Board and Advisors

Alex Ng

Vice President of Healthcare, Tencent

Honorary Professor, School of Public Health, The University of Hong Kong Alex’s personal mission is to support the under-privileged, the under-served and make this world a more equitable place. Throughout his career, he has been experimenting with different approaches to achieve his mission.

In order to fulfill Tencent’s mission and vision of “Value for Users, Tech for Good,” Alex is currently leading Tencent Healthcare to support healthcare industry’s digital innovation and transformation. Under his leadership, Tencent, on the one hand, connects and smoothens the process of accessing online and offline healthcare services for individuals, including information, registration, consultation, prescription purchase and payment; on the other hand, provides innovative digital services to health agencies, hospitals, medical institutions, and pharmaceutical companies, leading supply-side transofrmation through digital solutions.

Alex serves as an expert on the WHO Digital Health Technical Advisory Group, which supports the WHO in developing the digital health vision and strategy. In early 2020 during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, Alex and WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus advocated for actions against the “infodemic”, fighting rumors, lies and misinformation, and making good use of the internet and social media to spread correct public health information.

For the past 10 years, Alex is an honorary professor at the School of Public Health of the University of Hong Kong, where he teaches the “Strategies in Health Care” course for students pursuing a Master of Public Health.

Before joining Tencent, Alex was the deputy director at the Beijing office of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he led the health and innovation team, working with the Chinese government, private institutions and global health partners to develop and deliver products and services to tackle infectious diseases, pandemic preparedness and other major challenges that threaten the health of the poor. Prior to that, Alex spent 9 years at McKinsey & Company, where he was an Associate Partner and co-led McKinsey’s Healthcare Practice in Greater China serving governments, private and social organizations on strategy, health system reform, operations transformation and investments.

Alex is a trained physician from New Zealand where he served as the chief resident at Middlemore Hospital in Auckland. He received his medical qualifications from University of Auckland, a Master of Public Health from Harvard and Postgraduate Diploma in Health Informatics from University of Otago.

Bobby Samuel

Anthem

Bobby Samuel, Staff VP, Technology, leads the Anthem AI and software engineering teams based out of Palo Alto, CA. The Anthem AI team is made up of world class software and ML engineers, clinical professionals, scientists, and mathematicians with a mission to improve patient outcomes. Bobby and his team partner across the Anthem Digital ecosystem to deploy clinical products and solutions at enterprise scale, leveraging cloud native technologies and deep learning networks.  He and his team are focused on:

-Improving health trajectories of consumers and reduce health care cost burden
-Setting the standard for delightful experiences in health care
-Pioneering Clinical AI field of research and products
-Deploy cloud native platforms and systems with AI/ML and zero trust infrastructure as foundational components

Bobby joined Anthem in July 2010 and has served in various leadership roles to drive organizational transformation spanning people, process and technology. Prior to joining the AI team, Bobby was a key technology leader on a core systems modernization program and was also responsible for the flagship claims platform.  Before joining Anthem, he held roles in software delivery and health care consulting.

Danese Cooper

NearForm

Ms. Danese Cooper is VP of Special Initiatives at NearForm.com, an Irish software consulting firm that wrote the Irish COVID Contact Tracing App and helped establish an upstream Open Source version (COVID Green App) upon the founding of the Linux Foundation Public Health initiative (LFPH). Currently she is President of the InnerSource Commons Foundation, and she serves as well on the LFPH board. Previously, she served for 4.5 years as Head of Open Source Software at PayPal, Inc. during which time she was the first Chairperson of the Node.js Foundation as well as the Founder of InnerSourceCommons.org. Ms. Cooper has served as the CTO of Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., as the first Chief Open Source Evangelist for Sun and as Sr. Director of Open Source Strategies for Intel. She concentrates on creating healthy open source communities and has served on the Boards of the Drupal Association, the Open Source Initiative, the Open Hardware Association and has advised Mozilla, the Linux Foundation, and the Apache Software Foundation. She also runs a successful open source consultancy which counts Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, SETI Foundation, Harris Corporation and Numenta as clients. She has been known to knit in meetings.

