Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show

Send us a textDr. Asha M. George, DrPH (https://biodefensecommission.org/teams/asha-m-george-drph/) is Executive Director, Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, which was established in 2014 to assess gaps in and provide recommendations to improve U.S. biodefense. The Panel determines where the United States is falling short of addressing biological attacks and emerging and reemerging infectious diseases. Dr. George is a public health security professional whose research and programmatic emphasis has been practical, academic, and political. She served in the U.S. House of Representatives as a senior professional staffer and subcommittee staff director at the House Committee on Homeland Security in the 110th and 111th Congress. She has worked for a variety of organizations, including government contractors, foundations, and non-profits. As a contractor, she supported and worked with all Federal Departments, especially the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. George also served on active duty in the U.S. Army as a military intelligence officer and as a paratrooper and she is a decorated Desert Storm Veteran. Dr. George holds a Bachelor of Arts in Natural Sciences from Johns Hopkins University, a Master of Science in Public Health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (in Parasitology and Laboratory Practice), and a Doctorate in Public Health (with a focus on Public Health Policy and Security Preparedness) from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is also a graduate of the Harvard University National Preparedness Leadership Initiative.Support the show

Send us a textGeneral Stan McChrystal, is Founder and CEO of the McChrystal Group (https://www.mcchrystalgroup.com/people/stan-mcchrystal/) an advisory firm focused on delivering innovative leadership solutions to businesses globally in order to help them transform and succeed in challenging, dynamic environments. A retired four-star general, Stan is the former commander of US and International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) Afghanistan and the former commander of the nation’s premier military counter-terrorism force, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). He is best known for developing and implementing a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, and for creating a cohesive counter-terrorism organization that revolutionized the interagency operating culture. Throughout his military career, Stan commanded a number of elite organizations, including the 75th Ranger Regiment. After 9/11 until his retirement in 2010, he spent more than 6 years deployed to combat in a variety of leadership positions. In June 2009, the President of the United States and the Secretary General of NATO appointed him to be the Commander of US Forces Afghanistan and NATO ISAF. His command included more than 150,000 troops from 45 allied countries. On August 1, 2010 he retired from the US Army. Stan is a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, where he teaches a course on Leadership. He also sits on the boards of Navistar International Corporation, Siemens Government Technology, and JetBlue Airways. He is a sought-after speaker, giving speeches on leadership to organizations around the country. In 2013, Stan published his memoir, My Share of the Task, which was a New York Times bestseller; and is an author of Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, which was a New York Times bestseller in 2015. Stan also co-authored Leaders: Myth and Reality, a Wall Street Journal Bestseller based on the epochal Parallel Lives by Plutarch, and his most current book is Risk: A Users Guide. A passionate advocate for national service and veterans’ issues, Stan is the Chair of the Board of Service Year Alliance (https://www.serviceyearalliance.org/). In this capacity, he advocates for a future in which a year of full-time service—a service year—is a common expectation and opportunity for all young Americans. Stan is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and the Naval War College. He also completed year-long fellowships at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Council on Foreign Relations.Support the show

Send us a textDr. Robert A. Montgomery, MD, DPhil, FACS, (https://nyulangone.org/doctors/1467404137/robert-montgomery) is the Director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, and Chair and a Professor in their Department of Surgery, where he oversees a diverse team of medical and surgical specialists who provide a wide variety of surgery and transplantation services including bone marrow, heart, kidney, liver, lung, and facial transplantation. Dr. Montgomery received his Doctor of Medicine with Honor from the University of Rochester School of Medicine, his Doctor of Philosophy from Balliol College, The University of Oxford, England in Molecular Immunology, and completed his general surgical training, multi-organ transplantation fellowship, and postdoctoral fellowship in Human Molecular Genetics at Johns Hopkins. For over a decade Dr. Montgomery served as the Chief of Transplant Surgery and the Director of the Comprehensive Transplant Center at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Montgomery was part of the team that developed the laparoscopic procedure for live kidney donation, a procedure that has become the standard throughout the world. He and the Hopkins team conceived the idea of the Domino Paired Donation (kidney swaps), the Hopkins protocol for desensitization of incompatible kidney transplant patients, and performed the first chain of transplants started by an altruistic donor. He led the team that performed the first 2-way, 3-way, 4-way, 5-way, 6-way, and 8-way domino paired donations, and in the first 10-way open chain donation. Dr. Montgomery's current research focuses on stem cell therapies and gene- and cell-based therapies in transplantation. He was co-lead of a clinical trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health involving simultaneous donor bone marrow and live donor kidney transplantation. He also runs multiple clinical trials for novel desensitization therapies. Dr. Montgomery is credited in the 2010 Guinness Book of World Records with the most kidney transplants performed in 1 day, is a world expert on kidney transplantation for highly sensitized and ABO incompatible patients, and is referred the most complex patients from around the globe. Dr. Montgomery has received several awards recognizing his experience in patient care and research, including the American Society of Human Genetics’ Postdoctoral Basic Science Award, the Johns Hopkins Clinician Scientist Award, the Fujisawa Faculty Development Award from the American Society of Transplant Surgeons, the Champion of Hope Award from the National Kidney Foundation of Maryland, and the Terasaki Medical Innovation Award from the National Kidney Registry. Dr. Montgomery is also a transplant recipient himself so he has unique perspectives as both patient and clinician.Support the show

