global-health
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Jeremy Gowler Is Building for the Minutes Before Medicine Arrives
After two decades commercializing vaccines and biopharmaceuticals, the Ophirex CEO is applying an operator’s eye to a stubborn logistical gap: what can happen between a snakebite and the hospital.
Denali Dahl Turned a Class Assignment Into a Company Built for the Hard Part
She never planned to run a business. Then a Duke project refused to remain a project, and Denali Dahl learned to translate laboratory precision into the stubborn work of building Kalia Health.
Quentin Perrot
Quentin Perrot is Chief Product Officer at Zenysis Technologies, a Y Combinator-backed company that builds data integration software for ministries of health and government agencies across four continents. A Stanford-trained product leader who has lived and worked in six countries, he oversees the roadmap for Harmony, Zenysis's open-source platform used to knit together fragmented health data sources.
Jaspal Sandhu
Jaspal Sandhu is a designer, educator, and social entrepreneur who became President and CEO of Hopelab, a social innovation lab and impact investor focused on the mental well-being of young people ages 10 to 25, on January 1, 2026. Trained as an engineer at MIT and as a designer at UC Berkeley, he built his career around human-centered design in global health, co-founding the pioneering social impact design firm Gobee Group and teaching public health innovation at Berkeley since 2010. At Hopelab he has led investments in youth-focused mental health startups, raised millions for youth-led technology work, and built research and fellowship programs centered on Black, Brown, and Queer young people.
Edith Elliott
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.
Molly Heacock
Molly Heacock is the incoming CEO of Untold (formerly CARE for AIDS), an Atlanta-headquartered global nonprofit helping people living with HIV move toward a life beyond AIDS through holistic, community-based, faith-integrated care. A public health practitioner who spent a decade as COO and Managing Director before stepping up to lead, she has helped scale a model that pairs medical adherence with economic, emotional, and spiritual support across dozens of communities in Kenya, Tanzania, and beyond. She relocated from Atlanta to Nairobi in 2019 and built her career on the conviction that local, indigenous-led staff and dignity-first care change long-term outcomes.
Sema Sgaier
Sema Sgaier is the co-founder and CEO of Surgo Health, a Washington, DC public benefit corporation that uses AI and behavioral science to decode the 'why' behind health behaviors. A trained molecular biologist and neuroscientist turned serial entrepreneur, she spent a dozen years at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation scaling HIV-prevention programs across India and Africa before co-founding Surgo Foundation, Surgo Ventures, and Surgo Health. She has authored more than 60 peer-reviewed papers, taught at Harvard and the University of Washington, writes op-eds for The New York Times, and is a trained documentary photographer.
Shivang Dave
Shivang R. Dave is the co-founder and CEO of PlenOptika, a Cambridge, Massachusetts medical-device company behind QuickSee, a handheld autorefractor that measures eyeglass prescriptions in about 10 seconds using wavefront aberrometry. A bioengineer with a PhD in bioengineering and nanotechnology, Dave co-invented the device during the Madrid-MIT M+Vision fellowship and has grown PlenOptika from a four-fellow research team into an international company whose technology has helped correct vision for over 7 million people across 60+ countries, especially in low-resource settings.
Patricia "Trish" Henwood
Patricia "Trish" Henwood, MD, FACEP is an emergency physician who runs quality and safety across an 18-hospital system as Executive Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer of Jefferson Health in Philadelphia. Before the C-suite, she carried a portable ultrasound probe into an Ebola treatment unit in Liberia and built training programs that put imaging in the hands of clinicians in Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania and beyond. She founded the nonprofit PURE to bring point-of-care ultrasound to resource-limited settings, published her bedside Ebola work in the New England Journal of Medicine, and now applies the same systems thinking to closing care gaps for vulnerable populations at home.
Maria Gabriela Salvador
Dr. M. Gabriela Salvador is the CEO of Maternova, Inc., a Providence-based global health company that runs an e-commerce marketplace for vetted, life-saving medical devices, diagnostics and nutrition products aimed at low- and middle-income countries. A physician trained as a pediatric ophthalmologist in Argentina, the United States and Mexico, she spent two decades building high-impact health programs at Americares, Grameen Foundation, Freedom from Hunger and Pro Mujer before taking the helm at Maternova in March 2023. Originally from Salta, Argentina, she pairs a medical degree from the National University of Cordoba with a Harvard MPH in health policy and management.
Steve Xu
Steve Xu is a board-certified dermatologist turned medtech founder who runs Sibel Health, the Chicago company commercializing ICU-grade wearable sensors that now monitor patients in more than 20 countries. A physician-engineer trained at Rice, Harvard, and the London School of Economics, he splits his life between the clinic, the lab at Northwestern's Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics, and a startup chasing a single line: Better Health Data for All.
Marissa Fayer
Marissa Fayer is a 25-year medtech executive who runs DeepLook Medical, an AI diagnostics company that helps radiologists spot breast cancer earlier in women with dense breast tissue, which she took from concept through FDA clearance into global commercialization. She is also the founder of HERhealthEQ, a nonprofit that has reached over 128,000 women across 12 countries by deploying medical devices for cancers, maternal health, and cardiovascular disease. A partner at women's-health fund Goddess Gaia Ventures and author of the forthcoming book 'Undervalued to Unavoidable,' she argues women's health is not a charitable cause but economic infrastructure that has been systematically underestimated.
Dustin Moskovitz
Dustin Moskovitz co-founded Facebook in a Harvard dorm room in 2004, then quietly built Asana into a billion-dollar project management company while giving away billions through Open Philanthropy (now Coefficient Giving). The youngest self-made billionaire in the world when Forbes first named him in 2011, Moskovitz has spent the years since turning wealth into what he believes are the most high-impact charitable causes on Earth - from malaria nets to AI safety - alongside his wife Cari Tuna.
Dylan Matthews
Dylan Matthews is a policy journalist, effective altruism advocate, and former senior correspondent at Vox, where he founded and led the Future Perfect newsletter and section for seven years. Known for his deep-dive reporting on global health, animal welfare, and evidence-based philanthropy, Matthews embodies his own editorial philosophy: he donated a kidney to a stranger in 2016, initiating a chain that helped four people. As of December 2025, he joined Coefficient Giving (backed by Open Philanthropy) to manage the $120M+ Abundance and Growth Fund, moving from writing about doing good to actually doing it.