Don Berwick, MD

Donald M. Berwick is one of the leading scholars, teachers, and advocates in the world for the continual improvement of health care systems. He is a pediatrician, and a longstanding member of the faculty of Harvard Medical School. He founded and led the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, now the leading global nonprofit organization in its field. He was appointed by President Obama as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, where he served in 2010 and 2011. He has counseled governments, clinical leaders, and executives in dozens of nations. He is an elected Member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Philosophical Society. He has received numerous awards, including the Heinz Award for Public Policy, the Award of Honor of the American Hospital Association, and the Gustav Leinhard Award from the Institute of Medicine. For his work with the British National Health Service, in 2005 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II appointed him Honourary Knight Commander of the British Empire, the highest honor awarded by the UK to a non-British subject.

Linda Rae Murray M.D. MPH, F.A.C.P.

Dr. Murray has spent her career serving the medically under served. She has worked in a variety of settings including practicing Occupational Medicine at a Workers Clinic in Canada, Residency Director for Occupational Medicine at Meharry Medical College, and Bureau Chief for the Chicago Department of Health under Mayor Harold Washington. Dr. Murray worked as Medical Director of the federally funded health center, Winfield Moody, serving Cabrini Green Public Housing Project in Chicago. Dr. Murray has been an active member of a wide range of local and national organizations including serving as a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), and the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and the Board of Directors of Trinity Health ( a large Catholic Health system). In 1997 Dr. Murray returned to the Cook County Health System where she served as Chief Medical Officer - Primary Care for the twenty three primary care and community health centers comprising the Ambulatory & Community Health Network of the Cook County Bureau of Health Services; and as an attending physician in the Division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at Cook County Hospital. Dr. Murray has worked in leadership roles in many public health organizations including NACCHO’s (National Association of City & County Health Officers) Health Equity and Social Justice Team, the national executive board of APHA. During 2011 she served as President of the American Public Health Association. In December 2014, she retired from her position as the Chief Medical officer for the Cook County Department of Public Health of the Cook County Health & Hospital System , the PHAB accredited and state certified public health department for suburban Cook County. In December 2018 Dr. Murray stopped seeing patients as a voluntary attending in Internal Medicine ending over forty years of clinical practice. Today she serves as an Honorary Attending of Cook County Health and is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois School of Public Health. She serves on many local and national boards including the Chicago based Health and Medicine Policy Research Group; and chairs the board for the National Collaborative for Health Equity. She remains passionate about increasing the number of Black and Latinx health professionals and serves on the Urban Health Program Community Advisory Committee at the University of Illinois. Dr. Murray is devoting the rest of her career to being an enthusiastic full time trouble maker. She has been a voice for social justice and health as a basic human right for over fifty years.

Edgar Villanueva is an award-winning author, activist, and expert on issues of race, wealth, and philanthropy. Villanueva is the Principal of Decolonizing Wealth Project and Liberated Capital and author of the bestselling book Decolonizing Wealth (2018, 2021). He advises a range of organizations including national and global philanthropies, Fortune 500 companies, and entertainment on social impact strategies to advance racial equity from within and through their investment strategies. Villanueva holds a BSPH and MHA from the Gillings Global School of Public Health at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe and resides in New York City.

Noam N. Levey

Noam N. Levey is a Washington, D.C.,-based senior correspondent for Kaiser Health News, where he is currently producing “Diagnosis: Debt,” a multi-part series on medical debt in the U.S. in collaboration with NPR and CBS News. Noam joined KHN in 2021 after 17 years at the Los Angeles Times, the last 12 as the paper’s national healthcare reporter based in Washington. He has reported on healthcare issues from more than three dozen states and four continents and won numerous honors, including the prestigious NIHCM award for his 2019 series “Inside America’s High-Deductible Revolution.” Noam has also been published in Health Affairs, JAMA and Milbank Quarterly. He started his career at newspapers in Duluth, Minn., Montgomery, Ala., and the United Arab Emirates. Prior to the LA Times, Noam was an investigative reporter for the San Jose Mercury News. Noam has a degree in History and Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University.

Emily Cleveland-Manchanda, MD

Emily Cleveland Manchanda, MD, MPH is the Director for Social Justice Education and Implementation within the Center for Health Equity at the American Medical Association (AMA). She is also an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine, the Assistant Program Director for the Boston Medical Center Executive Fellowship in Health Equity, and works clinically as an attending physician in the Emergency Department at Boston Medical Center. At the AMA, Dr. Cleveland Manchanda leads and oversees the AMA Center for Health Equity’s education portfolio. Her work focuses on coordinating effective action across sectors to promote social justice and equity in health, pushing health systems to address social and structural drivers of health, and supporting the development of health care leaders equipped to effectively advance justice in healthcare for patients, families, staff, communities and populations. Her research, educational and advocacy work primarily focus on addressing racism and other intersecting systems of oppression in medical education and clinical care. After graduating from Yale with a degree in Art History and French, Dr. Cleveland Manchanda spent two years working in the public health sector in Liberia with the Clinton Foundation before attending medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. She obtained her MPH from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, and subsequently completed her residency training at the Harvard-Affiliated (MGH-BWH) Emergency Medicine Residency, where she served as a chief resident. She joined the faculty at Boston University School of Medicine in 2020, and the AMA in 2021. Dr. Cleveland Manchanda and her husband Gaurav met while working in Liberia, and now live in the Boston area with their three delightfully strong-willed children.

Karthik Sivashanker, MD

Dr. Karthik Sivashanker is the Vice President of Equitable Health Systems & Innovation in the Center for Health Equity at the American Medical Association, and a Medical Director in Quality, Safety, and Equity at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He's a psychiatrist at Justice Resource Institute and serves as a faculty member at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Dr. Sivashanker attended college and medical school at Northwestern University in Illinois. He completed psychiatry residency at NYP Weill Cornell in New York and a psychosomatic medicine fellowship at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He is a graduate of the Harvard Medical School Fellowship in Patient Safety and Quality and received a Master’s in Public Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. As a former Fulbright scholar, he conducted research in Venezuela on the vertical transmission of HIV/AIDS in rural mountain communities. As a former VA Under Secretary for Health Diffusion of Excellence Gold Fellow, he led efforts to standardize and improve the process of substance use screening and triage for Veterans. His work has focused on driving racial justice and equity in the health care arena by leveraging high-performance quality and safety practices to systematically make inequities visible and to address and resolve them as an integral part of health care delivery.