NorCal Symposium on Climate and Pandemic Resilience in Health Care

Michelle Pierce

Executive Director, Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates

BIO: Michelle has 20 years of experience working in sustainability and social justice. While with the San Francisco Department of the Environment, she helped small to medium sized businesses design sustainability/responsibility programs while maintaining or improving business viability. Programs spanned water use reduction as well as water quality improvement, energy efficiency improvement, toxic use and/or waste reduction. Some projects of note are the Custodial Green Cleaning Program and the Healthy Nail Salon Program. She is particularly adept at cultural competency and policy design, both of which were nurtured and polished while completing the Global Partners MBA Program. Michelle is currently stewarding the re-introduction of the Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates.

Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates is a grassroots organization founded by, governed by, and operated by long-term members of this vulnerable community. Our programs combine community organizing with education, advocacy, and direct services. We have taken an active role in mobilizing the Bayview Hunters Point community on issues of environmental and economic justice. We are currently focusing on the clean up at the Hunters Point Shipyard, preparing for sea level rise, reducing exposures to toxic air emissions, and the extreme housing pressures facing residents.

Sriram Shamasunder, MD

Co-founder and faculty director of the HEAL Initiative

BIO: Sriram Shamasunder graduated from University of California, Berkeley and completed his residency in Internal Medicine at Harbor UCLA Medical Center. He obtained his Diploma in Tropical Medicine & Hygiene in 2013. Throughout the last decade he has spent several months out of every year in underserved settings around the world including South Los Angeles, rural Liberia, Haiti, Burundi, and rural India.

Sri is an Associate Professor of Medicine at UCSF, and co-founder and faculty director of the HEAL Initiative, a health workforce strengthening fellowship working in Navajo Nation and 9 countries around the world. HEAL currently has over 150 fellows, over the last five years, half of whom are Native American and from low and middle income countries (LMIC).

Dr. Shamasunder led the HEAL UCSF response during the ongoing COVID surge in Navajo Nation spending several weeks with HEAL's partner site hospital taking care of COVID patients and supporting UCSF nursing and doctor volunteers. In April, May and June 2020, over 40 nurses and doctors from UCSF joined the over 50 HEAL fellows (Native and non-Native) in Navajo Nation.

Sri is a published poet and studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People while at UC Berkeley. He is interested in a solidarity that draws untold stories to the surface as well as health equity. In 2016, he gave a Berkeley Ted X talk entitled "Whose Suffering Matters Less, and Why?”

Carrie Ramirez

Climate Activist, Youth vs. Apocalypse

BIO: Carrie (she/her) is an indigenous activist with Youth vs. Apocalypse, an organization that focuses on youth & frontline leadership in addressing the roots of the climate crisis and abolishing all systems that have led to this crisis.

Kirsten Mouradian

Hematology nurse practitioner at Stanford Children’s Hospital, Member of Canopy's board

BIO: Kirsten Mouradian is a Board Certified Family Nurse Practitioner in hematology at Stanford Children’s Hospital. She is a volunteer and Board Member at Canopy, an urban forestry nonprofit that promotes healthy trees and healthy communities through advocacy, education and planting trees throughout the Midpeninsula. 

Rupa Marya, MD

Associate Professor of Medicine at UCSF and faculty director of the Do No Harm Coalition

BIO: Rupa Marya is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco in the Division of Hospital Medicine with a focus on Social Medicine. She is a co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition, a group of healthcare workers committed to changing social structures that make health impossible for different groups of people. Through her work with the coalition, she has worked on the health impacts of police violence specifically and the health legacies of colonialism globally. 

Rupa’s work in social advocacy in health has earned her trust from the indigenous communities where she lives, in Ohlone territory and in places where she has served, such as Lakota territory. In 2016, she was invited to Standing Rock to assist with medical response to increasing state violence towards indigenous people protecting their sovereign land in the face of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Through her investigations, she has been developing an understanding of the greatest health challenges we face, including climate change, as a consequence of colonialism and the interruption of traditional ways of caring. At the invitation of Lakota elders, she is helping to develop a clinic to decolonize food and medicine in Lakota territory to serve the indigenous communities, the Mni Wiconi Health Clinic and Farm.

Rupa advocates deeply for creating a culture of care as the most effective way to manifest impactful change in population health. She believes the interruption of ways of caring through colonial structures disproportionately causes the suffering of Black, Brown and Indigenous people around the world. Through changing those colonial structures and through reasserting the primacy of our relationships to the earth, to our foods and to one another, holistic health for all becomes achievable. As a physician in partnership with Benjamin, Rupa is studying how regenerative farming practices directly impact human health through the connections between the respective microbiota of the gut and soil.

