DISTINGUISHED GUEST

Vice Admiral Vivek H. Murthy, MD, MBA was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in March 2021 to serve as the 21st Surgeon General of the United States. As the nation’s top doctor, Dr. Vivek Murthy helps to advance the health and well-being of all Americans and has worked to address critical public health issues. He has issued Surgeon General’s Advisories on the youth mental health crisis and social media’s impact on youth mental health, the epidemic of loneliness and isolation, and on burnout in the health worker community. Dr. Murthy also issued a Surgeon General’s Framework on mental health in the workplace and he is the first Surgeon General to host a podcast, House Calls with Dr. Vivek Murthy, where he invites guests and listeners to explore how we can all build more connected and meaningful lives.

As Vice Admiral of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, Dr. Murthy oversees more than 6,000 dedicated public health officers serving underserved and vulnerable populations.

Dr. Murthy previously served as the 19th Surgeon General under President Obama. Raised in Miami, Dr. Murthy received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard, his medical degree from the Yale School of Medicine, and his Master’s in Business Administration from the Yale School of Management.

FEATURED SPEAKER

Dr. Priscilla Chan is co-founder and co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. As a pediatrician and teacher, Priscilla’s work with patients and students in communities across the Bay Area has informed her desire to make learning more personalized, find new paths to manage and cure disease, and expand opportunity for more people. She is also the founder of The Primary School, which integrates health and education and serves children and families in East Palo Alto and the Belle Haven neighborhood in Menlo Park, California. Priscilla earned her bachelor's degree in biology at Harvard University and her Doctor of Medicine at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She completed her pediatrics residency training in the UCSF Pediatric Leaders Advancing Health Equity program.

FEATURED SPEAKER

Stephen Quake is head of science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, where he oversees CZ Science grant programs, technology development, and the CZ Biohub Network. His contributions to science are varied and include invention of the biological equivalent of the integrated circuit, development of whole organism cell atlases, and creation of diagnostics that have made medicine safer by replacing invasive biopsies such as amniocentesis with simple blood tests. Steve has received numerous awards for his discoveries and has been elected to several scientific honorary societies, including the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, The National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Inventors. He has published more than 300 papers which have been cumulatively cited more than 100,000 times. Steve also holds a faculty position at Stanford University, where he is the Lee Otterson professor of bioengineering and applied physics. Previously, he was the founding co-president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and professor at the California Institute of Technology.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Amir Dan Rubin has focused his career on helping transform healthcare. He launched Healthier Capital to partner with technology-powered innovators to advance healthier outcomes for all.

Amir previously served as Chair & CEO of the technology-enabled primary care company, One Medical, which he took public in 2020 and sold to Amazon for $3.9B in the beginning of 2023. At Amazon, he helped launch One Medical’s membership model as an add-on to Amazon Prime membership. Prior to that, Amir served as an EVP at the Fortune 5 company, UnitedHealth Group and its Optum division. Prior to that, he served as CEO at Stanford University’s health system, COO at UCLA’s health system, COO at SUNY Stony Brook’s health system, and in leadership roles at Memorial Hermann’s health system. Amir has also twice received an EY “Entrepreneur of the Year” award. He holds MBA and MHSA degrees from the University of Michigan, and a BA from the University of California, Berkeley.

SPEAKER

Anna Lembke, MD is professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. A clinician scholar, she is the author of more than a hundred peer-reviewed publications, has testified before the United States House of Representatives and Senate, has served as an expert witness in federal and state opioid litigation, and is an internationally recognized leader in addiction medicine treatment and education. In 2016, she published Drug Dealer, MD – How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It’s So Hard to Stop (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), highlighted in the New York Times as one of the top five books to read to understand the opioid epidemic (Zuger, 2018). Dr. Lembke appeared in the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, an unvarnished look at the impact of social media on our lives. Her latest book, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence(Dutton/Penguin Random House, August 2021) was an instant New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller and has been translated into 35 languages.

SPEAKER

Dr. Boris Heifets, MD, PhD, is a board certified anesthesiologist who specializes in providing anesthesia for neurological surgery. He has practiced at Stanford since 2010. After completing residency training at Stanford, Dr. Heifets completed fellowship training in neuroanesthesiology, also at Stanford. In addition to treating patients, Dr. Heifets also directs both clinical research and basic neuroscience. His research group studies how new rapid acting psychiatric therapies, like ketamine, MDMA and psilocybin, produce lasting changes in nervous system function, behavior, and therapeutic outcomes.

