Tagged: public-health
11 results
Dynavax Technologies
Dynavax Technologies is an Emeryville, California biopharmaceutical company built around CpG 1018, a proprietary vaccine adjuvant that sharpens the immune system's response. Its flagship product, HEPLISAV-B, is the first and only two-dose adult hepatitis B vaccine approved in the U.S. and Europe, and had grown to roughly 44% U.S. market share by the end of 2024. Beyond hepatitis B, Dynavax licenses CpG 1018 to other vaccine developers - most visibly as an ingredient in several COVID-19 vaccines - and has advanced its own pipeline in shingles, plague, pandemic influenza, and Lyme disease. In December 2025 Sanofi agreed to acquire Dynavax for about $2.2 billion; the deal closed in February 2026.
Clear Labs
Clear Labs is a San Carlos, California genomics company that builds Clear Dx, a fully automated next-generation sequencing platform. It turns whole genome sequencing - normally a slow, expert-heavy lab process - into a push-button diagnostic used by food manufacturers and public health labs to detect pathogens like Salmonella and Listeria, characterize SARS-CoV-2 and TB, and identify bacteria and fungi from clinical specimens, often with next-day results.
Amanda Greenberg
Amanda Greenberg is the CEO and co-founder of Balloon, a SaaS platform that eliminates groupthink and cognitive bias from team collaboration through anonymous idea submission and merit-based voting. A former public health researcher who developed behavior-change campaigns for the CDC, EPA, and DOE, Greenberg pivoted to tech entrepreneurship after observing how social dynamics suppress good decision-making in rooms full of smart people. She co-founded Balloon in 2015 with her husband and CTO Noah Bornstein, bootstrapped to a Fortune 50 client within 11 months, raised $2.6M in seed funding from investors including Jason Calacanis and Matt Mullenweg, and was named to Inc. Magazine's Female Founders 100 list in 2022. Balloon's advisory board includes Adam Grant, Amy Edmondson, and Daniel Pink.
Tulane University
Tulane University is a private research university in New Orleans, Louisiana, founded in 1834 as the Medical College of Louisiana to fight cholera and yellow fever. Now one of 71 members of the Association of American Universities, it enrolls roughly 14,000-15,000 students across schools spanning medicine, public health and tropical medicine, law, architecture, business, science and engineering, social work and liberal arts. Known for a deep service ethic - it became the first major U.S. research university to require public service for graduation after Hurricane Katrina - Tulane pairs high-level research with a distinctive New Orleans culture.
Kurt Knight
Kurt Knight is the CEO of Foodsmart, the largest digital food-as-medicine platform in the United States, appointed in March 2025 after 13 years at Amwell where he rose to COO and helped scale virtual care nationally. With an MBA from Harvard, an MPH from Columbia, and field experience everywhere from UNICEF to the Gates Foundation to the Boston Consulting Group, Knight brings an unusually wide lens to the intersection of food, nutrition, and healthcare delivery.
Michael Bigham
Michael F. Bigham is a veteran biopharmaceutical executive and investor who spent nearly a decade as Chairman and CEO of Paratek Pharmaceuticals, guiding the company through the FDA approval and commercial launch of NUZYRA (omadacycline) - a novel tetracycline-class antibiotic tackling drug-resistant bacterial infections. A Stanford MBA and CPA with roots in Gilead Sciences' early days, he has built, funded, and led companies across the full arc of drug development. He now operates as founder and managing director of Firebrand River Capital.
Ziad Obermeyer
Ziad Obermeyer is a physician-scientist and professor at UC Berkeley whose 2019 Science paper exposing racial bias in a healthcare algorithm used by millions changed how the world thinks about AI fairness. An emergency medicine doctor who moonlights as a machine learning researcher, McKinsey alum, and serial founder, Obermeyer co-founded Dandelion Health and Nightingale Open Science while testifying before Congress and earning a spot on TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI.
Othman Laraki
Othman Laraki is the co-founder and CEO of Color Health, a company he has steered from affordable genetic testing to pandemic-scale COVID infrastructure to a $4.6B-valued virtual cancer clinic serving over 7 million Americans. A Moroccan-born Stanford and MIT alumnus who learned to code by typing programs from magazines in Casablanca, he built Twitter's first revenue products as VP of Product before pivoting to healthcare. Today he sits on the American Cancer Society board as its only non-clinician, partners with Google and OpenAI to deploy AI in oncology, and angel invests in companies like Pinterest, Slack, and Instacart.
Emily Oster
Emily Oster is a Harvard-trained economist, Brown University professor, and the mind behind ParentData - a platform transforming how millions of parents make decisions. With four consecutive New York Times bestsellers, TIME's 100 Most Influential People recognition, and over a million books sold, she wields data like a scalpel against pregnancy myths and parenting guilt, convincing readers that evidence beats anxiety every time.
Katelyn Jetelina
Dr. Katelyn Jetelina is an epidemiologist, data scientist, and one of America's most influential science communicators. She founded Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE) in March 2020 as a few sentences to update her UT Health students about COVID-19 - and somehow that turned into a 365,000-subscriber newsletter reaching people in 133 countries with over 500 million total views. Named a TIME100 Most Influential Person in Health, she translates complex public health science into actionable insights twice a week, covering everything from vaccines and bird flu to gun violence and federal health policy. She holds a PhD in Epidemiology and Biostatistics, consults with the CDC, and serves as an adjunct professor at Yale School of Public Health - all while raising two daughters and having visited 50+ countries.
Zeynep Tufekci
Zeynep Tufekci is a Turkish-born sociologist, professor at Princeton University, and New York Times opinion columnist who has become one of the world's foremost voices on the intersection of technology and society. Known for being consistently ahead of the curve — predicting Facebook's role in ethnic violence, YouTube's radicalization pipeline, and COVID-19's severity before mainstream institutions caught on — she bridges computer science and humanistic inquiry with a rare clarity. Her 2017 book 'Twitter and Tear Gas' is a landmark study of networked protest, and her Substack newsletter 'Insight' offers rigorous, genuinely open-minded analysis of the hardest puzzles at the edge of science, technology, and democracy.