Currently Rupa is writing a book making a case for a global culture of care with agroeconomist Raj Patel, entitled Inflamed. The book is due to be released by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Penguin Press in 2021.

In addition to her work in medicine and writing, Rupa is also the composer and front-woman for Rupa and the April Fishes, a polyglot band who has traveled to over 29 countries sharing musical soundscapes of building an alternative world that is beautiful, inspiring, deep and empowering. She attributes her holistic view of health and wellness as the direct outcome of playing music professionally for over 20 years.

Olivia Rodriguez, RN

CCMP Operations Manager

BIO: Olivia Rodriguez is a registered nurse who works as a full-time volunteer at the Coalition of Concerned Medical Professionals (CCMP) as the Operations Manager. She works to organize volunteers to help achieve their goals of providing comprehensive medical care to low-income families in the local community. CCMP is an all-volunteer effort, rooted in the community, founded in the Bay Area in 1976. CCMP’s primary purpose is to overcome political and economic barriers that deny access to comprehensive medical care for any and all working people. This has included conducting campaigns to defeat laws or governmental policies detrimental to the interests of low-income workers. CCMP takes an approach that incorporates medical care, ancillary health services, procurement of healthy foods for supplemental food distributions and joining with organizations of low-income workers whose members suffer lack of access to quality, affordable care. CCMP may choose to align with community groups to change conditions creating poor health, including environmental concerns.

Ashley McClure, MD, FACP

Cofounder of Climate Health Now

BIO: Dr Ashley McClure, FACP is a Seattle native, who went to medical school at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland and trained in Internal Medicine at the University of Washington.  She has been with Kaiser at The Permanente Medical Group since 2016, and works in primary care in Salud en Espanol in Oakland.  She had her climate awakening while at home on maternity leave with her 5month old during the “Paradise” Fire in November 2018 breathing unsafe levels of smoky particulate matter for 13 days, when she happened upon the Inconvenient Truth sequel, and asked herself what she was doing to prevent this being her daughter’s—and all of our children’s-- future.  Since her climate awakening, she’s been organizing within and beyond her own medical group. She is engaged in organized medicine introducing climate-related resolutions as a CMA delegate and AMA alternate delegate. She also cofounded the Ca-based nonprofit Climate Health Now whose mission is to activate colleagues to use their uniquely trusted voices to advocate for policy-level climate solutions in order to protect health because there’s no meaningful medical response to keep our children safe while living in a too-hot greenhouse. She welcomes your reaching out if you’re inspired to link arms in advocacy-- and she hopes you do, as she believes that only together will we be powerful enough to save everything we love.  ashley.e.mcclure@kp.org; @ashennessy on twitter; www.climatehealthnow.org

Randall Miller, PhD

PSR Bay Area Executive Director

BIO: Randall Miller received his PhD in Ethics & Social Theory from the Graduate Theological Union. Currently he is on staff for the Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) Bay Area chapter as the Executive Director, working to mobilize local health professionals to protect the planet and vulnerable populations.

Javier M. Sánchez, MD

Family Medicine Physician

BIO: Dr. Javier Sánchez is a Family Medicine Physician at Southern California Permanente Medical Group (SCPMG), practicing in Redlands, California. He also serves as Assistant Clinical Professor of Family Medicine, University of California, Riverside (UCR) School of Medicine and former Assistant Clinical Professor of Family Medicine, Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California (USC).

Dr. Sánchez’ passion for his patients and his commitment to ensuring access to quality and equitable care for all patient populations is evident not only through his professional involvement in healthcare systems but also through his volunteer activity in the quest to promote and protect organized medicine. In recent years, Dr. Sánchez has become a prominent leader regionally and statewide through his representation as Vice-Chair for the California Medical Association’s District II at the CMA’s House of Delegates, helping lead the delegation to policy consensus that prioritizes patient care and keeps physician practices viable and sustainable.

He is an officer on the San Bernardino County Medical Society’s (SBCMS) Executive Committee of the Board of Directors, currently serving as Vice President and slated to take on the Presidency in 2022. In addition, he is an esteemed member of the SCPMG/Kaiser Permanente Government Relations Committee. And, since 2019, Dr. Sanchez has been a catalyst in the advancement of the work of the Climate Change committee, a group of CMA physicians who seek to incorporate awareness and responsible environmental practices into physician practices and policies.

Dr. Sánchez has established himself as a role model for medical students and residents as well as physician peers, colleagues and the community. He and his wife, Teresa Frausto, MD, reside in Redlands, California and are proud parents of two grown daughters.