MODERATOR

Brett McClung is a seasoned healthcare executive dedicated to designing, scaling and leading impactful healthcare enterprises to produce the best possible health and healthcare in the future. Brett also advises HealthTech, MedTech, and BioTech companies on health system implementations.

Brett is the former President & CEO of Baptist Health, a $2+B integrated delivery network (IDN) with 200+ sites in Florida and is recognized as one of Florida’s Most Influential Business Leaders (2020, 2021). Immediately prior, Brett was the Chief Operations

Leader for the north market at Texas Health Resources (THR), a $6+B integrated delivery network (IDN) with 350+ sites in Texas. For over 20 years at THR, Brett designed, built and ran best in class, academically affiliated hospitals and physician partnerships focused on incorporating innovations from validated research.

Currently, he is collaborating with Stanford Medical School and Stanford Health Care to reimagine virtual care and to deploy emerging applications, including generative AI, into healthcare systems. Brett is the Executive Chair & Interim CEO of Rovia Clinical, Gauge Capital’s clinical trials portfolio company. He is an Independent Board Director for Proeza Venture’s Premier Healthcare Professionals, as well as for Tacoma Holding’s Frontpoint Health.

SPEAKER

Claire Bidwell Smith, LCPC, is a therapist specializing in grief and the author of multiple books, including Conscious Grieving and Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief. Led by her own experiences with grief and fueled by her work in hospice and private practice, Claire strives to provide support for all kinds of people experiencing all kinds of loss. Claire offers numerous programs in addition to working with people one-on-one, as well as training other clinicians to work in the field of grief and loss. Claire has been featured in and written for various publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Scientific American, The LA Times, CNN, and more. She deeply loves her work and is devoted to expanding the conversation about grief and loss.

MODERATOR

David Rehkopf is a social epidemiologist and serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health and in the Department of Medicine in the Division of Primary Care and Population Health at Stanford School of Medicine. He joined the faculty in 2011. He is the Director of the Stanford Center for Population Health Sciences. In this position, he is committed to making high-value data resources available to researchers across disciplines in order to better enable them to answer their most pressing clinical and population health questions. In all of his work, he has a focus on the implications of these exposures for health inequalities.

SPEAKER

Eleni Linos MD, MPH, DrPH, is the Director of the Center for Digital Health and Professor of Dermatology and Epidemiology at Stanford University. Dr. Linos' work focuses on the use of technology in health, dermatology, public health, cancer prevention and the care of older adults. Dr. Linos is dually trained in epidemiology and dermatology and is the principal investigator of several NIH funded studies aimed at improving the lives of patients. She received her medical degree from Cambridge and Oxford universities in the UK, then trained in epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health and completed her residency at Stanford.

SPEAKER

Eli Cahan, MD, MS is an award-winning investigative journalist covering the intersection of child health, youth welfare, and social injustice. His written work has been featured in The Washington Post, LA Times, Rolling Stone, USA Today, The Guardian, The New Republic, and VICE, among other publications. His multimedia work has appeared on TV via ABC and radio via NPR. Cahan’s reporting has won awards from the National Press Club, the News Leaders Association, the Association of Health Care Journalists, the National Association of Science Writers and elsewhere. He has received reporting fellowships from the Pulitzer Center and USC’s Center for Health Journalism, among others. His academic research has been featured in NEJM, JAMA, BMJ, and Health Affairs, among other publications. He is a pediatrician at Boston Children’s/Boston Medical Center.

SPEAKER

Dr. Elizabeth Comen has dedicated her medical career to saving the lives of women. An award-winning, internationally sought-after clinician and physician-scientist, Dr. Comen is a Medical Oncologist specializing in breast cancer and an Associate Professor of Medicine at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

Recognized for her compassion and easy-to-comprehend communication with patients, Dr. Comen is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Department of Defense Breakthrough Award for Breast Cancer, the American Society of Clinical Oncology Young Investigator Award, and multiple grants from the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and the Susan G. Komen Foundation, among others.

