Panel Moderator
Tabia Henry Akintobi, PhD, MPH
Professor, Department of Community Health and Preventive Medicine
Associate Dean, Community Engagement
Director, Prevention Research Center
Director, Evaluation and Institutional Assessment
Department of Community Health and Preventive Medicine
Morehouse School of Medicine
Tabia Henry Akintobi, PhD, MPH is Professor of Community Health and Preventive Medicine, Associate Dean of Community Engagement and Director of Evaluation and Institutional Assessment at Morehouse School of Medicine. As Principal Investigator of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-funded Morehouse School of Medicine Prevention Research Center, Dr. Henry Akintobi demonstrates leadership in local, national and global community-based participatory approaches and research addressing health disparities. She leads or collaborates in several federal and privately-funded initiatives that model community-driven research, including but not limited to the Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance, The Georgia Center for Diabetes Translational Research and the Morehouse School of Medicine/ Tuskegee University / University of Alabama at Birmingham Comprehensive Cancer Center Partnership. Her public health leadership is also evident through appointments to national taskforces designed to shape the science and practice of effective community-based participatory and translational research and collaborations bridging the gaps between basic, clinical and community-based stakeholders to address disparities and advance health equity. Among them include the National Institutes for Health National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences Collaboration and Engagement Taskforce Lead Team, designed to advance team science towards becoming a major academic model through more equitable community-academic partnership -from conceptualizing to dissemination. Her research and public health interests in maternal and child health, diabetes and cardiovascular risk reduction and HIV/AIDS prevention are guided by training in public health social epidemiology, social marketing and community based participatory research and evaluation.
Panelists
Bridget Hurley
Evidation Health
VP of Clinical and Regulatory
Bridget is the VP of Clinical and Regulatory at Evidation Health based in San Mateo, California. Evidation is a new kind of health and measurement company that provides the technology and guidance to understand how everyday behavior and health interact. Bridget has over 20 years of US and International experience in medical device product development and clinical and regulatory affairs. Prior to Evidation, Bridget was the head of clinical and regulatory for two bay area medical device start-ups, Element Science and Pulmonx. Bridget also held leadership roles across R&D and clinical at Abbott and Guidant–playing key roles in the development and manufacturing scale-up of the MitraClip mitral valve repair system and the XIENCE V drug-eluting stent. Bridget holds BS and MS degrees in Mechanical Engineering from The University of Texas and Georgia Tech.
Jim McClelland
State of Indiana
Executive Director for Drug Prevention, Treatment, and Enforcement
In January 2017, Governor Eric Holcomb appointed Jim McClelland to the newly-created position of Executive Director for Drug Prevention, Treatment, and Enforcement for the State of Indiana. He reports directly to the Governor and also chairs the Indiana Commission to Combat Drug Abuse.
As Indiana’s Drug Czar, Jim is charged with coordinating, aligning, and focusing the relevant work of a wide array of state agencies that affect substance abuse issues. In addition, he seeks to leverage the state’s resources with those of entities in other sectors – business, higher education, health care, philanthropic, faith-based, and others – to respond as effectively as possible to the current opioid crisis and to substantially reduce the likelihood of a crisis of similar magnitude arising from the use of any addictive substance in the future.
In 2015 Jim concluded a 45-year career with Goodwill Industries, the last 41 of those years as President and CEO of Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana, based in Indianapolis. During the last decade of his career, Goodwill became heavily involved in efforts to help raise education attainment levels and reduce intergenerational poverty. The organization created a unique high school, The Excel Center, to provide a diploma option for older youth and adults who left school before graduating. Goodwill now operates 17 Excel Centers in Indiana and has licensed the model to numerous groups in other states.
In 2011 Goodwill began implementing Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP), a highly effective home visitation program for first-time moms in low income households. Goodwill places great emphasis on the use of holistic, two-generation approaches with continuity of key relationships over an extended period of time, and NFP moms are able to take advantage of education and employment services offered by the organization. Goodwill also places great emphasis on leveraging its strengths and relationships with those of other organizations in focused ways to increase long term impact in the lives of people and help strengthen communities.
