Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show

Send us a textDr. George R. Dodge, Ph.D. is CEO & Co-Founder of Mechano-Therapeutics LLC ( https://mechano-therapeutics.com/ ), a biotechnology company spun out from his lab, and the labs of his partners Dr. Rob Mauck and Dr. Daeyeon Lee, at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in microcapsule development using proprietary microfluidics for drug encapsulation, with a mission to revolutionize musculoskeletal health using an innovative platform technology to enhance delivery of therapeutics for improving patient outcomes. Dr. Dodge recently served on the faculty of Orthopaedic Surgery, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania; as Director, Philadelphia VA Shared Instrument Core; and Director, Translational Musculoskeletal Research Center, Philadelphia Crescenz Veterans Administration Medical Center, Department of Veteran Affairs. Dr. Dodge has a B.S. (Biology) from Asbury College, a B.S. (Biology and Health Science / Public Health) from State University of New York, a Ph.D. (Biochemistry and Immunology) from McGill University, and did Post-Graduate work in Molecular and Cell Biology, at Thomas Jefferson University Department of Pathology and Cell Biology. Dr. Dodge is an established investigator with a career long commitment to translational musculoskeletal research and in particular research focused on cartilage and chondrocyte biology, extracellular matrix and research related to osteoarthritis. Support the show

Send us a textDr. Majid Fotuhi, M.D., Ph.D. ( https://neurogrow.com/about-us/dr-majid-fotuhi-md-phd/ ) is the Medical Director of NeuroGrow Brain Fitness Center, a neurology practice dedicated for treating patients with concussion, memory loss, or attention deficit disorder. He is also an affiliate staff at Johns Hopkins Medicine ( https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/profiles/details/majid-fotuhi ) and teaches medical students at Harvard Medical School. He has been an active member of the American Academy of Neurology, American Medical Association, International Brain Research Organization, and Society for Neuroscience. Dr. Fotuhi received his MD degree (cum laude) from Harvard Medical School, as a member of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) and his doctoral PhD degree in Neuroscience from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Fotuhi’s initial clinical research at Johns Hopkins focused on basic brain neurochemistry and on finding effective ways to prevent dementia. More specifically, he worked on longitudinal studies to determine the beneficial role of a combination of vitamins and natural supplements along with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID) in maintaining cognitive function and brain health. His current research focuses on designing multi-disciplinary treatment programs for patients with memory loss and/or post-concussive syndrome. He has published his research findings in Brain Research, Journal of Neuroscience, the Lancet, Nature, Neurology, Neuron, and Proceedings of National Academy of Science. Dr. Fotuhi has dedicated much of his time to educating the public about memory, aging, and concussion. In his book, The Memory Cure: How to Protect Your Brain Against Memory Loss and Alzheimer's Disease, he provides clear and concise information about how to prevent dementia. His second book, entitled The New York Times Puzzles to Keep Your Brain Young: The 6 Step Age Defying Program, was released in January 2008. His most recent book, Boost Your Brain, teaches people how they can grow the size of their hippocampus. He has had two PBS programs, entitled “Conquering Memory Loss” and “Fight Alzheimer’s Early.” He has been interviewed by more than 50 media outlets including ABC News, CTV, CBS, TODAY show, Montel show, Fox News, Dr. Oz show, Discovery Channel, The Boston Globe, USA Today, Health magazine, Ladies’ Home Journal, Forbes, BusinessWeek, The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Montreal Gazette, and The Times (London). Dr. Fotuhi has taken a leadership role in medical education as well. He has received numerous awards for his innovative and dynamic teaching style. He is one of the most popular instructors at Harvard Medical School, where he designed and helped to build two 5O foot tall brain models for his students in neuroanatomy classes. He won the distinguished teaching award from the American Academy of Neurology in 2001. He has presented academic lectures as the honorary visiting professor in Canada, Egypt, China, Israel, and Japan; he also had the honor of presenting a lecture at a United Nations meeting in New York in September 2010 and at the legislative briefings for the house and senate in Maryland in February 2015. Support the show