Dr. Comen frequently appears in national media outlets and is a tireless advocate for women’s healthcare. She is the author of All In Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today. Dr. Comen is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School. She completed her residency at Mount Sinai Hospital and her fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

SPEAKER

Esther Landhuis, PhD, is a science & health journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her stories take a hard look at the status quo, exploring how controversial diagnoses and treatments elude mainstream medicine. Before pivoting to freelance journalism, she earned an immunology PhD from Harvard University, completed a graduate certificate in science writing at UC Santa Cruz, and spent six years reporting on brain aging and neurodegenerative disease for Alzforum. Her training and experience fuel a growing interest in the body-brain connection. In articles for Undark, Scientific American, Nature, JAMA, Quanta and elsewhere, Esther strives to highlight overlooked voices and to balance nuance and intuition with rigorous reporting.

SPEAKER

Holly Tabor, PhD, is the Director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. She is Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, and by Courtesy of Pediatrics and Epidemiology and Population Health. She is also Co-Chair of the Ethics Committees at Stanford Hospital and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. She is a globally recognized expert on the ethical issues surrounding health care and research for patients with disabilities, especially intellectual and developmental disability, and on the ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) in genetics. Her research has shed light on the benefits and risks of participating in genomic research, particularly of rare and undiagnosed diseases. She is Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Bioethical Empirical Research.

MODERATOR & SPEAKER

Dr. Yurkiewicz is a physician on the faculty at Stanford Medicine and an award-winning medical journalist. She is a practicing primary care doctor with fellowship training and board certification in internal medicine, oncology, and hematology and a clinical assistant professor of primary care and population health in the Department of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. As Co-Director of the Primary Care for Cancer Survivorship program, she runs a medical practice that is uniquely focused on comprehensive care for patients with a history of cancer and patients carrying genetic diagnoses of elevated risk.

As a science journalist, she has been a regular columnist for Scientific American and MDEdge. Her work has also appeared in The Atlantic, TIME, STAT News, Aeon Magazine, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. She won a Folio: Eddie Award for her column “Hard Questions” and was shortlisted for the Cancer Journalism Award.

Dr. Yurkiewicz is the author of the nationally acclaimed book, Fragmented: A Doctor’s Quest to Piece Together American Health Care from the publisher W.W. Norton.

SPEAKER

James Zou is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Data Science and, by courtesy, of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He works on making machine learning more reliable, human-compatible and statistically rigorous, and is especially interested in applications in human disease and health. Several of his algorithms are widely used in tech and biotech industries. He received a Ph.D from Harvard in 2014, and was a member of Microsoft Research, a Gates Scholar at Cambridge and a Simons fellow at UC Berkeley. He joined Stanford in 2016 and is excited to be a two-time Chan-Zuckerberg Investigator and the faculty director of the university-wide Stanford Data4Health hub. He is also a member of the Stanford AI Lab. His research is supported by the Sloan Fellowship, the NSF CAREER Award, and Google, Amazon and Adobe AI awards.

MODERATOR

Dr. Chiang is a Clinical Assistant Professor in Primary Care and Population Health at Stanford. She is also the Director of Continuity of Care Clerkship and the Medical Director at the Stanford Internal Medicine Clinic.

SPEAKER

Dr. Rotenstein is a primary care physician, researcher and healthcare leader whose work focuses on ambulatory care delivery, physician wellbeing, gender issues in medicine, and the intersection of the electronic health record with these issues. She is an Assistant Professor and Medical Director of Ambulatory Quality and Safety at UCSF Health. She additionally serves as the Director of the Center for Physician Experience and Practice Excellence at Brigham and Women's Hospital. She was named a 2022 Modern Healthcare Top 25 Emerging Leader, the 2022 New England Region SGIM Investigator of the Year, and a 2021 STAT Wunderkind. Dr. Rotenstein currently is establishing and leading ambulatory quality efforts across the UCSF Health system in her role as Medical Director of Ambulatory Quality and Safety. She additionally leads quality and electronic inbox optimization efforts for the UCSF Department of Medicine.

