Joe Cerrell , director of Global Health Policy & Advocacy for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, oversees the foundation's global health communications, public policy and international finance. In this capacity, Cerrell manages a policy and advocacy grant-making portfolio and oversees relations with governments, NGOs, the private sector, multilateral organizations, and other foundations. Cerrell previously served as assistant press secretary to former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. He was a senior member of a team responsible for advising the vice president on energy and environmental issues and was a White House liaison to elected officials, industry, environmental, religious, and labor leaders, and the media. Cerrell also acted as U.S. spokesperson for numerous vice-presidential international state visits. Cerrell provided communications support and served as an advisor for three U.S. presidential campaigns. He was vice president of the philanthropy practice at APCO Worldwide, overseeing the agency's nonprofit and foundation clients. He currently serves on the board of directors for the ONE Campaign, UNITIAD, and the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute. He is also an advisory board member of the Clinton Global Initiative.

Robert Semeniuk, MA, has been a full-time, freelance author, photojournalist, human and environmental rights activist for nearly 30 years. He has worked for most of the world’s major magazines in over 80 countries and a dozen war zones. His work is used by numerous government and non government organizations including: United Nations agencies; the International Committee of the Red Cross (Geneva); the International Committee to Ban Landmines; the World Health Organization, David Suzuki Foundation, Orbis Canada. Robert commits many months to each of his projects. He spent over two years working exclusively on the global landmine crisis, and the plight of “War Affected Children” has engaged him for much of his career. He has degrees in Environmental Studies (Cultural Ecology) and Human Geography. His graduate research introduced him to Canada’s Inuit. His extensive experience in developing countries has brought him to the realization that war, poverty, literacy, environmental degradation and health are intricately connected. He sees the disparity in world health as the most appalling manifestation of failed capitalism imaginable. He has earned more than 40 award nominations, including multiple top honors in National Magazine Awards, The Science Writers Association and The Canadian Association of Journalists. He is a founder of On The Ground a tax-exempt organization dedicated to helping documentary photographers fund and present important work. For a profile, see “Bearing Witness,” the Pacific Northwest cover story in the August 12, 2007 Seattle Times.

Saturday Lunch

Stefanie Friedhoff is special projects manager at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. She also works as a freelance journalist and science writer for U.S. and European media. Her articles have appeared in Time magazine, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Sueddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), Folio/Neue Zuercher Zeitung and Facts (Switzerland), among others. Friedhoff started a career as a freelance correspondent based in Cambridge, Mass., when she moved to Boston in 1998, leaving BZ, Berlin's largest daily newspaper, where she was news editor and editor of the Sunday magazine. In 2000-2001, she was a Nieman Fellow. She has organized a number of educational workshops and conferences for the Nieman Foundation on science-related topics and journalism before joining the Foundation part time in 2006.

Panelists

Lisa Berglund is an award-winning videographer, editor, producer and storyteller. She was the first and only woman videographer to receive the National Press Photographers Association’s Photographer of the Year award. Her work with corporations, international news and nonprofit organizations has given her powerful professional experience — including shooting, producing, and editing news, marketing and promotional videos, documentaries, PSAs and music videos. Berglund specializes in working in some of the most remote corners of the world because she feels strongly about giving voice to people who are rarely heard.  She has worked in more than 15 African countries, including Angola, Rwanda, Niger, Congo, and Zimbabwe, and has also covered stories in India, Sri Lanka, Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico and Europe.

Stephen Bezruchka, MD, MPH, has practiced emergency medicine for 30 years. This has given him the insight to ask "do you want health or health care?" He directs the Population Health Forum at the University of Washington, whose mission is to inform the public on what makes societies healthy and why the United States is less healthy than all the other rich countries and some poor ones despite spending half of the world's health care bill. The reasons for our poor health are entirely political. If the United States were to perform significantly better in the Health Olympics' events, global health would improve immensely. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on this material and tries to engage the mainstream media as well.

Alejandro Cerón, MD, MPH, is a general practice physician trained at the San Carlos University in Guatemala where he graduated from the School of Medicine in 2000 and the School of Public Health in 2006. Starting in 2001 he worked as a physician in the government’s program to extend service coverage to rural areas. In 2002 he began working with the Instancia Nacional de Salud to coordinate a project on monitoring the right to health in Guatemala and from 2003-2006 he was the Coordinator for the implementation of the Instancia’s Inclusive Primary Health Care proposal in rural Guatemala. He now is a doctoral student in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Washington and he works in collaboration with Central American institutions to conduct research on the right to health and access to medicines in Central America.

