public-health
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Patrice Harris and the Long Practice of Opening Doors
From a close-knit West Virginia childhood to the presidency of American medicine, Harris has built a career by moving between rooms - and holding the door for the people coming next.
Kendra Canton Has Been Building a Seat at the Table Since College
Before the degree and the policy roundtables, there was a Spokane teenager doing homework first and everything else second. A decade later, Kendra Canton's work still follows the same practical rule: earn your place, then use it to bring more people into the room.
Tariana Little Put Public Health Behind the Camera
A failed qualifying exam loosened one plan. A 90-day Craigslist experiment supplied another. Tariana Little turned research, a camera and an insistence on community voice into an agency built to make complex work feel human.
Sasan Amini
Sasan Amini is the co-founder and CEO of Clear Labs, a San Carlos genomics company that turns next-generation DNA sequencing into a push-button diagnostic for food safety and infectious disease. An Iranian immigrant who left Tehran at 22, he earned a PhD in genomics at Princeton, worked in advanced research at Illumina, and in 2014 set out to make sequencing simple enough for any lab to run. When COVID-19 hit, Clear Labs pivoted its automated platform into SARS-CoV-2 surveillance and reached more than half of U.S. public health labs.
Eric Klasson
Eric Klasson is the founder and CEO of Resilienci.ai, an Austin-based company that uses AI, machine learning and behavioral data to map hyperlocal infectious-disease risk and supply-chain disruption. A longtime entrepreneur and finance executive with a 40-year career spanning Price Waterhouse, PepsiCo and several technology startups, he previously co-founded the social-analytics firm Snaptrends and founded Pandemic Insights. He is also a longtime food-security advocate who has chaired and served on food-bank boards.
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.
Lisa Fitzpatrick
Lisa Fitzpatrick is an infectious-disease physician, medical epidemiologist, and founder and CEO of Grapevine Health, a Washington, DC digital health media company that uses street interviews, plain-language video, and text messaging to build trust and health literacy in Black and brown communities. A former CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service officer, Caribbean health diplomat, and chief medical officer for DC Medicaid, she became known as 'Dr. Lisa on the Street' for standing on sidewalks to answer real people's medical questions and bust misinformation.
Anna Ford
Anna Ford is the co-founder and CEO of Bookclubs, the free app and website that has grown into the organizing layer for more than a million readers and over 100,000 book clubs worldwide. A former public health policy advocate with a Georgetown degree and a Harvard Kennedy School MPA, she built the platform out of pure frustration after the tangled email threads of her own Philadelphia book club nearly killed it. The fix - coded by a friend named Ian Campbell, who later became her husband - turned a logistics problem into a company, and a public health career into a mission against loneliness. She runs it all from Camden, Maine.
Daniel Wexler
Daniel Wexler is the co-founder and CEO of EatWell, a Boston public-benefit startup that turns dinner into a doctor's prescription. He maps food deserts the way logistics planners map warehouses, then ships affordable one-pot meal kits into the neighborhoods that grocery chains forgot. Trained in public health and behavioral economics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Wexler reframed groceries as a 'Food is Medicine' tool that health insurers can prescribe to fight food insecurity and prevent diet-related disease while lowering healthcare spend.
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.
Nick Gulino
Nick Gulino is the founder and CEO of Recover (letsrecover.com), a Y Combinator-backed telehealth company that delivers evidence-based addiction treatment in partnership with state and local governments, at roughly a tenth of the cost of traditional rehab. A graduate of Yale Law School and UC Berkeley who started at a community college and a 'last chance' high school, he spent a decade in government and addiction services - leading work in McKinsey's government practice, advising governors, and serving in the White House - before building Recover to make recovery accessible to low-income and underserved people.
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.
Veeraj Shah
Veeraj Shah is the co-founder and CEO of Vitalize (YC W23), a San Francisco company building software to fix hospital operations, starting with staffing and scheduling. A 2021 Gates Cambridge Scholar who walked away from a Cambridge PhD to run the company full-time, he is a three-time healthcare founder whose earlier work spanned the U.S. Surgeon General's office, IBM Watson Health, and the National Cancer Institute. Vitalize is now live across more than 20 hospitals.