James Snell

NearForm (TAC Chair)

James M Snell is the Head of Research at NearForm, the chair of the LFPH Technical Advisory Committee, and a member of the Node.js Technical Steering Committee within the OpenJS Foundation. He dedicated his career to the development of open source technologies, open standards, and inclusive open technical communities.

Nirav Shah

doc.ai

Nirav R. Shah, MD, MPH, is Senior Scholar at Stanford University’s School of Medicine and Chief Medical Officer of doc.ai. He is a leader in public health, digital health and innovation, and the strategies required to transition to high value, patient-centered care. Board-certified in Internal Medicine and caring for patients at Stanford, Dr. Shah is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale School of Medicine, and is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. Dr. Shah’s expertise spans health and healthcare as a member of the HHS Secretary’s Advisory Committee, as Senior Fellow of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), and as an independent director of public and private companies and foundations. Previously, he served as Chief Operating Officer of Kaiser Permanente in Southern California, and as Commissioner of the New York State Department of Health.

Vijoy Pandey

Vice President, Engineering and CTO Cisco

Vijoy Pandey is Vice President, Engineering for Emerging Technologies and Incubation (ET&I) at Cisco. ET&I is chartered to create and drive the next Bold Bets for Cisco in an agile, ambitious and entrepreneurial manner. Vijoy runs both engineering and a global framework of co-innovation labs for these ventures. He is also the CTO for Cloud at Cisco.

Vijoy has held various strategy and engineering leadership roles, and has over 20 years of expertise in planet- scale distributed systems, cloud, operational excellence, and application-first software infrastructures which serve to complement his role as a technical visionary for a software-focused digital future.

Before joining Cisco, he served as Head of Engineering at Google for the company’s global cloud networks, where he was responsible for developing software systems for intent-driven automation, ML/AI-based data analytics, and application-level awareness. Vijoy has held the CTO role at various companies including IBM Cloud, IBM Systems and Software Group, and Blade Network Technologies. He has also led large geo-diverse agile engineering teams at Blade Network Technologies, Nortel, Alteon and Google.

Ed Warnicke

Cisco

Ed Warnicke is a Distinguished Consulting Engineer at Cisco Systems. He has been working for over a decade in many areas of networking and Open Source. He was the longest serving founding TSC member at OpenDaylight TSC. He was a founding TSC member at ONAP. Ed is currently the FD.io TSC Chair, and a founder of and active contributor to the Network Service Mesh project. Ed has a masters in Physics (String Theory) from Rutgers University.

James Snell

NearForm (TAC Chair)

James M Snell is the Head of Research at NearForm, the chair of the LFPH Technical Advisory Committee, and a member of the Node.js Technical Steering Committee within the OpenJS Foundation. He dedicated his career to the development of open source technologies, open standards, and inclusive open technical communities.

Jesse Cook

Geometer

Jesse is a technologist who’s interested in solving complex problems with simple solutions. He started off consulting and leveraged that experience as a co-founder at Watsi, Y Combinator’s first non-profit company. He then built a basic income platform for Open Research Lab (née YC Research) that will transfer millions of dollars over 3 years. Now he’s looking to help improve the utilization of technology in the public health sector as Vice President of Engineering at Geometer.

Greg Kroah-Hartman

The Linux Foundation

Greg is a Fellow at the Linux Foundation and is responsible for the Linux kernel stable releases. He is also the maintainer of a variety of different kernel subsystems (USB, char/misc, staging, etc.) and has written a few books about Linux kernel development.

Harper Reed

Harper Reed is a technologist that predicts the future for a living. He spends his life traveling around the world showing people the possibilities of tech and sharing his experiences to propel the greater good, all while raising the level of fun in the room.

Harper knows his incredible luck has led him to achieve many wonderful things. At PayPal, his roles as Head of Commerce and as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence allowed him to guide teams into the thrilling future of e-commerce. The technology he developed as co-founder at startup Modest Inc. had initially garnered the attention of PayPal, which led them to acquire Modest only a few years after launch.