Send us a textMr. Benson Kanyembo is Law Enforcement Advisor, Conservation South Luangwa ( https://cslzambia.org/ ), an organization which works in partnership with Zambia’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife (DNPW) on the frontline of wildlife conservation and human-wildlife coexistence in the South Luangwa Valley. The organization is focused on protecting the 1,400,000 hectares of largely intact wilderness in eastern Zambia that make up the South Luangwa National Park and the surrounding Upper and Lower Lupande game management areas. The Luangwa Valley is home to over 60 species of mammals and 450 species of birds. Species include the unique Crawshay’s zebra, Cookson’s wildebeest, and a geographically isolated population of Luangwa giraffe (G. t. thornicrofti), a subspecies of Masai giraffe. The Valley is also known for its high densities of lion, leopard and wild dog, and it remains a stronghold for elephants in Zambia. Born in Kitwe, the son of a policeman, Mr. Kanyembo grew up with an understanding of the importance of good law enforcement and has devoted over 20 years of his life to protecting Zambia’s wildlife for future generations, including his own four daughters. In 1994, Mr. Kanyembo started his career in wildlife enforcement as a village scout in North Luangwa. In 2000, after the formation of ZAWA (Zambian Wildlife Authority) he became a community scout before rising to the rank of Senior Wildlife Police Officer and was in charge of the training of all scouts and transferred to South Luangwa in 2008. In 2009, Mr. Kanyembo joined CSL as Operations Manager, and during the restructuring in 2018 was promoted to Law Enforcement Advisor. He leads all CSL anti-poaching law enforcement and wildlife rescue operations either in the field or from his control room in collaboration with DNPW. He has facilitated the growth and development of the anti-poaching unit from 30 to 92 scouts. In 2019, Mr. Kanyembo's commitment to conservation in Africa was recognized on the global stage, when he was awarded the TUSK Wildlife Ranger Award in London by Tusk’s Royal Patron HRH The Duke of Cambridge, Prince William of Wales. Support the show

Send us a textDr. Grzegorz (Greg) Ombach, Ph.D. ( https://councils.forbes.com/profile/Greg-Ombach-Head-Disruptive-R-T-Senior-Vice-President-Airbus/b60db4cb-0b87-48cb-a3a0-41068d3d05ab ) is Head of Disruptive R&T ( https://www.airbus.com/en/innovation/disruptive-concepts ) and Senior Vice President, at Airbus, the multinational aerospace corporation, where he is passionate about managing technological innovation from an idea to broad market adoption, and his combination of technology, leadership and commercial expertise together with a truly global outlook, having worked across Europe, the USA and China, puts him in a solid position to drive international market success for high-tech innovations. As a Head of Disruptive R&T, Dr. Ombach shapes Airbus's ability to be the global leader in innovation and future technologies across all Airbus divisions and he works very closely with all businesses and divisions globally. Prior to this role, when Dr. Ombach served as Executive Vice President, Head of Battery Systems Business and Group Strategy and Innovation at Dräxlmaier, he was responsible for the strategy for the business and led the entire product commercialization, from the initial concept to high volume production of cutting-edge technology in a premium market for the automotive sector, including the first high-volume production of an 800V battery system for the Porsche Taycan. Earlier, Dr. Ombach worked at Qualcomm as a Global Vice President and General Manager of a breakthrough automotive technology licensing business and also gained experience from Siemens VDO, Continental and Brose. Dr. Ombach holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Silesian University of Technology, Poland and a Certificate in Global Management from INSEAD, The Business School for the World. He has also been awarded Guest Professorship at the Zhejiang University in China. Support the show