Donna DeCesare is an associate professor at the University of Texas School of Journalism, a faculty affiliate of the Latin American Studies program and an Advisory Board member of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. She is widely known for her groundbreaking photographic reportage on the spread of Los Angeles gangs in Central America. Her photographs and testimonies from children in Guatemala and Colombia who are former child soldiers, survivors of sexual abuse, or who live with the stigma of HIV helped UNICEF to develop protocols for photographing children at risk.  

She is recipient of an Emmy award, the Dorothea Lange Prize, The Alicia Patterson Fellowship, the Mother Jones International Photo Fund Award, the Soros Independent Project fellowship and most recently a Fulbright Fellowship in Colombia. DeCesare is currently documenting narratives of loss and survival among those who have suffered political violence in Colombia. Images and text from this project published on the Web site Crimes of War won a top award in the National Press Photographer’s Best of Photojournalism contest. DeCesare is a member of the Executive Committee of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.

Christopher J. Elias, MD, MPH, is president and chief executive officer of PATH, an international, nonprofit, nongovernmental organization based in Seattle. PATH creates sustainable, culturally relevant solutions that enable communities worldwide to break longstanding cycles of poor health. By collaborating with diverse public and private-sector partners, PATH helps provide appropriate health technologies and vital strategies that change the way people think and act. As president, Elias is responsible for PATH’s strategic, programmatic, financial, and management operations. PATH currently works in more than 65 countries in the areas of health technologies, maternal and child health, reproductive health, vaccines and immunization, and emerging and epidemic diseases. PATH’s 2008 budget is $218 million, which is provided by foundations, the U.S. government, other governments, multilateral agencies, corporations, and individuals.

Prior to joining PATH, Elias was a senior associate in the International Programs Division of the Population Council. For six years, he served as the country representative in Thailand, where he managed reproductive health programs throughout Southeast Asia.

Steve Gloyd, MD, MPH, is a family practice physician with more than 25 years of experience working in Africa and Latin America. He is a professor in the University of Washington Department of Health Services in the School of Public Health and Community Medicine, and director of the Population Leadership Program, a joint program of the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology and the Evans School of Public Affairs. His research interests lie in primary health care systems, reproductive health, program evaluation, rapid assessment methods, epidemiology and control of measles, tuberculosis, diarrhea, and HIV. He has experience in Mozambique, Cote d'Ivoire, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Somalia, Honduras, Brazil, and Ecuador.

Hanson Hosein is an award-winning digital filmmaker and the director of the Master of Communication in Digital Media program at the University of Washington in Seattle, specializing in user-generated content, multimedia storytelling and research strategies.

Throughout his career, he has sought out the technological changes that are now upending traditional media—from being one of the first contributors to a nascent msnbc.com, to pioneering digital content creation as a globe-trotting solo broadcaster. He's particularly interested in the use of this technology in developing countries.

Stefan Kappe , PhD, joined SBRI's Malaria Program  as a Principal Investigator in the fall of 2003. His work is focused on the biology of malaria mosquito stages and mammalian liver stages. The discovery of pre-erythrocytic subunit vaccine candidates and the creation of genetically attenuated parasites as whole organism vaccines to prevent malaria infection is a major goal of his research.  In 2005, Kappe received one of 43 prestigious Grand Challenges in Global Health grants, targeted at identifying the immune responses that prevent severe disease and death due to Plasmodium falciparum malaria. Kappe comes to SBRI from New York University where he was an assistant professor researching blood and liver stage malaria. Kappe's research has led to a genetically attenuated whole organism malaria vaccine candidate that has proven 100 percent protective 100 percent of the time in a mouse model. The vaccine candidate, designed to stop malaria infection in the liver and provide permanent protection against the disease, will go into human safety within a year

David Kohn is a medicine and health reporter for The Baltimore Sun. He spent last year as a Nieman/Gates Global Health Fellow at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. As part of the fellowship, he spent four months covering health in India. He has covered a wide range of stories, including the politics of U.S. international AIDS policy, the post-Katrina healthcare crisis in New Orleans, and infant mortality in Baltimore and India. Before coming to The Sun, he was a senior producer for CBSNews.com.