Harper also believes the talent of a great bunch of humans can transform an organization like nothing else and he uses that belief to strengthen, deploy, and inspire every team he works with. Previously, Harper was CTO of the Obama 2012 campaign, where he was the first to bring the mentality and connective capabilities of tech to the political stage. He was also the CTO of Threadless.com, where he pioneered crowdsourcing and grew the company from a 12 person startup to a multi-million dollar enterprise. Harper is an MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow, sits on the advisory boards for IIT Computer Science and the Royal United Service Institute, and is on the Cornell College Board of Trustees.

You can find Harper hacking on personal projects and enjoying life in Chicago with his partner, Hiromi and their beautiful and bizarre poodle, Lulu.

Joel Selanikio

Joel is a physician, TED speaker, inventor, emergency responder, and consultant working in the fields of technology, healthcare, artificial intelligence, entrepreneurship, social innovation, big data, child health, and disaster response. 

A founding member of the World Health Organization’s Digital Health Roster of Experts, he is the winner of both the Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award for Healthcare and the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainable Innovation for the development of the Magpi mobile data collection system, the first cloud-based application created for global health and international development.

Joel has consulted and/or spoken at Davos, Foo Camp, WHO, UNICEF, IFRC, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Google, DARPA, CNN, Fox News, the Clinton Global Initiative, the Royal Society of Medicine, and for the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry – and has been profiled by the Guardian, Wired, Forbes, TED, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, the BBC, NPR, Information Week, and the Washington Post, among many other publications.

An emergency responder and former CDC epidemiologist and outbreak investigator, in December 2014 – January 2015, he was the lead physician at the IMC Ebola Treatment Center at Lunsar, Sierra Leone. As an officer of the Public Health Service, Joel served as Chief of Operations for the HHS Secretary’s Emergency Command Center after the 9/11 attacks. In 2005, he was given the Haverford Award for Humanitarian Service for his work in treating tsunami victims in Aceh.

Josh Aas

Let’s Encrypt, Internet Security Research Group

Josh is the co-founder and Executive Director of Let’s Encrypt, the nonprofit organization that provides free https certificates to over 200 million websites. Prior to Let’s Encrypt Josh worked on the Firefox web browser at Mozilla, and the Linux kernel at SGI.

Liz Rice

Aqua Security

Liz is the VP Open Source Engineering at cloud native security specialists Aqua Security, looking after projects including Starboard, Trivy, Tracee, kube-bench and kube-hunter. She is chair of the CNCF’s Technical Oversight Committee and was Co-Chair of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in 2018.  She is also the author of Container Security, published by O’Reilly. 

She has a wealth of software development, team, and product management experience from working on network protocols and distributed systems, and in digital technology sectors such as VOD, music, and VoIP. When not writing code, or talking about it, Liz loves riding bikes in places with better weather than her native London, and competing in virtual races on Zwift.

LJ Tan

Immunization Action Coalition

Prior to joining the Immunization Action Coalition (IAC), LJ was the director of medicine and public health at the American Medical Association (AMA), a position he held since 2008. From 1997 to 2008, he was the AMA’s director of infectious disease, immunology, and molecular medicine.

LJ was a voting member of the Department of Health and Human Services’ National Vaccine Advisory Committee from 2009 to 2013, where he served on the adult immunization, vaccine safety, and healthcare worker immunization working groups, and chaired the immunization infrastructure working group. For more than ten years, he was the AMA’s liaison to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, where he served on the influenza, pneumococcal, zoster, and adult immunization working groups.

He co-founded and currently co-chairs the National Adult and Influenza Immunization Summit. He serves or has served on the steering committees/advisory boards of the 317 Coalition, the Adult Vaccine Access Coalition (AVAC), the Unity (United for Adolescent Vaccination) Consortium, the National Network for Immunization Information, and the National Viral Hepatitis Roundtable and on the IAC scientific advisory board. 