Send us a textDr. Lesley Ogilvie, Ph.D. is Director, Global AMR R&D Hub Secretariat ( https://globalamrhub.org/about/global-amr-rd-hub-secretariat/ ), part of a global partnership focused on addressing challenges and improving coordination and collaboration in Global Antimicrobial Resistance R&D using a One Health approach. Dr. Ogilvie joined the Global AMR R&D Hub in February 2021, hoping to combine scientific insight with targeted action to help combat the silent pandemic of AMR, following over ten years-experience working in academia as a researcher and lecturer in Microbial Ecogenomics, applying molecular and bioinformatics techniques to tackle questions regarding the human gut microbiome/virome in health and disease. Dr. Ogilvie has a BSc (Hons) in Ecology from University of Dundee, UK.; an MSc in Marine Resource Development and Protection from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK; a Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences from University of East Anglia; and did Postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics. Support the show

Send us a textAdvitya Gemawat ( https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/agemawat/ ) is a Machine Learning Research Engineer who currently works in the Responsible AI (RAI) team as part of the Azure Machine Learning (AML) and Azure AI Studio product lines, in the Azure AI Platform org. Prior to the RAI team, he was part of the 4th cohort of the Microsoft AI Development Acceleration Program (MAIDAP), where he worked with Azure Quality, Microsoft’s Gray Systems Lab (GSL), Azure Edge & Platform, and Azure Machine Learning (AML). His research experience is at the intersection of Machine Learning & Scalable Systems. His work with GSL was identified as the Microsoft Global Hackathon Executive Challenge 2022 Winner and recipient of the Best Demonstration Award at VLDB 2022. His work with the AML team on expanding the RAI Dashboard to support Object Detection models was released in Public Preview at Microsoft Build 2023. Prior to Microsoft, Advitya graduated from UC San Diego with a Data Science major, where he contributed to Project Cerebro (a Layered Data Platform for scalable Deep Learning) and was advised by Professor Arun Kumar. There, his research won the 2021 ACM SIGMOD Student Research Abstract Competition and the Best Project Award as part of UCSD’s Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI) Undergraduate Scholarship Program HDSI Scholarship Program. As part of an internship with VMware, his work on Massively Parallel Automated Model Building for Deep Learning was included in Apache MADlib 1.18.0 release. Opinions expressed in the video solely reflect Advitya’s views and not the views of his employer. Follow Advitya on the handles below: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/agemawat YouTube: youtube.com/@AdvityaGemawat Microsoft Research: microsoft.com/research/people/agemawat Support the show

Send us a textDr. Joni L. Rutter, Ph.D., ( https://ncats.nih.gov/director/bio ) is the Director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences ( NCATS - https://ncats.nih.gov/ ) at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) where she oversees the planning and execution of the Center’s complex, multifaceted programs that aim to overcome scientific and operational barriers impeding the development and delivery of new treatments and other health solutions. Under her direction, NCATS supports innovative tools and strategies to make each step in the translational process more effective and efficient, thus speeding research across a range of diseases, with a particular focus on rare diseases. By advancing the science of translation, NCATS helps turn promising research discoveries into real-world applications that improve people’s health. The NCATS Strategic Plan can be found at - https://ncats.nih.gov/strategicplan In her previous role as the NCATS deputy director, Dr. Rutter collaborated with colleagues from government, academia, industry and nonprofit patient organizations to establish robust interactions with NCATS programs. Prior to joining NCATS, Dr. Rutter served as the director of scientific programs within the All of Us Research Program, where she led the scientific programmatic development and implementation efforts to build a national research cohort of at least 1 million U.S. participants to advance precision medicine. During her time at NIH, she also has led the Division of Neuroscience and Behavior at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). In this role, she developed and coordinated research on basic and clinical neuroscience, brain and behavioral development, genetics, epigenetics, computational neuroscience, bioinformatics, and drug discovery. Dr. Rutter also coordinated the NIDA Genetics Consortium and biospecimen repository. Throughout her career, Dr. Rutter has earned an international reputation for her diverse and unique expertise via her journal publications and speaking engagements, and she has received several scientific achievement awards, including the 2022 Rare Disease Legislative Advocates–RareVoice Award for Federal Advocacy and the 2022 FedHealthIT–Women in Leadership Impact Award. Dr. Rutter received her Ph.D. from the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, New Hampshire, and completed a fellowship at NCI within the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics. Support the show