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.
Colby Takeda
Colby Takeda is the co-founder and CEO of Pear Suite, a digital health company that gives community health workers the software, billing tools, and data infrastructure to be recognized as a foundational part of the healthcare system. A fourth-generation Japanese American from O'ahu, registered community health worker, and former senior living executive, he built Pear Suite during the pandemic on Google Sheets and Typeform before turning it into a care navigation platform that supports thousands of frontline workers. In October 2025 the company raised a $7.6 million Series A led by Rock Health Capital to expand its reach into Medicaid and Medicare markets.
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.
Maribel Garcia
Maribel Garcia is the Executive Assistant to the Chief Executive Officer at Sanity, the San Francisco company behind a content operating system used by developers and enterprises. She keeps the CEO's orbit running at a fast-scaling, Series C software company, drawing on a winding path that ran through public health at UC Berkeley, a food-in-schools mission at Revolution Foods, and the front lines of hospitality at AMC Theatres before landing in the tech world.
Rebekah Gee
Dr. Rebekah Gee is the founder and CEO of Nest Health, the first value-based primary, behavioral, and social care provider built for whole families on Medicaid, delivered through house calls and virtual visits from a base in New Orleans. An obstetrician-gynecologist and health-policy researcher, she ran the Louisiana Department of Health from 2016 to 2020, where she led Medicaid expansion and pioneered a subscription drug-payment model for hepatitis C. She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2017 and now runs a startup that has raised a $22.5M Series A to scale care for the families the system tends to forget.
Christine Schindler
Christine Schindler is the co-founder and CEO of PathSpot, the maker of the HandScanner - a device that mounts beside a kitchen sink, scans a worker's just-washed hands with light, and flags invisible contamination in seconds. A Duke-trained biomedical engineer who first built low-cost medical tools near Mount Kilimanjaro, she prototyped PathSpot's algorithms in her apartment bathroom, sold her car to fund it, and grew the company into a food-safety operating system used across the restaurant industry. She is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, a Time Best Invention recognizee, and the founder of the nonprofit Girls Engineering Change.
David Werdegar
Dr. David Werdegar, MD, MPH is the former President and CEO of Institute on Aging (IOA), San Francisco's leading nonprofit dedicated to helping older adults and adults with disabilities live with dignity and independence. A physician trained at New York Medical College and UCSF, Werdegar transformed IOA from a community program into a comprehensive elder-care organization serving thousands annually across the San Francisco Bay Area. Under his watch, IOA opened a landmark 50,000-square-foot campus on Geary Boulevard in 2011, consolidating programs spanning home care, dementia day enrichment, and the 24/7 Friendship Line warmline. He retired in 2022 after steering the organization to nearly $100 million in annual revenue with a staff of around 900.
Jane Garcia
Jane Garcia has run La Clínica de La Raza since 1982, growing a scrappy storefront clinic in Oakland's Fruitvale into a $150M federally qualified health center serving more than 86,000 patients across Alameda, Contra Costa and Solano counties. She walked in as a Berkeley public health intern in 1978 and never left, building a Bay Area institution while suing two federal administrations over immigrant care.
Mark Primeau
Mark Primeau is a San Francisco based healthcare executive currently associated with the San Francisco Department of Public Health and operating as CEO of P B Strategies, a consulting practice focused on healthcare strategy and operations.
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.
Katherine Wu
Katherine J. Wu, Ph.D. is a staff science writer at The Atlantic and one of the most respected science journalists working today. A former Harvard bacteriologist turned acclaimed writer, she translates complex biology - from pandemic viruses to the sex lives of deep-sea creatures - into stories that are simultaneously rigorous and riveting. Winner of the 2024 Kovler Prize and the 2022 Schmidt Award for Science Communication, she has reported for The New York Times, National Geographic, and Smithsonian, and holds a PhD in Microbiology and Immunobiology from Harvard. She writes the newsletter The Pivot, covering science and health.
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.