麻豆传媒

Sarita A. Mohanty, MD, MPH, MBA, serves as the President and Chief Executive Officer of The SCAN Foundation. The SCAN Foundation is one of the largest foundations in the United States focused on improving the quality of health and life for older adults. Its mission is to advance a coordinated and easily navigated system of high-quality services for older adults that preserve dignity and independence. 

The SCAN Foundation has been a national leader in the development and scaling of person-centered care models for vulnerable adults with complex needs, including those served by Medicare and Medicaid. The foundation has been at the forefront of policy discussions regarding health care for older adults and coordinating services both for older adults and their caregivers.

Previously, Sarita served as the Vice President of Care Coordination for Medicaid and Vulnerable Populations at Kaiser Permanente. Sarita was previously Assistant Professor of Medicine at USC; Chief Medical Officer of COPE Health Solutions, a health care management consulting company; and Senior Medical Director at L.A. Care, the largest U.S. public health plan. Sarita was recently named a National Quality Forum (NQF) Quality Policy Fellow and has served on several NQF committees related to quality measurement. 

Sarita completed her Internal Medicine residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and research fellowship at Harvard Medical School. She earned her MD from Boston University, MPH from Harvard University, and MBA from UCLA. She completed undergraduate work at UC Berkeley. She currently is an Associate Professor at the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine and is a practicing internal medicine physician with Kaiser Permanente. Sarita enjoys international travel, tennis, and spending time with her husband and three children.

Stephen Ritz is an internationally-acclaimed, award-winning educator, author of best-selling book, The Power Of A Plant, and founder of Green Bronx Machine.  Known as "America's Favorite Teacher," Stephen is responsible for creating the first edible classroom in the world, which he has evolved into the National Health, Wellness and Learning Center.

Using his acclaimed, proprietary whole-school curriculum designed around urban agriculture aligned to key school performance indicators that grow healthy students and schools, Stephen and his students have grown and distributed more than 115,000 pounds of vegetables in the South Bronx.  In the process, Stephen has moved school attendance from 40 percent to 93 percent daily and helped provide 2,200 youth jobs in the Bronx.

The State University of New York uses his curriculum to train elementary school teachers statewide in all content areas, while New York City Department of Education offers professional learning credits for all Green Bronx Machine professional development. The curriculum also is being used in hundreds of schools across the United States, and internationally in Colombia, Canada, Egypt, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and beyond.

Recently honored with the 2020 Change-Maker Award by NYC Food Policy Center, Stephen also has been recognized as a Top Ten Finalist for the Global Teacher Prize, and named as both a Global Humanitarian and Food Tank Hero.  He and his students have presented at the Obama White House three times, been featured on the cover of TIME for KIDS and are the subject of a new, full-feature documentary called, 鈥淕eneration Growth.鈥�  

Stephen is available to speak on topics, including:

Education
鈥� Education Post-COVID:  What Teachers, Students and Parents Will Need for Successful Transition Back to the Classroom
鈥� The 21st Century Education Ecosystem:  Linking Food and Nutrition to Learning and Academic Achievement to Workforce Development and Living Wage Jobs to Justice, the Environment and Fully Circular Economy Communities
鈥� Social-Emotional Learning
鈥� Project-based Learning
鈥� Compassion is the New Curriculum

Food Justice/Food Insecurity
鈥� Urban Farming
鈥� Food and Economic Justice through Ag 鈥� Urban, Rural, Suburban
鈥� Food Insecurity in the U.S.
鈥� The 21st Century Education Ecosystem:  Linking Food and Nutrition to Learning and Academic Achievement to Workforce Development and Living Wage Jobs to Justice, the Environment and Fully Circular Economy Communities

Community Health and Wellness
鈥� The 21st Century Education Ecosystem:  Linking Food and Nutrition to Learning and Academic Achievement to Workforce Development and Living Wage Jobs to Justice, the Environment and Fully Circular Economy Communities
鈥� Next Gen Sustainability Leaders
鈥� Childhood Obesity and Diabetes

Steven Mayer, MD, sports medicine physician and medical director of the Northwestern Medicine Running Medicine Clinic. Dr. Mayer received a doctor of medicine from Indiana University School of Medicine in 2002. He completed an internship at Western Michigan University Homer Stryker MD School of Medicine in 2003 and a residency at University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics in 2006. Dr. Mayer is board-certified by the American Board of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in sports medicine as well as physical medicine and rehabilitation.

Matthew Pittman, MD, medical director of the Northwestern Medicine Metabolic Health and Surgical Weight Loss Center at Delnor Hospital.
Dr. Pittman received a doctor of medicine from Georgetown University School of Medicine in 2009. He completed a residency at Loyola University Medical Center in 2014 and a fellowship at Ohio State University Hospital in 2015. He is board-certified by the American Board of Surgery and primarily focuses on bariatric surgery.

Benjamin J. Seides, MD, MPH, director of interventional pulmonology at Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital.
Dr. Seides is a board-certified interventional pulmonologist with training and additional American Board of Internal Medicine certification in internal medicine, pulmonary and critical care medicine. His clinical interests include minimally invasive advanced diagnostic and therapeutic approaches to benign and malignant diseases of the lung, pleura and thorax; complex airway disease; thoracic oncology; and endobronchial treatments for asthma and COPD. Dr. Seides earned his medical degree from Tulane University School of Medicine, where he was elected to AOA, and he earned a Master of Public Health in health systems management from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans. He completed his residency in internal medicine, as well as his fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine, at New York University/Bellevue Hospital Centers. He went on to complete an advanced fellowship year in interventional pulmonology with the Chicago Chest Center.

