Confirmed Core Theme Speakers | Medicine X 2012 – Sept 28-30, 2012

Paul Abramson, MD is a medical doctor with an active private practice in San Francisco, and a former electrical engineer and programmer.  He has been self-tracking for health and greater awareness for many years, both with technological tools and through Vipassana (mindfulness) meditation. He received his medical degree from the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and is board certified in Family Medicine, certified by the American Board of Addiction Medicine, and completed a Residential Senior Fellowship in Integrative Medicine at Dr. Andrew Weil’s Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona.

B. Thomas Adler (commonly referred to as “Bo”) is a computer scientist studying user behavior in Wikipedia and building trust systems for wikis. He is a graduate student at the University of California in Santa Cruz, where he has received a master’s degree for research on timed games. Bo also currently conducts research for Fujitsu Laboratories of America. His work there currently involves collecting and processing medical sensor data using data mining techniques. He also was a key contributor in the Automated Ontology project, working on computational linguistics and information retrieval problems. Part of that work is publicly available as Xurch. Prior to graduate school, he helped develop “motion interfaces” for Fujitsu which allowed the user to move a PDA through the air to control actions on the screen.

Sean Ahrens is a User Experience Designer, Software Developer, and Startup Entrepreneur. He studied Business, Computer Science, and Design at UC Berkeley, and has an especially strong passion for where the three meet — in the design and execution of web startups. He is currently building a social health network for patients with chronic conditions, with the backing of RockHealth. In 2010, he cofounded YC-funded MessageParty and did user experience design and development for their product. The year earlier, he cofounded Outspokes, a startup providing embeddable web development tools, and spearheaded their business and user experience. He has served as the Creative Director at Berkeley Innovation, UC Berkeley’s Product Design Group. He has studied subjects from User Interfaces and Human Factors, to Marketing and Brand Strategy, to Engineering Entrepreneurship and Agile Web Development.

Peter Binfield is Publisher of PLoS ONE, an open access scientific and medical journal. Since April 2008, Peter has been running PLoS ONE, and in September 2009 he also took on overall responsibility for the PLoS Community Journals.

Sean Bonner is a Los Angeles based entrepreneur, journalist, activist and enthusiast. Currently Sean’s time is split between Safecast (an open global sensor network currently monitoring radiation levels in Japan), Neoteny Labs (an early stage consumer internet startup fund focusing on South East Asia) and Coffee Common (a customer education brand collaboration launched at TED 2011). He is one of the founders of Crash Space, a Los Angeles hackerspace and has been a regular contributor to BoingBoing.

Dennis Boyle is one of the founding members of the design and innovation firm IDEO and has worked as a project leader for many of the firm’s start-up and established clients including Apple, Palm, Tivo, Handspring, HP, Dell, Proctor and Gamble, and others. Dennis is now one of the leaders of the Health and Wellness practice at IDEO. Mr. Boyle is also a Consulting Assistant Professor at Stanford and teaches classes in the Design Division of the ME department.

Atul Butte, MD, PhD is Chief of the Division of Systems Medicine and Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Medicine, and by courtesy, Computer Science, at Stanford University and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. Dr. Butte trained in Computer Science at Brown University, worked as a software engineer at Apple and Microsoft, received his MD at Brown University, trained in Pediatrics and Pediatric Endocrinology at Children’s Hospital Boston, then received his PhD in Health Sciences and Technology from Harvard Medical School and MIT. Dr. Butte is also a founder of Personalis, providing clinical interpretation of whole genome sequences, and NuMedii, finding new uses for drugs.

Thomas Blomseth Christiansen holds an M.S. in Internet Technology from The IT University of Copenhagen. He has more than 15 years experience of working with software and extensive experience as a management consultant helping IT and software companies improve their software development processes using Agile and Lean methods. Unsatisfied with his own health condition and the approach applied in health care, he took those methods from business and industry and started applying them to improving his wellness and quality of life. Together with his co-founders at Group Mee LLC, he is now incorporating the lessons learned from that undertaking into the mobile and online service Mymee that will empower users to uncover the hidden causes of their health concerns in collaboration with their practitioners.