Send us a textMr. Tomas Diagne is the Director of the African Chelonian Institute (https://africanchelonian.org/), an organization with a mission to promote the long-term conservation of turtle, tortoise and terrapin populations, across the African continent, through research, education, and grassroots collaboration. Mr. Diagne is an African freshwater turtle and tortoise expert who has been working to save threatened and endangered turtle species in Senegal for the past 20 years. He began rescuing endangered African spurred tortoises (Centrochelys sulcata) as a teenager and in 1992 he created S.O.S. (Save Our Sulcata), a non-profit conservation organization. He also co-founded and built the Village des Tortues in Noflaye, Senegal - a sanctuary and captive breeding facility for sulcata tortoises that now houses over 300 individuals and has re-introduced numerous others back to the wild. Mr. Diagne has also been actively involved in freshwater and marine turtle research throughout Africa. He is a member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Tortoise and Freshwater Turtle Specialist Group. In 2009 he decided to create the African Chelonian Institute (ACI) in order to expand turtle research, captive breeding, and re-introduction to all African turtle species. Mr. Diagne is a 2019 winner of Tusk Award for Conservation in Africa.Support the show

Send us a textAmbassador John E. Lange (https://unfoundation.org/who-we-are/our-people/john-e-lange/) is Senior Fellow, Global Health Diplomacy, at the United Nations Foundation, a charitable organization headquartered in Washington, DC, that supports the United Nations and its activities. Ambassador Lange has extensive leadership experience in global health issues and longstanding involvement in United Nations affairs, focusing on issues related to global health security and the work of the World Health Organization. He also serves as the Chair of the Leadership Team of the Measles & Rubella Initiative. Ambassador Lange worked from 2009-2013 at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he engaged in high-level advocacy with governments and international organizations to advance the Gates Foundation’s global health and development goals in Africa. In 2012, he was the founding Co-Chair of the Polio Partners Group, the broad group of stakeholders in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, and served in that role for a four-year term. Ambassador Lange had a distinguished 28-year career in the Foreign Service at the U.S. Department of State, where he was a pioneer in the field of global health diplomacy and a leader in pandemic preparedness and response. He served as the Special Representative on Avian and Pandemic Influenza (2006-2009); Deputy Inspector General; Deputy U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator at the inception of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief; and Associate Dean for Leadership and Management at the Foreign Service Institute, where he directed the Senior Seminar, the federal government’s highest-level civilian/military joint training program. He was the U.S. Ambassador to Botswana and Special Representative to the Southern African Development Community (1999-2002), where he oversaw operations of seven U.S. Government agencies and made HIV/AIDS his signature issue. Ambassador Lange headed the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, as Charge d'Affaires during the August 7, 1998, Al-Qaeda bombing, for which he received the State Department’s Distinguished Honor Award for "skilled leadership" and "extraordinary courage." From 1991 to 1995, while at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, Ambassador Lange managed U.S. humanitarian and refugee assistance channeled through international organizations. He also had tours of duty in the State Department Bureaus of African Affairs, Western Hemisphere Affairs and Management in Washington and at U.S. Embassies in Lomé, Togo; Paris, France; and Mexico City, Mexico. Prior to joining the diplomatic service in 1981, he worked for five years at the United Nations Association of the USA in New York. Ambassador Lange is the author of a case study in the book, Negotiating and Navigating Global Health: Case Studies in Global Health Diplomacy (2012), that describes the international negotiations on sharing of pandemic influenza viruses and access to vaccines when he led the U.S. delegation. He has delivered lectures on pandemics and other global health issues at Chatham House, London; the Council on Foreign Relations, New York; and numerous other venues. He has written numerous journal and magazine articles and blogs on the Dar es Salaam Embassy bombing, leadership in a crisis, humanitarian assistance, pandemic preparedness and response, and other global health issues. Support the show