Robert M. Gould, MD

PSR Bay Area President

BIO: Robert M. Gould, MD graduated from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and from 1981 until 2012 worked as a Pathologist at Kaiser Hospital in San Jose. Since 2012 Bob has been an Associate Adjunct Professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at UCSF, working with the  Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment (PRHE).  Since 1989, he has been President of the San Francisco Bay Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), and served as President of National PSR in 2003 and 2014. Since 1992 Bob has been a leading member of the Environmental Committee of the Santa Clara County chapter (SCCMA) of the California Medical Association (CMA), authoring numerous environmental health resolutions adopted by CMA as policy. For such work, Bob received the SCCMA's "Outstanding Contribution in Community Service" award in 2001, and “Outstanding Contribution to the Medical Society award in 2012.

Mackenzie Clark, PharmD, APh, BCPS, BCGP

Assistant Clinical Professor of Pharmacy, UCSF; Pharmacy Supervisor, UCSF Specialty Pharmacy

Jeremy A. Lacocque, D.O.

Emergency Medicine Physician

BIO: Jeremy Lacocque is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at UCSF/ZSFG and an attending physician at St. Mary's Medical Center in San Francisco. He did an EMS/Disaster Medicine fellowship at UCSF after finishing his medical school and residency at Midwestern University in Chicago. He has specific interests in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest and disaster management.

Joy Lloyd-Montgomery  

BIO: Ms. Lloyd-Montgomery manages communications and media outreach for My Green Doctor. Her commitment to My Green Doctor results from her belief that encouraging environmental sustainability and community education helps to optimize health outcomes, reduces health disparities, and fosters environmental justice. Ms. Lloyd-Montgomery is studying for her Master's Degree in Public Health at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, and serves as a Research Project Coordinator/Wellness Specialist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Dr. Todd L. Sack, MD, FAACP

UCSF School of Medicine; Physicians for Social Responsibility

BIO: Dr. Todd Sack is a Facilitator for the Clinical Inquiry Curriculum at UCSF School of Medicine and a UCSF-trained internist and gastroenterologist. He has worked for many years within health professional societies, authoring twenty climate-related polices adopted by the American Medical Association and others. He chaired for ten years the Florida Medical Association’s Environment & Health Section, chaired the Jacksonville Environmental Protection Board, and served on the Florida Energy Commission where he chaired the Florida’s Climate Change Advisory Group. He serves on the Boards of Directors of Physicians for Social Responsibility and other environmental organizations. Dr. Sack edits MyGreenDoctor.org, the world’s most widely used program to implement environmental sustainability and climate change preparedness in healthcare practices.

Dr. Arianne Teherani, PhD

UCSF School of Medicine

Denah Nunes, LCSW

Director of Health and Wellness, Alameda County

BIO: Denah oversees and implements programs that serve Abode Services’ most at-risk participants with a focus on mental and physical health. These programs help a wide variety of individuals, including emancipated foster youth, people experiencing chronic homelessness, and people with disabilities. Denah supervises program staff and works to build and maintain key relationships with

community partners and funders. She oversees our HOPE Project Mobile Health Clinic to bring critical services to people who may have difficulty reaching traditional service sites. Denah holds a Master’s degree in Social Work and is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker.

Aurora Hill

BIO: Prior to her retirement, Mrs. Hill, taught high school English at the Arts School in the Oakland Public School system.  Since retirement, Mrs Hill divides her time

between the East Bay and Oregon. She has had 3 close encounters with wildfires.  Her Oakland hills home narrowly escaped destruction during the 1991 wildfire. 

Wildfires in the region of her Oregon home 2 years ago, forced her evacuation and precipitated her development of asthma.  Just last week she escaped the wildfires east of Eugene Oregon.  While her home was spared, her community and many of her neighbors were not.

Dr. Eric Toner

Senior Scholar and Senior Scientist, Johns Hopkins University

BIO: Dr. Toner is a Senior Scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and a Senior Scientist in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Department of Environmental Health and Engineering. He is an internist and emergency physician. His primary areas of interest are healthcare preparedness for catastrophic events, pandemic influenza, and medical response to bioterrorism.

Daniel Homsey

Director, Neighborhood Empowerment Network

BIO: Daniel Homsey is the Director of The Neighborhood Empowerment Network (NEN) for the City Administrator’s Office of the City and County of San Francisco. A fourth generation San Franciscan who has a degree in Political Science from San Francisco State University, Mr. Homsey has spent the last 25 years as a communications professional in both the private and public sector. After a long stint in the tech sector, Mr. Homsey joined the City in 2004 and in January 2008 became the Director of the Neighborhood Empowerment Network.

Felisia Thibodeaux

Vulnerable Populations Resilience Program Manager, Neighborhood Empowerment Network

BIO: Felisia Thibodeaux is the Executive Director of IT Bookman Community Center. She has been serving the public for over 25 years and coordinates Resilient Bayview (Empowering Communities Program HUB) which facilitates meeting and trainings to improve community resiliency in Bayview and Hunters Point.