Rhiju Das strives to predict how sequence codes for 3D structure in the basic chain-like molecules of life: RNA, DNA, and proteins. The Das group is creating chemical and computational tools to predict how biomolecules behave, to experimentally map the structures of viral and cellular RNAs, and to design new biomolecule devices. Most recently, the lab’s EteRNA project has crowd-sourced cutting-edge experimental research in RNA nanotechnology to tens of thousands of citizen scientists, integrating timely wet-lab feedback into a video game interface.

Esther Dyson is the founder of EDventure Holdings. A long-time backer of IT start-ups in the US and other markets, Ms. Dyson has more recently taken on new challenges in health as well as private aviation and “new” space. She is a director of 23andMe and number 3 of the Personal Genome Project subjects. She is also an investor in Genomera, GreenGoose, Habit Labs, HealthTap, Health Rally, Keas and Voxiva, among others.

Ian Eslick is an accomplished entrepreneur, computer scientist, and software architect who is currently finishing his PhD at the Media Laboratory as a Lybba Research Fellow. Mr. Eslick holds degrees in computer science, electrical engineering, and artificial intelligence. Eslick’s PhD work focuses on the practical and clinical value of aggregated self-experiments and how communities can use this to create virtuous feedback loops that inform decision making and influence clinical research. Central to this work is harnessing new sensor technologies for measuring and tracking our everyday lives. He is also partnered with the LAM (Lymphangioleiomyomatosis) Treatment Alliance in the development of LAMsight, a data sharing platform for LAM patients, clinicians and researchers. Eslick holds over a dozen patents and serves as an adviser to startup companies, non-profits and venture capital firms.

Susannah Fox studies the cultural shifts taking place at the intersection of technology and health care. Her research has documented the social life of health information, the concept of peer-to-peer healthcare, and the role of the internet among people living with chronic disease. The best summary of Fox’s research can be found in this video of her speech, The Power of Mobile, or this at-a-glance guide. Fox contributes to a health care blog, e-patients.net, and you can follow her on Twitter: @SusannahFox. Fox is the former editor of the website for U.S. News & World Report. She has also worked as a researcher for RealNetworks and for The Harwood Group. Fox graduated from Wesleyan University with a degree in anthropology.

Michael Graves is the Robert Schirmer Professor of Architecture (Emeritus) at Princeton University, Graves, 77, has been at the forefront of design for over 50 years.  A highly respected architect with a broad portfolio of projects ranging from the Walt Disney Co. corporate headquarters in Burbank, Calif., to the Netherlands’ Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport in The Hague, Graves, in 1985, put his mind to a smaller-scale task. His design of the stylish, utilitarian Alessi Teakettle foretold a high-profile future in the user-centered home design front. Paralyzed from the chest down due to a central nervous system infection in 2003, Graves has since used his design acumen to reshape the hospital experience by leading a functional and aesthetic transformation of hospital furnishings and equipment.

Bruce Goldman is a science writer at the Stanford University School of Medicine, covering biocomputation, immunology, infectious disease, neurosciences, radiology, cell biology, urology and biochemistry. He has written hundreds of articles for publications including Nature, Nature Medine, Science, The New Scientist, Popular Science, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and San Jose Mercury News. He is the co-author of two books: Fast Forward: Where Technology, Demographics, and History Will Take America and the World in the Next Thirty Years and 2020 Visions: Long View of a Changing World. Bruce holds bachelor’s degrees in philosophy and engineering physics and did graduate work in cell biology at Harvard University,
where in 1983 he received the Harvard-Danforth Certificate of Distinction for Excellence in Teaching. In 1972, he drove a car to Afghanistan.

Nate Gross, MD is the Co-Founder of Rock Health (the seed accelerator for health startups) and a founding team member of Doximity (the HIPAA-compliant physician network). Passionate about breaking down barriers to entrepreneurship and communication in health care, Nate loves working with great people and ideas at the intersection of medicine, policy and technology. He is a graduate of the Emory University School of Medicine and Harvard Business School.

Burt Herman is the co-founder of Storify and founder of Hacks/Hackers, a worldwide organization bringing together journalists and technologists. He previously reported from around the world for The Associated Press over a 12-year career, heading AP’s office in Korea and founding a bureau covering the five countries of former Soviet Central Asia. Burt was a Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University, where he also received his B.A. with honors in political science and M.A. in Russian and East European studies.