Active in Goodwill’s international development throughout his career, Jim was instrumental in establishing new Goodwill organizations in several South Korean cities.
Jim has served on the boards of numerous not-for-profit organizations at local, national, and international levels and chaired several of them. He currently serves on the Dean’s Council of the Indiana University Kelley School of Business – Indianapolis, the Advisory Board of the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, and the Board of Directors of Building Tomorrow.
In 2009 Jim was inducted into the Central Indiana Business Hall of Fame; in 2011 he received the Distinguished Entrepreneur Award from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University; and in 2018 he was inducted into the Georgia Tech College of Engineering Hall of Fame.
A native of Florida, Jim earned a Bachelor of Industrial Engineering degree from Georgia Tech and an MBA from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. He is married to Jane, and they have two grown children and two grandchildren.
J. Patrick O’Neal, M.D.
Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH)
Commissioner & Director of Health Protection
J. Patrick O’Neal, M.D. was appointed Commissioner of the Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH) July 7, 2017, by Governor Nathan Deal. As Commissioner, Dr. O’Neal oversees various state public health programs, the Office of Vital Records and the Georgia Public Health Laboratory.
In addition to his role of commissioner, Dr. O’Neal serves as the DPH director of Health Protection, where he has oversight responsibility for Emergency Medical Services (EMS) and Trauma, Emergency Preparedness, Epidemiology, Infectious Disease, Immunization and Environmental Health.
Since 2002, Dr. O’Neal has served as the medical director for the Office of EMS/Trauma in the Georgia Division of Public Health under the Department of Community Health (DCH). For 29 years prior, he practiced emergency medicine at DeKalb Medical Center in Decatur. In his final seven years at DeKalb Medical Center, he served as the regional medical director for EMS throughout the Greater Atlanta area. Dr. O’Neal formerly served as director of the Outpatient Clinic at the Medical Center of Central Georgia for two years before his work at DeKalb.
He completed an undergraduate program at Davidson College in North Carolina and received his medical education at the Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, Louisiana. Following medical school, he completed a rotating internship at Providence Hospital, Portland, Oregon, before entering the United States Air Force for training in flight medicine. Dr. O’Neal served as a flight surgeon in Viet Nam in 1970-71.
Vivian Singletary, JM, MBA
Public Health Informatics Institute (PHII), Task Force for Global Health
Director
Vivian Singletary, JM, MBA serves as director of the Public Health Informatics Institute (PHII), a program of the Task Force for Global Health. In this role, Vivian guides PHII’s work to improve health outcomes worldwide by strengthening health practitioners’ abilities to use information effectively.
Vivian’s experience combines almost 20 years in systems development and in public health. Earlier in her career, she served in leadership positions in supply chain management and information systems implementation for Home Depot and M&M before transitioning into public health. She was introduced to the Task Force for Global health in 2009 as the global supply chain manager for the International Trachoma Initiative, where she oversaw the pharmaceutical supply chain of over $1 billion in Zithromax donations and built in-country capacity for over 15 African and Asian countries.
Vivian has played an integral role in developing PHII’s global portfolio. Her work for the institute began with improving, designing and analyzing business processes and developing functional requirements for health insurance information systems. She established PHII’s Requirements Laboratory business unit in 2012. As the unit’s director, Vivian played an essential part in managing informatics projects in both the U.S. and in developing countries. Key projects include her leadership role in developing the African Workforce Planning project—a tool that helps allocate health care practitioners to areas of greatest need in Mozambique and Tanzania—and acting as director of informatics practice for the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance (CHAMPS) initiative, which addresses the causes of childhood mortality in developing countries.