Linda Helland

Climate Change & Healthy Equity Program, California DPH

BIO: Linda Helland is the unit chief leading the Climate Change & Health Equity Program of the California Department of Public Health’s Office of Health Equity. The Climate Change and Health Equity Program works across agencies and with communities to embed health and equity into California climate change programs, policies, and investments; provides data and tools to identify and reduce the health effects of climate change and maximize the health equity benefits of climate action; and increases the capacity of public health departments and tribes to address climate change and health equity.

Linda’s 21 years of public health practice have focused on increasing health equity through policy changes to achieve equitable social, economic, and environmental conditions for all. Before joining CDPH in 2015, Linda managed the Prevention & Planning Unit at Mendocino County Public Health, with 14 staff members implementing 20 preventive health programs including chronic disease prevention; alcohol, tobacco and other drug prevention; youth empowerment and capacity-building focused on disadvantaged and LGBTQ youth; health impact assessments; and input to land use and transportation policies.

Linda is honored to do work that combines her two passions of health equity and climate change, and is deeply inspired by movements for racial justice.

Derek Ouyang

Program Manager, Stanford Future Bay Initiative

BIO: Derek Ouyang is a Lecturer in Geophysics at Stanford. He graduated from Stanford University in 2013 with dual Bachelor’s in Civil and Environmental Engineering and Architectural Design, and in 2015 with a Master’s in Structural Engineering and Geomechanics. He was project manager of Stanford’s first-ever entry to the U.S. DOE’s 2013 Solar Decathlon. He is co-founder of City Systems, a nonprofit consultancy, and program manager / lecturer at Stanford’s Future Bay Initiative.

Santana Diaz

UC Davis Health Executive Chef

BIO: SEASONAL. LOCAL. CREATIVE. These words fully define the passion and characteristics that guide Executive Chef Santana Diaz at UC Davis Health. Chef Diaz’ vision has always been to bring a true Farm-to-Fork, restaurant-style culinary experience to all facets of every food venue that he has had the privilege to lead.  Chef Diaz has recently joined the UC Davis Health team after setting up and executing the new Golden 1 Center food program with the most successful farm-to-fork production in sports.  His drive to create an impactful program via healthcare intrigued him and offered him more opportunity to impact the local farming and rancher community. His experience with fine dining restaurants, hotel management in the California Bay Area coupled with large volume sports and entertainment have yielded Diaz the opportunity to bring the high-volume “eats” to a healthier platform while not losing most important aspect of the meals: TASTE.

Daphne Miller

Clinical Professor at the University of California San Francisco, and Research Scientist at the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health

BIO: In a typical work week, Daphne Miller, MD spends as much time with ecologists, soil scientists, and farmers as she does with medical professionals.  She is a family physician, science writer, Clinical Professor at the University of California San Francisco, and Research Scientist at the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health. As founder of the Health from the Soil Up Initiative, she studies the connections among health, culture, and agriculture, with the goal of building a healthier and more resilient food system from the soil up.

Daphne is a regular health and science contributor to the Washington Post. She has two books about food, agriculture and health: The Jungle Effect, The Science and Wisdom of Traditional Diets (HarperCollins 2008) and Farmacology, Total Health from the Soil Up (HarperCollins 2013).  Farmacology appears in four languages and was the basis for the award-winning documentary In Search of Balance.

Daphne has consulted for and presented to organizations around the globe including the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Indigenous Terra Madre and Slow Food International. A pioneer in the “Healthy Parks, Healthy People” initiative, she helped build linkages between our medical system and our park system. Her 2009 Washington Post article “Take a Hike and Call Me in the Morning” is widely credited with introducing “park prescriptions” into medical practice.

Daphne is a graduate of Brown University and Harvard Medical School and completed her family medicine residency and an NIH-funded primary care research fellowship at UCSF.  She is on the Advisory Board of the Center for Health and Nature at Oakland Children’s Hospital and the Edible Schoolyard Foundation and a past Fellow at the Berkeley Food Institute and the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine.

She lives and gardens in Berkeley, California.

Dan Henroid

Director of the Department of Nutrition and Food Services UCSF Health

BIO: Dan is the director of the Department of Nutrition and Food Services and serves as the sustainability officer for UCSF Health. His operational responsibilities include all patient dining, retail food services, catering and conference services, culinary services, inpatient and outpatient nutrition services, and retail services. He also serves in key leadership roles in the robotic TUG system, the Interactive Patient Experience (IPX) committee, and other committees within the health system and university.