Diana M. Lanchoney, MD, is executive director of Developing World Strategic Integration Merck Vaccine and Infectious Diseases. She is currently responsible for leading strategic planning and cross-divisional integration efforts to accelerate the introduction and broad use of Merck's vaccines in the world's poorest countries. Lanchoney directs Merck's Developing World planning efforts, ensures integration of vaccine strategies into broader, corporate access strategies for vaccines and pharmaceuticals, and oversees implementation of plans. She earned her MD from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA (summa cum laude) in economics and German studies at Tufts University. She completed her residency and internship at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also worked as a staff physician, instructor and researcher in both basic virology and health services research. Prior to her medical career, she worked as a financial analyst for Chase Manhattan Bank.

Nancy Lewis, PhD, director, research program, East-West Center, is a medical geographer who recently has been working on climate change and health in small islands in the Pacific with the WHO and other international organizations. She has also worked on human ecology, the geography of health and disease, gender and health, and currently on emerging infectious disease. She is also interested in policy issues related to vulnerability and the human dimensions of global change. Lewis serves as vice president of the Pacific Science Association and has been instrumental in developing the EWC’s new health journalism fellowship program offered in collaboration with the University of Hong Kong.

Ira M. Longini , PhD, is a world leader in using mathematical and statistical methods to study infectious disease, including helping to pioneer the field of HIV vaccine design and analysis. He has analyzed numerous actual or threatened infectious-disease epidemics and created statistical models for the control of a possible bioterrorist attack with an infectious agent. He worked with one team of experts that determined the risks of large-scale smallpox vaccinations in the event of a bioterrorist attack outweighed the benefits, and another that used supercomputers to generate models to predict the possible course of a bird-flu pandemic. Longini directs the Program in Mathematical Modeling for HIV/STD at the University of Washington Center for AIDS Research, and is professor, Department of Biostatistics, UW School of Public Health and Community Medicine and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Jonathan D. Mayer, PhD, is professor of epidemiology and geography, and adjunct professor of medicine (Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases), global health, family medicine, and health services at the University of Washington. He is also president and CEO of the Health Improvement and Promotion Alliance (HIP-Ghana: www.hip-ghana.org), an NGO working on public health in the largest slum in Ghana. He co-directs the undergraduate program in public health at the University of Washington. He is a member of numerous committees and panels at the National Academies of Science, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Institutes of Health. He was a member of the joint National Academy of Sciences-Institute of Medicine Committee on Climate, Ecosystems, Infectious Diseases, and Human Health, which was charged with assessing the state of knowledge on the relationship of climate variability and infectious diseases. The findings were published in the National Research Council's "Under the Weather," available from the National Academy Press. Mayer's research is in the epidemiology of infectious diseases, including environmental influences on infectious diseases, clinical epidemiology of infectious diseases, and the movement and spread of infectious diseases. He also works on the epidemiology of pain and accessibility to treatment for acute and chronic pain.

Loyce Mbewa-Ong’udi, founder and president, Rabuor Village Project , was born and raised in Rabuor, Western Kenya, not far from the shores of Lake Victoria. During her formative years, Loyce never saw herself as living in poverty, but rather as someone blessed with the fellowship and strong support of her community. Loyce came to the United States in 1996, and soon began working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. During a trip back to Kenya with former President Jimmy Carter and Bill Gates Sr., Loyce found her native home radically transformed by the arrival of HIV/AIDS and felt compelled to find a way to help her home village overcome the devastating consequences she had witnessed. Loyce's friends and acquaintances became increasingly involved in helping in her mission and in this collective spirit the not-for-profit organization, Rabuor Village Project (RVP), was officially formed in 2003. Loyce has been serving as the organization's president and defining the way forward for sustainable community development. Her vision is to combat HIV/AIDS and the resulting hardships through community-based solutions that are driven by the ingenuity and strength of local people. In addition to volunteering her time to run RVP, Loyce is pursuing a master's degree in public administration and non-profit management at the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington. She is a Truman Scholar, member of the University of Washington's Global Health Resource Center, and has spoken at dozens of meetings and events throughout the United States on the effects of HIV/AIDS in African communities and community-based responses to HIV/AIDS. Loyce's relentless hope and commitment have resulted in a vast improvement in the lives of Rabuor's residents and she hopes to replicate the success of these efforts in other similar communities in the future.

Guy Palmer, PhD, is regents professor of pathology and infectious diseases and director of the School for Global Animal Health at Washington State University. His research focuses on improving control of animal diseases with direct impact on human health, and he has led collaborative infectious diseases research programs in southern and eastern Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. Palmer, who is fluent in Spanish, also directs a multi-institutional infectious diseases research program in Latin America. His current NIH-, USDA-, and Wellcome Trust-funded research focuses on genetic change in microbial pathogens in animal populations and the risk for shifts in disease pattern and emergence in new animal and human populations. Palmer is a member of the founding Board of Directors of the Washington State Academy of Sciences and of the Executive Committee of the Washington Vaccine Alliance. He also chairs the NIH study section on host interaction with bacterial infections and serves on the External Scientific Advisory Committee for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Trypanosomiasis Vaccine Project.

