Dr. John C. Langenbrunner is an Expert Advisor on Social Health Insurance and a global health financing expert with over 35 years of experience advising governments on health systems reform, including advising the US government’s health reforms. His major areas of expertise include health financing, strategic purchasing, and universal health coverage, and he has extensive experience working on health financing issues in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa as a health economist.

He was formerly the Lead Health Economist at The World Bank, where he led the design, development, and implementation of health sector loan projects and served as a resident technical health advisor in China, Russia, and subsequently Indonesia. He previously worked at the U.S. Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services and with the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. In the mid‑1990s, Dr. Langenbrunner served on the Clinton Health Care Reform Task Force for the U.S. White House.

Dr. Langenbrunner is currently an Expert Advisor on Health Reform to the Kingdom of Bahrain, and an Expert Adviser on Social Health Insurance to the government of Indonesia.

Dr. Langenbrunner is currently the Expert Advisor on Health Reform to the Kingdom of Bahrain. The author of multiple books and articles, he holds master’s and doctorate degrees in Public Policy/Economics and Health Policy from the University of Michigan.

Prof. K. Srinath Reddy is the Past President of the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) and Former Head of the Department of Cardiology at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). He is currently an Honorary Distinguished Professor at PHFI. He was appointed as the first Bernard Lown Visiting Professor of Cardiovascular Health at the Harvard School of Public Health (2009–13) and served as an Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology at Harvard (2014–2023). He holds advisory positions on several national and international bodies and recently published the book Make Health in India: Reaching a Billion Plus.

He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, and an Honorary Professor of Medicine at the University of Sydney. He was the first Indian elected to the U.S. National Academy of Medicine and has received multiple prestigious national and international doctorates and fellowships. He served as President of the World Heart Federation (2013–15) and is a Padma Bhushan awardee. He advises the governments of Odisha, Punjab, Haryana, and Andhra Pradesh on public health and has served as physician to two Prime Ministers of India.

Prof. Reddy obtained his medical degree from Osmania Medical College (Hyderabad), M.D. (Medicine) and D.M. (Cardiology) from AIIMS Delhi, and an M.Sc. in Epidemiology from McMaster University (Hamilton, Canada). He has served on numerous WHO expert panels, chaired the Core Advisory Group on Health and Human Rights for India’s National Human Rights Commission, was a member of India’s first National Science and Engineering Research Board, chaired the High‑Level Expert Group on Universal Health Coverage set up by the Planning Commission, and led the National Board of Examinations overseeing postgraduate medical education in India.

Dr. Kevin A. Schulman is Professor of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine and, by courtesy, Professor of Operations, Information, and Technology at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. He serves as Interim Division Co‑Chief for the Division of Hospital Medicine and as Associate Chair of the Department of Medicine. He is Faculty Director of Stanford’s new applied master’s degree program, the Master of Science in Clinical Informatics Management, and Deputy Director of the Clinical Excellence Research Center (CERC). He also holds an appointment in the Department of Health Policy.

Dr. Schulman’s research interests include organizational innovation in health care, health care policy, and health economics. With over 300 original articles, 100 review articles/commentaries, and 40 case studies/book chapters, he has had a broad impact on health policy (h‑index = 77). His peer‑reviewed articles have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and Annals of Internal Medicine. He is on the editorial/advisory boards of the American Heart Journal and Health Policy, Management and Innovation (HMPI), and serves as Senior Associate Editor of Health Services Research.

Prior to Stanford, he was Professor of Medicine at Duke University, directed the Health Sector Management Program at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business for twelve years, created and directed Duke’s Master of Management in Clinical Informatics Program, and served as Visiting Professor and Visiting Scholar at Harvard Business School.

He is a co‑founder of Bivarus (exit January 2018), co‑founder and Managing Member of Faculty Connection, LLC, and a Board Member of Grid Therapeutics. He is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) and the American Association of Physicians (AAP).

He graduated from Dartmouth College, the New York University School of Medicine and completed the Wharton Health Care Management Program.

Prof Mala Rao is Director of the Ethnicity and Health Unit and Senior Clinical Fellow in the Department of Primary Care and Public Health at Imperial College London. She was Director of Public Health in the UK NHS in the 1990s, Head of the Public Health Workforce for England from 2004 to 2008, and Director of the Public Health Foundation of India’s first Institute of Public Health under the UK Global Health Strategy and UK–India health collaboration from 2008 to 2011. She chairs the WHO Southeast Asia Region’s Expert Group on the Environmental Determinants of Climate Change and Health and served as Medical Adviser to NHS England’s Workforce Race Equality Strategy from 2018 to 2022. Her career spans public health practice, policy, research, and training, with major achievements in workforce development, health systems strengthening, and environmental health in the UK and overseas.

Her research and advice to governments and global institutions have improved health care for millions in some of the poorest states in India and elsewhere, earning her recognition among the most influential people in India–UK relations. A champion of climate action, safe water and sanitation, and gender equity, she guest edited the 2022 issue of the International Review of Psychiatry on the climate crisis and mental health, and serves as Vice Chair of WaterAid UK, as well as an honorary adviser to several charities addressing health and social inequalities.