Regina Holliday is a DC-based patient rights arts advocate. Regina began painting a series of murals depicting the need for clarity and transparency in medical records. This advocacy mission was inspired by her husband Frederick Allen Holliday II and his struggle to get appropriate care during 11 weeks of continuous hospitalization at 5 facilities. After his death resulting from kidney cancer on June 17, 2009, she began painting a mural entitled “73 cents.” It depicts the Holliday family’s journey through the medical system. This painting became part of the national healthcare debate and was covered by news sources such as ABC, CBS, BBC and peer reviewed journal such as the BMJ. Regina will be the 2012 Medicine X artist-in-residence. She will be painting throughout the conference, documenting the events that occur both on stage and off.

Sridhar Iyengar PhD is the co-founder and CTO of AgaMatrix, a rapidly growing medical device company that invents, designs, and manufactures blood glucose meters and biosensors for people with diabetes. AgaMatrix products are sold worldwide by Sanofi, Medco, Walmart, Target, and are used by millions of patients across the globe. AgaMatrix’s core technology “WaveSense” combines Sridhar’s background in electrical engineering and biological sciences into the concept of Dynamic Electrochemistry which couples an advanced DSP approach to enhance biosensor performance. AgaMatrix recently invented the first medical device capable of analyzing blood that works with the iPhone and is helping shape the future of mobile health. Sridhar has several patents granted under his name and received his Ph.D. from Cambridge University as a Marshall Scholar.

Brian Loew created Inspire in 2005 with the goal of accelerating clinical trial recruitment through the use of safe, trusted online social networks, organized by medical condition, for patients and their caregivers. Brian believes that patient contributions to medical progress have been historically underappreciated, and great progress in medical research will result from involving patients and fully valuing their contributions. Brian has degrees in physics and economics from The George Washington University. He is a regular author and speaker on topics related to e-health,
patient empowerment, and healthcare social media.

John Markoff writes for the science section of the New York Times. He joined the Times in 1988 as a reporter for the business section and has written about science and technology since 1977. Markoff is the co-author of The High Cost of High Tech and of Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier. In January of 1996 Hyperion published Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America’s Most Wanted Computer Outlaw, which he co-authored. His most recent book, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture shaped the Personal Computer Industry, was published in 2005 by Viking Books. Markoff has been nominated four times for a Pulitzer Prize. He lives in San Francisco and is married to Leslie Terzian Markoff.

Katie McCurdy is a User Experience Designer & Researcher who most recently worked as a Senior Interaction Designer at R/GA in New York City. She is also a patient with 20 years’ experience with the autoimmune disease Myasthenia Gravis. Her goal is to help people live healthier and happier lives, and she’s especially interested in working at the intersection of healthcare and data visualization to help promote behavior change. She recently visualized her medical history to better communicate her health story to a new doctor, and she hopes to eventually help other patients do the same. She holds a Masters of Science in Information with a specialization in Human-Computer Interaction from the University of Michigan School of Information. She now lives, skis and hikes in Burlington, VT.

Illah R. Nourbakhsh, PhD is Professor of Robotics, director of the Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) lab and head of the Robotics Masters Program in The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His current research projects explore community-based robotics, including educational and social robotics and ways to use robotic technology to empower individuals and communities. He is co-principal investigator of the Global Connection Project, a joint initiative of Carnegie Mellon, NASA, the National Geographic Society and Google Inc. that developed the gigapixel imaging technology known as GigaPan. Nourbakhsh earned his bachelors, masters and PhD in computer science at Stanford University and has been a faculty member of Carnegie Mellon since 1997. The National Academy of Sciences in 2009 named him a Kavli Fellow. He is co-author of the second edition an MIT Press textbook, Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots.

Kimberly Petty is the Senior Director of Experience Design and a founding member of ExperiaHealth, an organization whose aim is to accelerate the discovery of breakthrough solutions that improve healthcare outcomes, create value for patients, and restore the human connection in healthcare. Prior to launching ExperiaHealth, Kim formed Value Genesis, LLC, a strategic healthcare consultancy, where she worked with healthcare organizations to design ideal experiences and deploy customer experience programs.

Ernesto Ramirez is currently a PhD candidate in the Joint Doctoral Program (Health Behavior) at San Diego State University and University of California, San Diego. He is currently working at the Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems (CWPHS). He focuses on how to use existing and new technologies to create persuasive systems that positively impact health behaviors. He is also the community organizer for Quantified Self, a global collaboration among users and makers of self-tracking tools.