Prior to UCSF, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Houston and was a Foodservice and Lodging Specialist at Iowa State University. During this time in academia, he developed his passion for food safety research issues particularly in retail food environments. He has conducted many research and applied projects including modeling the efficacy of novel hand hygiene tracking systems and the application of hazard analysis critical control point (HACCP) systems in food operations. His other research interests include sustainable food systems and health and wellness education in food operations.

Mike Martin

UCSF Associate Clinical Professor, Epidemiology & Biostatistics, Founder & President of Physicians Against Red Meat (PhARM)

BIO: Dr. Martin is an Associate Clinical Professor in UCSF’s Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics. His medical research has focused on preventive medicine issues such as the relationship of cholesterol levels to heart disease, the effects of passive smoking on heart disease, the cost of firearm injuries, sunlight’s aging effects on the skin, and the excessive use of antibiotics in animal agriculture.

Dr. Martin teaches at UCSF, and he saw, for more than 30 years, patients in the General Medicine Clinic at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, an affiliate of UCSF.

Dr. Martin is on the national board and is the Treasurer of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR). He chairs the national office’s Environment & Health (E&H) Committee and Finance Committee. He also serves on the board of PSR’s San Francisco Bay Chapter.

Dr. Martin is the Founder & President of Physicians Against Red Meat (PhARM), a nonprofit dedicated to reducing red meat consumption for health and environmental reasons.

Dr. Martin completed his medical training at the University of Chicago, his Internal Medicine Residency at Yale, and his Clinical Epidemiology Fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Dr. Martin also received both an MBA and MPH from the University of California, Berkeley.

Elyse Rainey

Economic Inclusion Manager with Emerald Cities, Impact Hub Oakland

BIO: Elyse Rainey has a passion for cultivating environmentalists from low-income communities and communities of color. She has led community engagement initiatives for the National Park Service, provided East Bay teens with their first green job, and taught sustainable agriculture to youth in West Oakland. Elyse has over 7 years of experience increasing access to affordable, healthy and culturally relevant food for low-income families. At City Slicker Farms, an urban agriculture non-profit, Elyse led community outreach initiatives to ensure that the produce, practises and programming reflected the needs and desires of West Oaklanders. At Ecology Center, she provided environmental literacy and green job training for transitional age youth at Berkeley’s Farmers Markets and City of Berkeley curbside recycling. At Emerald Cities Collaborative, Elyse continues to support community-sourced solutions for a more sustainable and inclusive green economy. She is excited to utilize her relationships and experience within food justice, and Bay Area sustainable agriculture to build a more equitable food system with the Anchors in Resilient Communities (ARC) initiative. Elyse holds a degree in Economics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Garden Heals Team - Harry Ciabattini, Quentin Gachot, Tony Jarrous, Dominico Irigoyen

BIO: We are Garden Heals, a mutual aid group, funded by our peers. We aim to aid in the redistribution of healing food, clothes, sleeping gear, and transportation from friends and family who have some type of surplus to low income, POC, and Queer community members who have a lack of resources. We strive to reuse/recycle in any way we can, and in general, we make great efforts to be as frugal and sustainable as we can with our donation. We will continue to expand to distributing resources that are even more effective and healing to our communities that are disproportionately affecte by oppressive health conditions. This will look like mental health treatment, restorative food justive actions, indigenous herbal healing, and other long term solutions to preventing the overextension of the medical industry and championing the health and healing of our communities. 

Jodi Sherman MD

Associate Professor of Anesthesiology and Epidemiology (Environmental Health Sciences) at Yale University, and Director of the Program in Healthcare Environmental Sustainability at the Yale Center for Climate Change and Health

BIO: Dr. Jodi Sherman is an internationally recognized researcher in the emerging field of sustainability in healthcare. Her research interest is in life cycle assessment (LCA) of environmental emissions, human health impacts, and economic impacts of drugs, devices, clinical care pathways, and health systems. Her work seeks to establish sustainability metrics, paired with health outcomes and costs, to help guide clinical decision-making, professional behaviors, and public policy toward more ecologically sustainable practices to improve the quality, safety and value of clinical care. Dr. Sherman routinely collaborates with environmental engineers, epidemiologists, toxicologists, health economists, health administrators, health professionals, and sustainability professionals. Jodi Sherman is the founding director of the Program on Healthcare Environmental Sustainability of the Center for Climate Change. She also serves as Director of Sustainability in Anesthesiology at Yale-New Haven Hospital.