Globally respected for her work on race equality and the intersections of race, health, and climate, Prof Rao led a review that prompted the establishment of the NHS Workforce Race Equality Strategic Advisory Group (of which she was Vice‑Chair, 2016–2018), co‑guest edited BMJ’s February 2020 special issue on Racism in Medicine (winner of a PPA in 2021), and in 2021 developed the Medical Workforce Race Equality Standard, a world first in monitoring racism and discrimination in the medical workforce.

She has been named among the most influential ethnic minority figures in English health and has received numerous honours, including an OBE in the Queen’s Honours (2013), the Alwyn Smith Prize (2021), and an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (2022).

Prof. Mushtaque Chowdhury is Adviser to the James P. Grant School of Public Health at BRAC University and Professor of Clinical Population and Family Health at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. He is a Bangladeshi development worker, researcher, academic, and micro‑philanthropist who spent about four decades with BRAC—the world’s largest NGO—serving as its Vice‑Chair, Executive Director, founding Director of the Research and Evaluation Division (now part of the Graduate Institutes of BRAC University), and founding Dean of the James P. Grant School of Public Health.

He has also served as Senior Adviser and Acting Managing Director at the Rockefeller Foundation and as a Fellow at Harvard University. Prof. Chowdhury received the “Medical Award of Excellence” from Ronald McDonald House Charities (Chicago) in 2017 and was honored by The Lancet for his contributions to global health in 2013.

A founder of Bangladesh Education Watch and Bangladesh Health Watch—two civil‑society watchdogs—he sits on the boards and committees of several major organizations and initiatives. Prof. Chowdhury has published nearly 200 peer‑reviewed scientific articles and holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, and a B.A. (Hons) in Statistics from Dhaka University.

Prof. Shalini Bharat is Former Director/Vice Chancellor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India, and has nearly four decades of experience in teaching, research, capacity building, advocacy, and field action in broad areas of social science and health, social development, family studies, and minority community demographics. She is known for her work on equity and access issues with special reference to reproductive and women’s health; social determinants of HIV and TB, including stigma, discrimination, and human rights issues; multi-purpose prevention technologies for the HIV epidemic; self-testing for HIV prevention; young people’s health and wellbeing; family studies and child adoption; women, work and family; and demography of the Indian Parsi community.

With her wide experience in community-based research using qualitative and mixed methodology research approaches, she has contributed to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the social and gender dimensions of a range of issues concerning the health, development, and well-being of women, youth, and vulnerable populations such as people living with HIV, transgender people and homosexual men, and female sex workers.

She has also contributed to understanding the mainstreaming of gender in HIV and mental health and social linkages for controlling drug-resistant TB. Her research on the Parsi community is an in-depth exploration of the psycho-social aspects of the demographic decline of India’s most threatened population group on the verge of extinction.

As a member of several national scientific advisory committees and boards, Prof. Bharat is actively engaged with a wide range of national-level programs, schemes, policies, and field interventions in health and public health, social development, gender, HIV/AIDS, and TB prevention.

Mr. Stefan Nachuk is currently the Philanthropy Lead at Morris Brothers LLC. Previously, he served as Deputy Director of Health System Design for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in India. Mr. Nachuk has also worked as a Health Systems Specialist for ThinkWell Global and as a Lead – Private Sector Health Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco. Mr. Nachuk served as an Associate Director at The Rockefeller Foundation, where he provided strategic leadership and guided efforts aimed at transforming health systems in developing countries. Furthermore, he was a key architect, financial supporter, and thought leader of The Rockefeller Foundation’s Joint Learning Network (JLN) for Universal Health Coverage (UHC).

He also promoted the creation of concrete models of climate resilience in Asia. Prior to joining the Rockefeller Foundation, Mr. Nachuk was a Senior Poverty Specialist with the World Bank, based in Indonesia, where he focused on poverty analytics, service provision, local governance, and sub-national investment climates.

Mr. Nachuk received a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and a master’s degree from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Sten H. Vermund is Senior Associate Vice President of USF Health and Dean of the USF Health College of Public Health at the University of South Florida. He is a pediatrician and infectious disease epidemiologist focused on diseases of low and middle‑income countries. His work on HIV‑HPV interactions among women in Bronx methadone programs motivated a change in the 1993 CDC AIDS case surveillance definition and inspired cervical cancer screening programs launched within HIV/AIDS programs around the world.

The thrust of his research has focused on health care access, adolescent sexual and reproductive health and rights, and prevention of HIV transmission among general and key populations, including mother‑to‑child.

Dr. Vermund has become increasingly engaged in health policy, particularly around the sustainability of HIV/AIDS programs and their expansion to non‑communicable diseases, the coronavirus pandemic response and prevention, and public health workforce development. His recent grants include capacity‑building for public health in Chad, molecular epidemiology for HIV in Kazakhstan, and COVID‑19 vaccine studies in the Dominican Republic and Connecticut. He has worked with schools and arts organizations for COVID‑19 risk mitigation and institutional safety.

Before joining USF, he was the Anna M.R. Lauder Professor of Public Health and Professor of Pediatrics at the Yale School of Medicine.