Aza Raskin was named an interface guru by Wired and one of the top 40 Influential American Designers by Fast Company, Aza is the co-founder of Massive Health, and was until recently Creative Lead for Firefox. In 2012, he was part of Forbes 30-under-30. Previously, he was a founding member of Mozilla Labs. Aza gave his first talk on user interface at age 10 and got hooked. At 17, he was talking and consulting internationally. Aza has founded and sold two companies, including Songza.com, a minimalist music search engine that had over a million song plays in its first week. He also creates modular cardboard furniture called Bloxes. In another life, Aza has done Dark Matter research at both Tokyo University and the University of Chicago, from where he graduated in math and physics.

Christine Robins is currently the Chief Executive Officer of BodyMedia, Inc., a pioneering market leader in wearable body monitors. BodyMedia’s devices are unparalleled in the marketplace, and equip professionals and consumers with rich information to manage a range of health conditions impacted by lifestyle choices. A noted speaker, Christine has delivered presentations at universities such as Harvard, Stanford and Duke, as well as keynotes at industry shows such as the Consumer Electronics Show, Health 2.0 and CTIA. She holds a degree in Marketing and Finance from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MBA from Marquette University.

Geoff Rutledge is HealthTap’s Chief Medical Information Officer. He is responsible for the architecture of HealthTap’s Medical Knowledge Base. Prior to joining HealthTap, Geoff served as the Chief Medical Officer and the Executive Vice President of Product Development at ePocrates, and as the Chief of Medical Informatics in Emergency Medicine for Harvard University teaching hospital Beth Israel, and on the clinical faculty in Emergency Medicine at Stanford University and UCSD. He holds a Ph.D. in Medical Computing / Medical Information Science from Stanford University, and an M.D. and B.S. from McGill University, and is board certified in both Internal Medicine and Emergency Medicine.

Louise Schaper is the CEO of the Health Informatics Society of Australia (HISA). HISA is Australia’s equivalent to AMIA in the USA. Louise’s appointment as CEO of HISA came on the back of 10 years of experience in, and applied passion for, health informatics. With a background as an occupational therapist and a PhD on technology acceptance amongst healthcare professionals, Louise is a world leader in allied health informatics and is intimately connected to Australia’s substantial health reform efforts, where e-health is seen to be a key enabler to achieving high quality, safe, sustainable and patient-centered care.

Michael Seid, PhD, is Director of Health Outcomes and Quality of Care Research in the Division of Pulmonary Medicine and a Core Faculty in the James M. Anderson Center for Health Systems Excellence at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. With Peter Margolis, MD PhD, he is co-Principal Investigator of the C3N Project, funded by a Transformative R01 grant from the NIH to design and test a new system for transforming chronic care.

Denise Silber is an American living in Paris and an early eHealth evangelist recognized for her work in both Europe and the US in creating some of the first health web sites and ethical codes. She is the founder and president of Basil Strategies, a healthcare emarketing and social media consultancy. Basil Strategies organizes the annual Doctors 2.0 & You conference in Paris, France. She is a 2011 recipient of the French Legion of Honor.

Ida Sim, MD, PhD is a Professor of Medicine, Division of General Internal Medicine, and Co-Director of Biomedical Informatics at UCSF’s Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CTSI). She is an international leader in informatics for health care and clinical research, a practicing primary care physician, and a co-founder of Open mHealth. Open mHealth is creating an open ecosystem for mobile health through an open software architecture supporting scalable learning and improvement of individual and population health. Her other work includes the Ontology of Clinical Research, technologies for integrating clinical research and evidence-based practice, and research on evidence synthesis and dissemination methods.

Wendy Sue Swanson, MD, MBE is a board-certified pediatrician and author of the Seattle Mama Doc blog, the first pediatrician-authored blog from a major children’s hospital. Dr Swanson is working to revolutionize health communications by using social media to bridge the gap between parents/patients and doctors. She interprets research and hopes to dispel myth.

Amy Tenderich was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in May 2003. She is co-author of the new diabetes handbook, Know Your Numbers, Outlive Your Diabetes and recent winner of the LillyforLife Achievement Award for Diabetes Journalism. She tells it like it is on her award-winning blog, Diabetesmine.

