Dirk Soenksen is the co-founder and CEO of Ceresti Health, a Carlsbad, California digital-health company that treats the family caregiver as the unit of care for people living with dementia. An engineer by training, he first reshaped a corner of medicine by founding Aperio, the company that turned the glass microscope slide into a digital image and became the global leader in digital pathology before Danaher's Leica Biosystems acquired it in 2012. A coffee on his last day at Leica sent him into a second act: instead of imaging the brain, he set out to support the overwhelmed spouses and adult children caring for it.
Edith Elliott is the co-founder and co-CEO of Noora Health, a global nonprofit that turns hospital waiting rooms into classrooms and trains family members to care for their loved ones after discharge. What started as a Stanford design class project at a Bangalore hospital in 2012 has grown into an organization that has trained more than a million family caregivers across India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Indonesia. A TED speaker, Audacious Project winner and Skoll awardee, Elliott has built her career at the intersection of research, policy and design, betting that the most overlooked resource in any health system is the people already sitting at the bedside.