MODERATOR

Dr. Lungren, Chief Medical Information Officer at Nuance Communications (a Microsoft subsidiary), balances his role as a clinical AI researcher with a part-time pediatric interventional radiology practice at UCSF, and adjunct faculty roles at Stanford and Duke. Before Microsoft, he led Stanford's AIMI and served as Principal for Clinical AI/ML at Amazon Web Services, specializing in public sector healthcare business development. With over 100 scientific publications, he has contributed significantly to healthcare AI, including multi-modal data fusion models, computer vision, and natural language processing. He advises startups and Fortune-500 companies on healthcare AI strategy and frequently speaks on the subject nationally and internationally. Dr. Lungren also teaches a popular AI in Healthcare course on Coursera designed for non-technical learners.

SPEAKER

Director Megan Mahoney, MD, is Chair of the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Prior to joining UCSF, Dr. Mahoney was the Chief of Staff of Stanford Health Care and Professor in the Department of Medicine at Stanford University, where she served previously as Section Chief of General Primary Care and Medical Director and Clinic Chief of Stanford Family Medicine. Before joining Stanford, Dr. Mahoney was a faculty member at UCSF, serving in several leadership capacities in clinic operations, medical education, and research. She was a Visiting Professor at Aga Khan Medical College of East Africa and served on the Family Medicine Committee of the Kenya Ministry of Health. Dr. Mahoney serves on The Doctors Company Board of Governors and as a Member of the company’s Patient Safety Committee.

MODERATOR

Michael Fischbach is the Liu (Liao) Family Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University, an Institute Scholar of Stanford ChEM-H, and the director of the Stanford Microbiome Therapies Initiative. Fischbach is a recipient of the NIH Director's Pioneer and New Innovator Awards, an HHMI-Simons Faculty Scholars Award, a Fellowship for Science and Engineering from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, a Medical Research Award from the W.M. Keck Foundation, a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease award, and the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship. His laboratory studies the mechanisms of microbiome-host interactions. Fischbach received his Ph.D. as a John and Fannie Hertz Foundation Fellow in chemistry from Harvard in 2007, where he studied the role of iron acquisition in bacterial pathogenesis and the biosynthesis of antibiotics. After two years as an independent fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital, Fischbach joined the faculty at UCSF, where he founded his lab before moving to Stanford in 2017. Fischbach is a co-founder of Kelonia and Revolution Medicines, a member of the scientific advisory boards of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, NGM Biopharmaceuticals, and TCG Labs/Soleil Labs, and an innovation partner at The Column Group.

SPEAKER

Dr. Michael Nedelman works at an innovative health tech organization called Maisha Meds, which is pioneering AI-enabled digital tools and novel data sources to improve the quality and accessibility of care across Africa. He also co-directs the Health Equity Media Program at Stanford's School of Medicine, where he's appointed as an adjunct lecturer in the Division of Primary Care & Population Health within the Department of Medicine. Previously, he was an Emmy-nominated TV producer, playing a pivotal role in CNN’s coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic alongside Dr. Sanjay Gupta. His background also includes public health and media roles at ABC News, the World Health Organization, and Mount Sinai School of Medicine. He received his MD from Stanford and did his undergraduate work in film at Yale.

SPEAKER

Robert H. Lustig, M.D., M.S.L. is Professor emeritus of Pediatrics, Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He specializes in the field of neuroendocrinology, with an emphasis on the regulation of energy balance by the central nervous system. His research and clinical practice has focused on childhood obesity and diabetes. Dr. Lustig holds a Bachelor’s in Science from MIT, a Doctorate in Medicine from Cornell University. Medical College, and a Master’s of Studies in Law from U.C. Hastings College of the Law.

Dr. Lustig has fostered a global discussion of metabolic health and nutrition, exposing some of the leading myths that underlie the current pandemic of diet-related disease. He believes the food business, by pushing processed food loaded with sugar, has hacked our bodies and minds to pursue pleasure instead of happiness; fostering today’s epidemics of addiction and depression. Yet by focusing on real food, we can beat the odds against sugar, processed food, obesity, and disease.

SPEAKER

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Albert Ray Lang Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in Psychology. Her work focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural and the world of psychosis. She was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003, received a John Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2007 and elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022. When God Talks Back was named a NYT Notable Book of the Year and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. It was awarded the $100,000 Grawemeyer Prize for Religion by the University of Louisville. She has published over thirty OpEds in The New York Times, and her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Science News, and many other publications. She is the author of Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft, The Good Parsi, Of Two Minds, When God Talks Back, Our Most Troubling Madness, and How God Becomes Real, and is currently at work on a book entitled Voices.