Cheryl Phillips is deputy investigations editor at The Seattle Times, where she was an investigative reporter from 2002 until January 2007. In Seattle, she has twice been a member of reporting teams that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. During much of her career, Phillips has specialized in computer-assisted reporting and investigative reporting. She leads training sessions on how to find information and people using the Internet. Previously, she has worked as computer-assisted reporting editor for USA Today, as a computer-assisted reporting projects editor at The Detroit News, covered local government and the state legislature at the Great Falls Tribune in Montana and was a reporter at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where she covered stadium issues of the Texas Rangers baseball team and wrote about then-team-owner George W. Bush. She is vice president of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a nonprofit journalism organization that focuses on training its members in the latest tools.

Charles Piller, an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times based in San Francisco, covers philanthropy, science, medicine and other topics. He has received more than two dozen journalism honors or awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Gerald Loeb Foundation and UCLA, the Western Publications Association, the Computer Press Association, the American Society of Business Press Editors, the California Teachers Association, the National Association of Secondary School Principals and Project Censored, among other organizations. Piller’s work has appeared in leading magazines and newspapers around the world, and has been reported on by newspapers, magazines, broadcast media and blogs worldwide. His books and articles have influenced the national debate on investment policies for charitable foundations, missile defense, biological weapons, forensic science, infectious diseases, information privacy and security and other topics. Piller has authored two books: The Fail-Safe Society: Community Defiance and the End of American Technological Optimism, and Gene Wars: Military Control Over the New Genetic Technologies (with Keith R. Yamamoto). Piller was a founding board member of the Washington, DC-based Center for Public Integrity, which he served as board chair from 2000-2007.

Marla Smith-Nilson, executive director of Water 1st , brings extensive hands-on field experience with water supply projects in developing countries. From 1992-2005, Smith-Nilson was the co-founder and director of International Programs for WaterPartners International, responsible for the evaluation and monitoring of all aspects of WaterPartners-supported partner organizations and community water projects in developing countries. In 2005, Smith-Nilson founded Water 1st International and has overseen the growth and development of the organization to its present annual budget of $1 million. In her career, Smith-Nilson has coordinated the implementation of 250 community water projects in Latin America, Asia and Africa benefiting more than 150,000 people. Her major health interests are domestic water supply, household and environmental sanitation and hygiene education.

Genji Terasaki, MD, is an acting instructor in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the University of Washington and a primary care provider at the International Medicine Clinic at Harborview Medical Center, which provides care for immigrants and refugees.

Dana M. Terry is the associate program director for the Malaria Control and Evaluation Partnership in Africa ( MACEPA), a PATH malaria control program based in Zambia. Terry has responsibility for program planning and design and financial and human resource administration across all MACEPA sites. MACEPA was launched in 2004 to mobilize existing, proven malaria prevention and treatment methods to achieve near-term health and economic benefits at the national and household levels. In 2006, MACEPA launched the Learning Community which is leveraging those tools and lessons for use by other African countries interested or already involved in malaria control scale-up. Prior to joining PATH in 2004, Terry served as an associate director for the Arizona Health Education Centers, a statewide network of community-based nonprofit organizations that develops locally relevant strategies to improve access to healthcare for rural and medically underserved populations and to address health workforce shortages. Terry has 10-plus years of public administration and program management experience in the academic and nonprofit sectors. 

Ruth C. White, PhD, MPH, MSW, is an assistant professor in anthropology, sociology and social work at Seattle University, where she teaches social policy and community organizing among other topics. She is founder and director of the Maama Omwaana Safe Motherhood Initiative, a community-based education and training program for maternal and child health in Njeru, Uganda, which has been replicated in other areas of Uganda as well as in Kenya. White’s groundbreaking research in HIV/AIDS stigma and gay stigma in Jamaica has led to her work as a human rights activist, helping to get asylum for HIV-positive and gay Jamaicans in the U.S. She has hosted a policy radio show and writes policy columns in various local publications. Her research interests include: social determinants of health; comparative/international health and social welfare; HIV/AIDS; maternal and child health; cultural/ethnic issues in social work and public health.