David Van Sickle, PhD, is the co-founder and CEO of Asthmapolis, a Madision, WI based company that is pioneering effective new disease management solutions for asthma and chronic respiratory disease. Previously, Van Sickle was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. From 2004-2006, he was an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, where he was assigned to the Air Pollution and Respiratory Health Branch. Van Sickle received his PhD in medical anthropology from the University of Arizona in 2004. In 2011, he was named a Champion of Change by the White House for his work on innovation.

Bryan Vartabedian, MD, is a pediatric gastroenterologist at Texas Children’s Hospital and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine who covers the convergence of social media and medicine on his prominent blog, 33Charts.

Sonny Vu, PhD is the co-founder of Misfit Wearables, makers of wearable sensor products for wellness and medical applications. He is also the co-founder of AgaMatrix, which made the world¹s first hardware medical device (a glucose meter) that works with the iPhone, winner of the Red Dot Design Award, and has sold over 1 billion biosensors for people with diabetes. Previously, he was CTO of a software start-up where he invented a number of machine learning-assisted natural language processing technologies. He studied math (BS) at UIUC and linguistics (PhD) under Noam Chomsky at MIT.

Anne Wojcicki co-founded 23andMe in 2006 after a decade spent in healthcare investing, focused primarily on biotechnology companies. Her hope was to empower consumers with access to their own genetic information and to create a way to generate more personalized information so that commercial and academic researchers could better understand and develop new drugs and diagnostics. Presently, 23andMe has built one of the world’s largest databases of individual genetic information. Its novel, web-based research approach allows for the rapid recruitment of participants to many genome-wide association studies at once, reducing the time and money needed to make new discoveries, and the company has created a proven and standardized resource for finding new genetic association and confirming genetic loci discovered by others. Under Anne’s leadership 23andMe has made significant advances in bringing personalized medicine directly to the public. Anne graduated from Yale University with a BS in Biology. Getting access to and understanding her own genetic information had always been one of her ambitions.

Anne Wright is Co-principal Investigator and Director of Operations for the BodyTrack project in the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. She received B.S. and M.Eng. degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996.  She co-founded the BodyTrack Project in 2010 with the support of the Heinz Endowments of Pittsburgh. Through the BodyTrack Project she pursues a multi-faceted approach to improving health empowerment for people affected by such diffuse conditions, including open-source technology development, aggregation and visualization of data from existing devices and data sources, collaborative development of common data interchange formats and APIs, development of custom devices, and cultural engineering. She also seeks to identify and catalyze synergistic efforts in this space such as the Quantified Self, Quant Friendly Doctor, Locker Project, and open mHealth movements.

Dr. Roni Zeiger is the former Chief Health Strategist at Google where he led efforts ranging from Google Flu Trends to Symptom Search. He is now  CEO of Smart Patients, which aims to leverage the knowledge of expert patients in order to accelerate the era of precision medicine. Roni continues to see patients part-time at a local urgent care center. He earned his MD at Stanford and completed his internal medicine residency at the University of California, San Francisco. He has served as a Clinical Instructor of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, and also received a masters degree in biomedical informatics from Stanford. Roni co-founded the blog Seduce Health, and writes for ABCNews.com and The Huffington Post. He has written and edited several medical textbooks and has published articles on topics including continuing medical education, clinical decision support tools, and searching for health information on the web.

Ben Zotto is Head of Penultimate Products at Evernote, where he leads work on digital handwriting technologies for tablet computing. An engineer, designer, and entrepreneur, Ben created the best-selling iPad handwriting and notes app Penultimate, which was acquired by Evernote earlier this year. He started his career in consumer technology as part of Microsoft’s original Xbox team, and later worked on the web for Xoopit and Yahoo!. Ben is a sometime angel investor and advisor to Bay Area startups, and has spoken on app and product design from San Francisco to Seoul.

Christi Dining Zuber is a nurse with a passion for design. She is the director of the Innovation Consultancy at Kaiser Permanente, a not-for-profit Integrated Delivery System providing healthcare for over 8.5 million people each year. Zuber has been with Kaiser Permanente since 2001, in roles that have encompassed finance, strategy, facilities design, and her current position in the Innovation Consultancy which she began to build in 2003. In her innovation and design work, Zuber has partnered with IDEO to learn and internalize a human centered design methodology into Kaiser Permanente.