes frequently on these topics. He received his MD with Alpha Omega Alpha honors from the Tufts University School of Medicine and trained at the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency, where he served as a chief resident. He has completed educational programs in leadership, quality service and value-based healthcare, and earned his Master’s in Health Care Management at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Charlotte Croteau, MD
Attending Emergency Physician at Mass General Hospital and MGH Fellow in Emergency Department Administration
Charlotte is a practicing Emergency Medicine physician at Mass General Hospital as well as the current Fellow in Emergency Department Administration at MGH. She serves as a member of the ED operations and quality and safety teams and works closely with departmental leadership on various patient experience, operations and quality initiatives within the ED and on a hospital-wide level. Charlotte earned her MD from Tufts University School of Medicine and trained at the NYU/Bellevue Emergency Medicine Residency in New York City, where she served as a chief resident and from which she graduated in 2023. She is currently earning a master’s degree in healthcare management from the Harvard Chan School of Public Health.
Sean Lane
Founder and CEO at Evolv Health
Evolv Health is a healthcare technology company that improves transitional outcomes for hospitals, health plans and skilled nursing facilities by automating complex care transitions within the discharge planning process. Prior to founding Evolv, Sean received his master of social work in 2012 and quickly climbed the ranks in his field serving as corporate director of social services for a skilled nursing chain as well as vice president of care coordination for a value-based care management organization.
Ethan Watters
Senior Editor, The Future of Health / Head of Story, Attention Span Media
Ethan is a journalist who has spent the last two decades writing about culture and psychology. He is the author of Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche and Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family, and Commitment. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Outside, Discover, Men’s Journal and Wired, among other national publications.
Jonathan Scheiman, PhD
Co-founder CEO, FitBiomics
Jonathan received his PhD from NYU in biomedical research and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, working on transformative sequencing technologies and programmable cellular engineering. A Big East champion in basketball at St. John’s University and former inner city public high school basketball coach, one of Jonathan’s long-term goals is to use human performance as a medium to discover next-gen health modalities and make them accessible to broader populations. He is co-founder and the CEO of FitBiomics, a microbiome/biotechnology company decoding the biology of the super fit and translating that info into next-gen probiotics to improve human health and longevity.
Rameen Beroukhim MD, PhD
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School
Rameen is an associate professor of medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, and an associate member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. In addition to directing a genomics-focused lab, he sees patients in an adult neuro-oncology clinic. Raised in Milwaukee, Wis., Rameen studied physics and philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He obtained an MPhil and PhD from the University of Cambridge for work done at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Medical Biology on electron crystallographic studies of ion channels. He then completed his MD and internal medicine residency at the University of California, San Francisco, before completing a medical oncology fellowship at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital. His research focus is to understand tumor evolution, with emphases on brain tumors and alterations in chromosome structure. This work spans computational methods development, genomic studies of human cancers, and experiments in model systems. In early work describing integrated genomic profiling of glioblastomas, he developed the Genomic Identification of Significant Targets In Cancer (GISTIC) method that is now widely used to analyze copy-number changes across a range of cancers. He has also contributed to the development of several other genomic analysis methods and has led integrated genomic profiling efforts in multiple cancer types, including pan-cancer analyses across thousands of tumors. This work has identified novel mechanisms by which cancers develop and progress, and novel cancer dependencies that have spurred the development of new cancer therapeutics.
Jenny Qi, PhD
Writer and Scientist, Section Head, The Future of Health
Jenny received her PhD in Biomedical Science (Cancer Biology) from UCSF, where she studied novel drug targets for pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors. She has been a content marketer, editor, and strategist across health and science industries and is now a freelance writer. In addition to oncology, she has covered health insurance policy, diversity in medicine, medical humanities, end of life, mental health and more. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Tin House, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other places. Her first book, Focal Point, won the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize.
Jean Pham
Co-founder and CEO, Cellens, Inc.
Cellens leverages computational AI and mechanobiology to create high-performing, non-invasive cancer diagnostic products. At Cellens, Jean drives the company’s strategic vision on product development, clinical studies and external collaborations to maximize clinical utility and long-term growth of the company. As a life sciences entrepreneur, Jean Pham’s mission is to translate breakthrough technologies into products that can significantly improve cancer patients’ quality of lives.
David W. Salzman, PhD
CEO and Scientist, Gatehouse Bio
David is the CEO of Gatehouse Bio where he is combining small RNA biology and artificial intelligence to create new precision medicines. As one of the first entrants in the small RNA field, he pioneered the development of gold standard kits and tools that have been used in over 50,000 peer-reviewed publications. At Yale, David identified small RNA mutations linked to radiation and immunotherapy response, and as the CSO of MiraDx he facilitated the development of these findings into commercial diagnostics (ProsTOXä and PrevIOTox) that are transforming clinical care for cancer patients. At Biogen, he established the early translational strategy for QALSODYÒ, a targeted therapy for patients with SOD1-mutated ALS. David earned a PhD in Molecular Biology, and is a Business Advisor for the Harvard Institute for RNA Medicine.
Adnan Siddiqui, MD, PhD
Chief Executive Officer & Chief Medical Officer, The Jacobs Institute
Dr. Siddiqui is also vice-chairman and professor of neurosurgery at the State University of New York at Buffalo (UB) Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. He is the director of neuroendovascular research and stroke service at Kaleida Health’s Gates Vascular Institute (GVI), and director of the UB Canon Stroke & Vascular Research Center (CSVRC). He is also a practicing surgeon with the University at Buffalo Neurosurgery (UBNS) which is part of UBMD Physicians’ Group, a clinical practice where he sees and treats patients.
He trained in interventional neuroradiology, cerebrovascular surgery, and neurocritical care at Thomas Jefferson University, completed a neurosurgical residency at Upstate Medical University, and holds a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Rochester and a medical degree from Aga Khan University, Pakistan. Dr. Siddiqui is affiliated with various prestigious organizations, including the American Association of Neurological Surgeons and the American College of Surgeons.
As fellowship director for Buffalo’s Neuroendovascular Program and director of neurosurgical stroke service at GVI, he significantly influences neuroendovascular surgery training and credentialing. He has been actively involved in various committees of the AANS, CNS, and SNIS, contributing to the consensus in the field. He co-chairs initiatives with the FDA, CMS, and NIH, and plays a key role in the Medical Device Industry Consortium, focusing on early feasibility studies in the U.S.