Gail Lee, REHS, MS, HEM

Sustainability Director at the University of California San Francisco and UCSF Health

BIO: Gail has 25 years of experience in healthcare, environmental health and safety in public, non-profit, and private industries, currently serving as the Sustainability Director at the University of California San Francisco since 2010.  Gail Lee provides thoughtful leadership, creativity, and lends an experienced perspective on sustainability including greenhouse gas emissions, energy efficiency, and toxics and waste reduction at UCSF and UCSF Health.  Gail’s particular interest lies in helping health care institutions, known for their 24/7 operations, energy usage and waste-generating activities, reduce their environmental impact.  Her work as a healthcare practitioner, environmental health specialist, and EH&S director provides a strong background for championing sustainability at UCSF.  Gail supports the UCSF Advisory Committee on Sustainability and nine workgroups.  She serves on the Advisory Committee of the new UCSF NIEHS-funded EaRTH Center to accelerate the pace of preventing environmental exposure that affects reproduction and development.  She also serves on the Advisory Committee for the Climate and Health Center, which focuses on a transdisciplinary community of practice in research, education, health system sustainability and policy.  During her 10 years at UCSF, she served twice as co-chair of the healthcare track of the California Higher Education Sustainability Conference, and as chair of the UCSF Transportation Advisory Committee. Gail holds a bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley, and a master’s degree in Environmental Management from University of San Francisco.

Seema Gandhi

Associate Professor, Anesthesia

BIO: Dr Seema Gandhi, is an Associate Clinical professor in the Department of Anesthesia at University of California, San Francisco. She has trained and practiced anesthesia in three different countries, India, London and the US. This training has given her a global view and a unique perspective to health care practices across varied settings of developed vs developing countries and across multiple payer mix structures.

Born and raised in a modest Indian family, Dr Gandhi has been troubled by waste, not limited to only hestlvcare waste but also in her personal life around water, electricity and consumables.

Early in her career as faculty she was impressed by the surplus amounts of OR/health care generated and has tackled GHG emissions from the ORs. She was the mastermind behind creating an electronic real-time feedback mechanism to decrease anesthesia gas usage and cost per case. In addition she has taken on the issue of single use devices, reprocessing and most importantly questioned and lead grand rounds about the current  state of practice regarding waste generation and incorporating this inntarinee curriculum.

Currently she is focusing her efforts on a UC-wide collaborative efforts to decrease anesthesia gas usage, auditing overage generated during surgical cases and also looking at our lab testing practices.

For her efforts she was recognized by the Chancellor in his state of university address and has also received the Annual sustainability faculty award.

Praveen Kalra, MBBS, MD, FCCP

Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of Anesthesia, Stanford University School of Medicine

BIO: Dr. Praveen Kalra is an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at Stanford University, School of Medicine. He is the founder of the Green Team in the University’s Department of Anesthesia. He was a pharmacist before he entered medical school in 1988. He completed his anesthesia training from India in 1998 as well as from Harvard University’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in 2004. He received a Fellowship in Critical Care from Johns Hopkins in 2005. His interests include reducing carbon emissions in health care through education, reducing OR waste and investing in green technologies. He has been invited to give talks at the American Society of Anesthesiologists as well as in India. He has undertaken many projects to make operating rooms green. He has played a key role in reducing anesthesia related carbon emissions at Stanford and contributed to Stanford receiving the environmental excellence award for 2020 by Practice Green Health. His vision is to make Stanford Health Care carbon neutral within 5 years.

Dennis Robinson

MedShare

BIO: In 2020 Dennis M. Robinson joined MedShare International as Western Regional Director bringing a 30-year career in philanthropy and nonprofit/community development, specializing in philanthropic strategies for government and community organizations, universities and hospitals. In previous roles Dennis served as a Senior Philanthropy Advisor at Silicon Valley Community Foundation and West Coast Advancement Officer at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Dennis has led large fundraising efforts in response to major natural disasters, coordinating relief and recovery efforts in Puerto Rico, providing air support and developing an emergency shelter after Hurricane Maria

Jodi Manning

Cool Effect

BIO: Cool Effect is a nonprofit crowdfunding platform that provides individuals, businesses, and organizations, the opportunity to support carbon emissions reductions by funding carbon-reducing projects around the world, all of which have an element of social good in addition to offsetting carbon. As Director of Marketing and Partnerships for Cool Effect, Jodi Manning is responsible for helping to build this nonprofit into a community of 500,000+ businesses, individuals and organizations, taking action in the fight against the climate crisis. Jodi works with organizations of all sizes to build their sustainability programs, helping them reduce their carbon emissions, then offset the rest with the highest-quality carbon offsets around the globe.

Gina McCarthy

President/CEO of Natural Resources Defense Council
Former Administrator of Environmental Protection Agency

BIO: Gina McCarthy became the president and chief executive officer of NRDC in January 2020, leading more than 700 attorneys, scientists, advocates, and policy experts that make NRDC one of the country’s most effective environmental action organizations. McCarthy has been a leading advocate for smart, successful strategies to protect public health and the environment for more than 30 years.