Send us a textDr. Ana Maria Cuervo, M.D., Ph.D. (https://www.einsteinmed.edu/faculty/8784/ana-maria-cuervo/) is Co-Director of the Einstein Institute for Aging Research, and a member of the Einstein Liver Research Center and Cancer Center. She serves as a Professor in the Department of Developmental & Molecular Biology, and the Department of Medicine (Hepatology), and has the Robert and Renée Belfer Chair for the Study of Neurodegenerative Diseases. Dr. Cuervo studied medicine and pursued a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Valencia, as well as post-doctoral work at Tufts, and in 2001 she started her laboratory at Einstein, where she studies the role of protein-degradation in aging and age-related disorders, with emphasis in neurodegeneration and metabolic disorders. Dr. Cuervo’s group is interested in understanding how altered proteins can be eliminated from cells and their components recycled. Her group has linked alterations in lysosomal protein degradation (autophagy) with different neurodegenerative diseases including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s disease. They have also proven that restoration of normal lysosomal function prevents accumulation of damaged proteins with age, demonstrating this way that removal of these toxic products is possible. Her lab has also pioneered studies demonstrating a tight link between autophagy and cellular metabolism. They described how autophagy coordinates glucose and lipid metabolism and how failure of different autophagic pathways with age contribute to important metabolic disorders such as diabetes or obesity. Dr. Cuervo is considered a leader in the field of protein degradation in relation to biology of aging and has been invited to present her work in numerous national and international institutions, including name lectures as the Robert R. Konh Memorial Lecture, the NIH Director’s, the Roy Walford, the Feodor Lynen, the Margaret Pittman, the IUBMB Award, the David H. Murdock, the Gerry Aurbach, the SEBBM L’Oreal-UNESCO for Women in Science, the C. Ronald Kahn Distinguished Lecture and the Harvey Society Lecture. She has organized and chaired international conferences on protein degradation and on aging, belongs to the editorial board of scientific journals in this topic, and is currently co-editor-in-chief of Aging Cell. Dr. Cuervo has served in NIH advisory panels, special emphasis panels, and study sections, the NIA Scientific Council and the NIH Council of Councils and has been recently elected member of the NIA Board of Scientific Counselors and member of the of the Advisory Committee to the NIH Deputy Director. She has received numerous awards for the pioneering work of her team such as the 2005 P. Benson Award in Cell Biology, the 2005/8 Keith Porter Fellow in Cell Biology, the 2006 Nathan Shock Memorial Lecture Award, the 2008 Vincent Cristofalo Rising Start in Aging Award, the 2010 Bennett J. Cohen Award in Aging Biology, the 2012 Marshall S. Horwitz, MD Faculty Prize for Research Excellence and the 2015 Saul Korey Prize in Translational Medicine Science. She has also received twice the LaDonne Schulman Teaching Award. In 2015 she was elected International Academic of the Royal Academy of Medicine of the Valencia Community and in 2017, she was elected member of the Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Fisicas y Naturales. She was elected member of the AmeriSupport the show

Send us a textDr. Katherine High, MD, is President, Therapeutics, at Asklepios BioPharmaceutical (AskBio - https://www.askbio.com/), where she is also member of the AskBio Board of Directors, and has responsibility for driving the strategic direction and execution of pre-clinical and clinical programs of the company. AskBio is a wholly owned and independently operated subsidiary of Bayer AG, set up as a fully integrated gene therapy company dedicated to developing life-saving medicines that cure genetic diseases. Most recently, Dr. High was a Visiting Professor at Rockefeller University and previous to that, she served as President, Head of Research and Development, and a member of the Board of Directors at Spark Therapeutics (a subsidiary of Hoffmann-La Roche), where she directed the development and regulatory approval of Luxturna® (a gene therapy medication for the treatment of the ophthalmic condition Leber congenital amaurosis), and represents the first gene therapy for genetic disease to obtain regulatory approval in both the United States and Europe. Dr. High was a longtime member of the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and medical staff at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where she was also an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She served a five-year term on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Advisory Committee on Cell, Tissue and Gene Therapies and is a past president of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy. Dr. High received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Harvard University, an MD from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, a hematology fellowship at Yale University, a business certification from the University of North Carolina Business School’s Management Institute for Hospital Administrators and a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine of the Royal College of Physicians (London).Support the show