Send us a textDr. Reshmi Ghosh, Ph.D. ( https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/reshmighosh/ ) is an Applied Scientist as part of Microsoft’s AI acceleration program, under their Office of Applied Research, where she serves as a Tech Lead to drive teams towards bettering customer experience by integrating state-of-the-art machine learning capabilities in Microsoft products and services while working at the intersection of Natural Language Processing, human-centered AI, and Reinforcement Learning. Dr. Ghosh’s collaborations at Microsoft have revolved around researching and building machine learning models that can help understand/predict enterprise user and consumer behavior, to power intelligent service improvements (e.g., efficient search, information consumption) and commanding experiences (e.g., search, command prediction, task automation, etc.). Additional collaborations also include research on topic segmentation methods for unstructured conversation data using transfer learning approaches. Prior to joining Microsoft, Dr. Ghosh completed her doctorate degree at Carnegie Mellon University, researching novel deep-learning and bayesian approaches to strategize methods for climate change adaptation and mitigation in collaboration with the University of Michigan and CMU Portugal. She also has two other masters’ degrees from Carnegie Mellon University: M.S. in Engineering and Public Policy (Focus: Data Science techniques for Policy Analysis) and M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering (Focus: Data Analytics for Engineered Systems) Support the show

Send us a textDr. Jamie Jonker, Ph.D. ( https://www.nmpf.org/team/jamie-jonker/ ) is the National Milk Producers Federation’s Chief Science Officer and Vice President of Sustainability & Scientific Affairs where he serves as the organization’s lead scientific expert on dairy issues ranging from animal health and sustainability, to dairy farm biosecurity, air and water quality, and more. Dr. Jonker leads NMPF’s engagement with scientific groups such as the U.S. Animal Health Association, the International Dairy Federation (IDF), the World Animal Health Organization, and Codex Alimentarius. Dr. Jonker serves on the IDF Board of Directors and in 2020 was elected chair of the IDF Science Program Coordinating Committee. He is also involved in coordinating relations with the Federation’s Animal Health & Wellbeing Committee and Environmental Issues Committee. Dr. Jonker received his B.S. degree (Animal Science) and M.S. degree (Animal Science, with concentration in dairy cattle nutrition) from Cornell University, and his Ph.D. (Animal and Avian Science) from the University of Maryland. Prior to joining NMPF he worked at the National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Agriculture. NMPF was organized in 1916 to provide a forum for dairy producers and the cooperatives they own to participate in public policy discussions and they currently advocate to Congress, U.S. and foreign government agencies, industry organizations, the news media, and the public, addressing policies including milk pricing, domestic and international market development, agriculture credit and taxation, environmental issues, food safety and health, animal welfare, product standards and labeling, and research and biotechnology. Dr. Jonker is also the Executive Director of the National Ice Cream Mix Association (NICMA). Support the show

Send us a textDr. Scott O'Neill (PhD, FAA, FAAAS) is Founder of the World Mosquito Program ( https://www.worldmosquitoprogram.org/en/work/about-us/team/scott-oneill ) and Professor at Monash University ( https://lens.monash.edu/@scott-oneill ), where he leads a large international research collaboration (formerly known as Eliminate Dengue), which is focused on developing the Wolbachia bacteria as a novel method to block the transmission of dengue fever and other mosquito-transmitted viral diseases, such as Zika and chikungunya. This global, not-for-profit program is currently conducting field trials of the Wolbachia method in multiple countries, in areas where these diseases are endemic, working closely with communities, local health organizations and governments to implement its self-sustaining method through controlled releases. Dr. O’Neill has spent his academic career at the University of Illinois, Yale University, the University of Queensland and Monash, where he was previously the dean of the Faculty of Science. Dr. O’Neill is internationally recognized for his contributions to the field of insect symbiosis and the way the intimate bacterial associations of invertebrates are ubiquitous and can generate major effects on the reproductive physiology, developmental biology and ecology of the insects they infect. His work has made major contributions to understanding how insect symbionts exert their effects and the consequences for infected hosts. Support the show