McCarthy served as the 13th administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and as assistant administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation under President Obama. Her leadership led to significant federal, state, and local actions on critical issues related to the environment, economy, energy, and transportation. McCarthy ushered in a paradigm shift in national environmental policy, which expressly linked it to global public health. She led initiatives that cut air pollution, protected water resources, strengthened chemical safety, and reduced greenhouse gases to protect more communities from negative health impacts. McCarthy signed the Clean Power Plan, which set the first national standards for reducing carbon emissions from existing power plants, underscoring the country’s commitment to domestic climate action and spurring international efforts that helped secure the Paris Agreement.

As assistant administrator, McCarthy strengthened collaborative efforts with state environmental and public health agencies and organizations across the United States to identify and reduce threats to human health from harmful air and carbon pollution by updating health- and technology-based emissions standards, establishing greenhouse gas standards for cars and trucks, promoting energy efficiency and alternative fuels, and mitigating harmful exposures to indoor air pollution.

At the state level, McCarthy served as commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, deputy secretary of the Massachusetts Office of Commonwealth Development, and undersecretary of policy for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs. In Connecticut, she was instrumental in developing the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a multi-state effort to reduce emissions contributing to global warming, which has spurred economic growth, improved public health, decreased energy demand, and helped mitigate electricity price increases across the region. In Massachusetts, McCarthy advised five governors on environmental affairs, worked at the state and local levels on critical environmental issues, and coordinated policies on economic growth, energy, transportation, and the environment.

At the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, McCarthy was a professor of the practice of public health in the Department of Environmental Health and currently chair of the board of advisors at the Harvard Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment (C-CHANGE). She also serves as a member of the boards of the Energy Foundation and Ceres.

McCarthy holds a master's degree in environmental health engineering and planning and policy from Tufts University and a bachelor's in social anthropology from University of Massachusetts at Boston.

Dr. Lloyd Minor

Dean, Stanford School of Medicine

BIO: Lloyd B. Minor, MD, is the Carl and Elizabeth Naumann Dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine. With his leadership, Stanford Medicine has established a strategic vision to lead the biomedical revolution in Precision Health, a fundamental shift to more proactive and personalized health care that empowers people to lead healthy lives. His book, “Discovering Precision Health,” published in 2020, highlights how biomedical advances are dramatically improving our ability to treat and cure complex diseases. Dr. Minor also is a professor of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery and a professor of Bioengineering and of Neurobiology, by courtesy, at Stanford University. With more than 160 published articles and chapters, Dr. Minor is an expert in balance and inner ear disorders. In 2012, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.

David Entwistle

President and CEO of Stanford Health Care

BIO: David Entwistle is president and CEO of Stanford Health Care (SHC). He joined SHC in July 2016 with extensive executive experience at leading academic medical centers. Entwistle is a passionate advocate of precision health – tailoring a treatment to a patient’s specific disease or condition as well as focusing on prevention to empower patients to take charge of their health before they become ill.

Among the factors that attracted him to SHC are the unparalleled technologies available in Silicon Valley that help advance health care through better application of technology for individuals. According to Entwistle, SHC is extremely well-situated to be able to apply innovative technology, such as wearable devices that track activity or monitor blood glucose levels, to improve health.

Before joining SHC, he served for nine years as CEO of the University of Utah Hospital & Clinics (UUHC), the only academic medical center in the Intermountain West region. While serving at UUHC, Entwistle received the Modern Healthcare “Up and Comers Award,” for significant contributions in health care administration, management or policy.

He previously served as senior vice president and chief operating officer at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics in Madison, Wis., from 2002-2007; and as vice president of professional services and joint venture operations at City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, Calif.

As a recognized health care thought leader, Entwistle serves on the boards of the American Hospital Association, the AAMC Council of Teaching Hospitals, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, and Vizient. He is the past chair of the Utah Hospital Association and was appointed by the governor of Utah to the state’s Medicaid Task Force.

Dr. Talmadge King

Dean-SOM/VC-Medical Affairs, Dean's Office, Dean of the UCSF School of Medicine, Vice Chancellor – Medical Affairs

BIO: Dr. Talmadge E. King, Jr. was named dean of the UCSF School of Medicine and vice chancellor for medical affairs in May of 2015. He began his career at UCSF in 1997 as chief of Medical Services at Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center. From 2006 to 2015, he served as chair of the UCSF Department of Medicine, the largest department in the school, with approximately 29 percent of the school's full-time faculty.