LJ received his Master of Science degree in biology at New York University and earned his PhD in microbiology/immunology from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. LJ is an editor for Vaccine, BMC Infectious Diseases, Medscape Infectious Diseases, and a member of the ESCMID Vaccine Study Group and has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles. LJ has been invited to address international, national, and state immunization audiences on issues ranging from vaccine financing to risk management in vaccine safety to emerging infectious diseases.

LJ has received several awards for his advocacy work including the 2011 CDC National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Honor Awards: Excellence in Partnering recognition, and most recently was awarded the American Pharmacists Association’s national Friend of Pharmacy Award. As a former part-time faculty member at the Institute for Science Education and Science Communication, Columbia College, Chicago, he received the 2000 Excellence in Teaching Award.

Mark Grabowsky

Mark is a Public Health & General Preventive Medicine Specialist in Washington, DC and has over 34 years of experience in the medical field. He holds a medical degree from Virginia Commonwealth University and a master’s in public health from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.  Dr. Grabowsky has also held senior level posts at the World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control, National Institute of Health, American Red Cross, and the Canadian International Development Agency.  He has over 25 years of experience at the forefront of significant global health challenges including efforts to reduce measles and malaria deaths in developing countries and advance HIV-prevention strategies. At NIH, he was Chief of HIV Prevention Research and HIV Vaccine Clinical Development.  At CDC, he founded and led global partnerships for measles and malaria control  and has worked on disease control efforts in over 30 countries.  With the UN Special Envoy’s Office he was responsible for directing strategic partnerships to finance the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals.  As Deputy Director of the National Vaccine  Program Office he was on the national H1N1 Task Force and led efforts to increase flu vaccination nationally. His most recent position was as Chief Medical Officer at Pantheryx, Inc.  He currently resides in New York and San Juan.

Robin Carnahan

Georgetown University

Robin is the former Secretary of State of Missouri and founded and led the State and Local Government Practice at 18F, a tech consultancy inside the US government General Services Administration. She’s a nationally recognized government technology leader and in 2017 was named one of the federal government’s “Top Women in Tech.”  Her lifelong passion for improving how people experience and value their government inspires her work helping governments get the digital tools they need to deliver services to people that are better, faster and cheaper.  

At 18F, Robin helped federal, state and local government agencies improve customer facing digital services and cut costs.  In particular, she helped educate and empower non-technical executives on defining outcomes and implementing digital modernization strategies to transform their organizations, mitigate risk and deliver cost-effective results for customers.  Using human-centered design and agile development, budgeting and procurement approaches, her teams worked in a wide-range of high impact sectors, including healthcare, child welfare, paid family leave services and deployment of smart cities technologies.

As Secretary of State, Robin served as the state’s Chief Election Official and State Securities Regulator responsible for providing in-person and on-line services to 400,000 businesses, 116 local election authorities, 4 million voters, 134,000 brokers and financial professionals and hundreds of thousands of other customers. An essential part of her job was leading the office’s technology modernization efforts and managing a large service delivery team of 250 employees and 7 operating divisions.

Robin serves on a number of non-profit and corporate boards including the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs which provides global support for democratic institutions, citizen participation, openness and accountability in government; and the LaunchCode Foundation which provides training and apprenticeships for non-traditionally credentialed tech talent.  Robin was in the inaugural class of the Aspen Institute’s Rodel Public Leadership Fellowship, served as Co-Chair of the Democracy Fund’s National Advisory Committee, was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and Senior Fellow at the Harris School of Public Service and served as a Senior Advisor at the global strategy firm Albright Stonebridge Group.  She holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics from William Jewell College and J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law.

Robin frequently speaks, writes and testifies about government innovation through smarter use of technology.

Waldo Jaquith

Georgetown University

Waldo is a technologist with extensive experience in the government, non-profit, and for-profit sectors.

Until recently, he worked for 18F, developing and promoting best practices for government procurement of custom software, particularly for state governments. Previously, Waldo ran U.S. Open Data, and worked for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Obama. He’s had fellowships from both the Knight News Challenge and the Shuttleworth Foundation. He lives near Charlottesville, Virginia with his wife and children.