Send us a textThe Honorable Secretary Dr. Donna Shalala, Ph.D. (https://people.miami.edu/profile/dshalala@miami.edu), currently serves as Professor Emerita, Department of Health Management and Policy, University of Miami, where she previously served as President from 2001 to 2015, where during her tenure as President, she advanced the university into the top tier of U.S. research universities. With more than 40 years as an accomplished scholar, teacher, and administrator, Secretary Shalala personifies outstanding leadership and dedication to public service. Secretary Shalala received her A.B. degree from Western College for Women and Ph.D. degree from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. In addition to her leadership of University of Miami, Secretary Shalala served as President of Hunter College from 1980 to 1987 and as Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1987 to 1993. Secretary Shalala was assistant secretary for policy development and research at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Carter administration. In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed her U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), where she served for all eight years of the Clinton administration, becoming the nation's longest serving HHS secretary. During this time she fought to create, implement and oversee the Children’s Healthcare Insurance Program, currently covering over 7.6 million children throughout the country, as well as doubling the budget of the National Institute of Health (NIH) and securing the highest immunization rates in American history. Secretary Shalala was appointed by President George W. Bush to co-chair with Senator Bob Dole the Commission on Care for Returning Wounded Warriors, and in 2008 received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award. In 2009, she was appointed chair of the Committee on the Future of Nursing at the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. Most recently, in addition to serving in the U.S. Congress for Florida's 27th congressional district, in the U.S. House of Representatives, Secretary Shalala served as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force on The Emerging Global Health Crisis, as well as a Commissioner of the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense. One of the most honored academics of her generation, Secretary Shalala has been elected to seven national academies including: National Academy of Education; the National Academy of Public Administration; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the American Philosophical Society; the National Academy of Social Insurance; the American Academy of Political and Social Science; and the National Academy of Medicine.Support the show

Send us a textDr. Srinivas Rao, MD, Ph.D. is the Chief Scientific Officer at atai Life Sciences (https://www.atai.life/), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company aiming to transform the treatment of mental health disorders. With offices in New York, London and Berlin, atai's business model combines funding, technology, scientific and regulatory expertise with a focus on psychedelic therapeutic moieties, and other drugs, with differentiated safety profiles and therapeutic potential. Dr. Rao also serves as CEO of atai portfolio company, EntheogeniX (https://www.entheogenixbio.com/), a computational biophysics and artificial intelligence biotech working to design the next generation of psychedelics-inspired mental health drugs. Dr. Rao has over 19 years of professional experience in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Prior to atai, Dr. Rao has held the titles of Chief Scientific, Medical, or Executive Officer at companies ranging from venture-backed startups to vertically-integrated, publicly-traded pharmaceutical companies. Dr. Rao completed an internship in Internal Medicine at Yale-New Haven Hospital. He received his Ph.D. in neurobiology from Yale Graduate School and his M.D. from Yale School of Medicine. He holds both a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Yale College and Yale Graduate School, respectively.Support the show

Send us a textDr. Steve Iley, MD (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-steve-iley/?originalSubdomain=uk) is the Chief Medical Officer and Global Head of Occupational Health and Safety, at Jaguar Land Rover (https://www.jaguarlandrover.com/). With his medical degree from the University of Bristol, and training in emergency medicine in Australia, Dr. Iley is an experienced Medical Director and Chief Medical Officer having worked at senior and board level both in the UK and internationally, having practiced around the globe in locations like Bermuda, Singapore and Russia. Dr. Iley's background includes responsibility for the health and wellbeing of workforces and customers in both automotive and aviation industries, as well insurance and healthcare. Prior to Jaguar Land Rover, Dr. Iley served as Medical Director for Bupa’s UK Insurance business. He also has worked in both the NHS and private medicine, as well as for corporate companies including at British Airways, AXA, and International SOS, the world's leading health and security risk services company.Support the show