A physician-scientist, King’s research has focused on inflammatory and immunologic lung injury. He is best known for his pioneering work in the management of the interstitial pneumonias, a scarring process that often leads to death. His bibliography comprises more than 300 publications and he has co-edited eight books, including the acclaimed reference book, "Interstitial Lung Disease," now in its fifth edition.

Mark Laret

President and chief executive officer of UCSF Health

BIO: Mark R. Laret is president and chief executive officer of UCSF Health, which is comprised of Benioff Children's Hospitals San Francisco and Oakland, Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital and Clinics and the Faculty Practice. Laret, who joined UCSF in 2000, is a 30-year veteran of health care management and a national leader in health care reform. His career began at UCLA Medical Center, where he served from 1980 to 1995 in several leadership positions, before being named CEO of UC Irvine Medical Center, which he led from 1995 to 2000.

As CEO of UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals, Laret heads one of the most distinguished medical institutions in the world, one that is consistently ranked by U.S. News & World Report as one of the top hospitals in the United States and as the best in Northern California. At UCSF, he has led initiatives to improve quality of care and patient safety and to modernize facilities and equipment. He led an effort to build a $1.5 billion UCSF hospital complex at the Mission Bay campus — including hospitals for children, women's services and cancer — and raised $600 million in private contributions for the new facility.

He is immediate past chair of the California Hospital Association and past chair of the board of directors of the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Laret's volunteer service includes membership on the board of the international charity Mercy Ships, which delivers medical care on hospital ships to indigent communities in Africa. He chaired corporate fundraising drives in San Francisco for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and American Heart Association.

He is a member of the board of directors of Varian Medical Systems in Palo Alto and Nuance Communications in Boston, Mass.

Laret earned a bachelor's degree at UCLA and a master's degree at the University of Southern California, both in political science.

Dr. Kari Nadeau, MD, PhD

Director, Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research at Stanford University
 

BIO: Dr. Kari Nadeau is the Naddisy Foundation Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics and, Director of the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research at Stanford University. She is Section Chief in Asthma and Allergy in Pulmonary and Critical Care at Stanford.  She is a pediatrician and practices Allergy, Asthma, Immunology in children and adults.

For more than 30 years, she has devoted herself to understanding how environmental and genetic factors affect the risk of developing allergies and asthma, and the molecular mechanisms underlying the asthma and its severity. Her laboratory has been studying air pollution and wildfire effects on children and adults.  Many of the health issues involving individuals and the public are increasing because of global warming and extreme weather conditions. She works with Mary Prunicki, PhD, MD who is the Director of Air Pollution and Wildfire Studies in the Center. Dr. Nadeau has taught medical students, graduate students, undergraduate students and post docs for over 16 years at Stanford.

Dr. Nadeau work with other organizations and institutes across Stanford campus. She was involved in the Planetary Health Annual Meeting where she moderated, sponsored, and invited speakers from all over the world to participate in the plenary session titled, “Burn: Wildfires, Deforestation, and Planetary Health.” Dr. Nadeau brought attention and awareness to how agricultural burning is on the rise. Promoting the interdisciplinary collaborations, Dr. Nadeau has been involved and is a current faculty member with the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. She has been invited to the Forum for Undergraduate Environmental Leadership (FUEL) under the Woods Institute to give a talk. Her collaborations with faculty members such as Drs. Michele Barry and Chris Field have helped the cause. These leaders in the field are engaged to achieve impactful results from the knowledge provided to the public.

She has a team of full-time physicians who run translational clinical research. We have worked in the Central Valley and focused on community outreach and education since 2009. Dr. Nadeau has a good relationship with key stakeholders and policy makers in the Central Valley and our research has helped enact legislation to mitigate pollution exposure. Her accomplishments to date include over 240 peer-reviewed publications. She leads and collaborates with others in the area of global climate change, and to mentor others in order to make transformative changes in patients’ lives in allergy and asthma, especially in the underserved communities, through innovation and discovery.

The main focus of her basic research has been on understanding the environmental and genetic factors that affect the risk of developing allergies and asthma, especially by studying the effects of air pollution and secondhand smoke exposure. Using epigenetic approaches, she has worked to establish a novel paradigm for asthma following environmental exposure to cigarette smoke. Her group has successfully administered several multicenter projects and collaborated with researchers in other disciplines. Her team has experience and expertise in recruiting participants for large-scale studies examining environmental exposures.

Dr. Nadeau received her MD and PhD from Harvard Medical School. She completed a residency in pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and a clinical fellowship in asthma and immunology. Dr. Nadeau served as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the EPA. And is currently working with the US Congress and CA Governor’s office on Global Climate Change emergency preparedness plans.  NHLBI DSMB, ASCI, American Thoracic Society, American Lung Association Medical Board, and NIH Study Sections.