Vivian holds a master’s of business administration degree from Kennesaw State University, and has a juris master degree from Emory University School of Law, with a focus on global health. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Rapid Fire Presenters
Jennifer R DuBose, MS
Georgia Institute of Technology
Associate Director of the SimTigrate Design Lab, Principal Research Associate
Jennifer R. DuBose is the associate director of the SimTigrate Design Lab and principal research associate in the College of Design at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is responsible for the operations of the Lab as well project development and research. Her research focuses on evidence-based design for healthcare facilities projects including the development of a business case for evidence-based design, collaboration on the exhaustive 2008 literature review on the subject and investigating the role of innovation in improving design for healthcare systems. She has worked on projects for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Military Health System and the Louisiana State University Hospital creating materials to support transformation of new hospitals based on emerging evidence. She has authored numerous peer-reviewed journal articles, several book chapters, and has been an invited speaker at national and international meetings.
Danny Hughes, PhD
Georgia Institute of Technology
Professor in the School of Economics and Director of Georgia Tech’s Health Economics and Analytics Lab (HEAL)
Dr. Hughes is a Professor in the School of Economics and Director of Georgia Tech’s Health Economics and Analytics Lab (HEAL). He also serves as Executive Director of the Harvey L. Neiman Health Policy Institute. His research focuses on the roles of technology, innovation, and incentives in the delivery and usage of health care services – with a specific focus on the economics of diagnostic imaging. His externally funded research has focused on exploiting large scale data to explore contemporary health policy issues. He has published over 80 articles in leading journals across economics, health services research, and operations research.
Prior to Georgia Tech, he spent two years at the University of Oklahoma and four years at the University of South Alabama. He has also held research and management positions at the American College of Radiology, Logistics Management Institute, and Tecolote Research. Prior to his undergraduate studies, he served as a Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Operations Specialist in the United States Army.
Omer T. Inan, PhD
Georgia Institute of Technology
Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Adjunct Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Omer Inan is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Adjunct Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech. He received his BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford in 2004, 2005, and 2009, respectively. From 2009-2013, he was the Chief Engineer at Countryman Associates, Inc., a professional audio manufacturer of miniature microphones and high-end audio products for Broadway theaters, theme parks, and broadcast networks. He has received several major awards for his research including the NSF CAREER award, the ONR Young Investigator award, and the IEEE Sensors Council Early Career award. While at Stanford as an undergraduate, he was the school record holder and a three-time NCAA All-American in the discus throw.
Zihao Li, PhD
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Prevention Effectiveness Fellow, Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention
Dr. Li is a Prevention Effectiveness Fellow at the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention of CDC. His work focus on developing and improving HIV models, including an agent-based simulation model Progression and Transmission of HIV (PATH), a compartmental model HIV Optimization and Prevention Economics (HOPE) and a resource allocation model (RAMP). Dr. Li earned his PhD and MS degrees in Operations Research at Georgia Institute of Technology, and his dissertation applied mathematical and computer algorithms to the problem of allocating limited resources to people with preferences. He works with Georgia Tech professors and students to estimate the value of vaccine inventory and identify risk factors related to unplanned extubation.
Mark Styczynski, PhD
Georgia Institute of Technology
Associate Professor, School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering
Dr. Styczynski’s research focuses on the experimental and computational study of the dynamics and regulation of metabolism, with ultimate applications in metabolic engineering, biotechnology, and biosensors/diagnostics. Metabolism, which is the process of cells taking in nutrients and turning them into energy and the building blocks for more cells, is at the core of many biotechnological processes, as well as numerous diseases. The Styczynski lab studies the network of reactions that constitutes metabolism via “metabolomics”: measurement of the concentrations of the biochemical intermediates in that network — sugars, amino acids, etc. — that are direct, real-time readouts of cellular state. Tracking these intermediates over time reveals details about the cell’s metabolic dynamics that may then be used for modeling and analysis of metabolism. The group works with a variety of systems, including cancer cells, stem cells, yeast, and E. coli. The ultimate aim is to use an increased understanding of metabolic dynamics in order to exert control over the cells, whether by keeping cancer cells from proliferating or by metabolic engineering of yeast to overproduce valuable chemical feedstocks.
The group also has significant efforts in synthetic biology, including its use in the context of metabolic engineering. They are currently developing the underlying technology for diagnostics that use bacteria as biosensors that generate pigments as a visible readout. This application requires significant metabolic engineering of the cells to precisely control their pigment production, in terms of both time and pathway utilization.