Dr. George received a doctor of medicine from Wake Forest University School of Medicine in 1996. He completed a residency at University of Colorado and a fellowship in hematology and oncology at University of Chicago in 2002. Dr. George is board-certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine- Hematology and the American Board of Internal Medicine- Medical Oncology. He has a special interest in genitourinary cancers and gastrointestinal cancers.

Dr. Eimer received a doctor of medicine from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in 1998. He completed an internship at University of Chicago in 1999. Dr. Eimer鈥檚 residency and fellowship in cardiovascular disease were completed at McGaw Medical Center of Northwestern University in 2001 and 2006. He is board-certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine and the American Board of Internal Medicine - Cardiovascular Disease.

Dr. Feinberg received a doctor of medicine from Rush University Medical College in 2000. She completed a residency at McGaw Medical Center of Northwestern University in 2004 and a fellowship at the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health in 2007. She is board-certified by the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology - Reproductive Endocrinology/Infertility.

Dr. Howard received a doctor of medicine from Emory University School of Medicine in 1997. He completed a residency at MedStar Health/Georgetown University in 2003 and a fellowship in breast reconstruction and microsurgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 2004. He is board-certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery. He primarily focuses on breast reconstruction surgery.

Dr. Khan received a doctor of medicine from University of Manitoba College of Medicine in 2009. He completed a residency at the University of Toronto in 2015 and a fellowship in cerebrovascular neurosurgery at Jackson Memorial Hospital/Jackson Health System in 2016. He is board-certified in neurological surgery and specializes in minimally invasive care.

Dr. Indira Gurubhagavatula is chair of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine COVID-19 Task Force. She also is an associate professor of clinical medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also director of the Sleep Medicine Fellowship. She also serves as director of the sleep medicine clinic at the Crescenz VA Medical Center in Philadelphia. 

Professor Anna Choromanska did her Post-Doctoral studies in the Computer Science Department at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in NYU and joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering in Spring 2017 as an Assistant Professor. She is also affiliated with the NYU Center for Data Science, the NYU Center for Urban science and Progress (CUSP), and the NYU Center for Advanced Technology in Communications (CATT). Anna Choromanska is a recipient of the Alfred. P. Sloan Fellowship and IBM Faculty Award. 

Prof. Choromanska's research interests focus on machine learning both theoretical and applicable to the variety of real-life phenomena. Currently, her main research projects focus on optimization (deep learning landscape, deep learning optimization, and general machine learning optimization), large data analysis (extreme multi-class and multi-label classification and density estimation), and machine learning for robotics and autonomy (autonomous driving systems, self-driving cars, AI-based robotics). Prof. Choromanska collaborates with NVIDIA (New Jersey lab) on the autonomous car driving project. 

Prof. Choromanska was a recipient of The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science Presidential Fellowship at Columbia University in the City of New York. She co-authored several international conference papers and refereed journal publications, as well as book chapters. The results her works are used in production by Facebook (training production vision systems and entry to COCO competition) and Baidu, and in product development by NVIDIA. She is also a contributor to the open source fast out-of-core learning system Vowpal Wabbit (aka VW). Prof. Choromanska gave over 50 invited and conference talks and serves as a book editor (MIT Press volume), organizer of top machine learning events (workshops at conferences such as the  International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems), and a reviewer and area chair for several top machine learning conferences and journals.

Prof. Anna Choromanska is also a pianist who has been playing piano since the age of six and has diplomas of two music schools. Her piano performance can be found here. She was also a bronze medalist of amateur couple dance. She was practicing standard and latin dance in the Columbia University Ballroom Dance Team. Prof. Choromanska is also an avid salsa dancer. She performed in Ache Performance Project of Frankie Martinez, the one of the most innovative and renowned Latin contemporary dancers of his generation, and practiced individually with one of the most charismatic female mambo dancers, Lori Ana Perez-Piazza. She also likes dancing hula, especially during her travels to Hawaii. Her dance performances can be found here, here and here. Finally, prof. Choromanska loves painting and fashion design techniques. She comes from a scientific family: her father, Wlodzimierz Choromanski, was a professor of transportation and her mother, Danuta Jasi艅ska-Choroma艅ska, is a professor of mechatronics at the Warsaw University of Technology, Poland. 

 

Dr. John DiFiori is Chief of the Primary Sports Medicine Service at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) and has special expertise and extensive experience in treating sports injuries in competitive athletes. He serves as the Director of Sports Medicine for the NBA, where he is involved with the League鈥檚 research initiatives, as well as the development and implementation of all policies related to player health and safety. He has also been appointed to the FIBA (The International Basketball Federation) Medical Commission where he works with basketball federations around the world to set standards for player health.

Prior to joining HSS, Dr. DiFiori was Chief of the UCLA Division of Sports Medicine and Non-Operative Orthopaedics. As Head Team Physician for the UCLA Department of Intercollegiate Athletics, he supervised the care of more than 650 athletes in 24 NCAA sports. He spent more than 15 years on the sidelines with the Bruins football and basketball teams.

Dr. DiFiori has served as President of the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine, the largest organization of sports medicine physicians in the U.S. He has the distinction of being named a fellow of both the American College of Sports Medicine and the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine. Dr. DiFiori recently presented at the 2020 Scandinavian Sports Medicine Congress in Copenhagen, honored to be the only American physician invited to provide scientific presentations at the three-day event. He spoke on youth sports injuries, injury prevention and early single sport specialization in young athletes.

Dr. DiFiori is the lead author for the recently published NBA Youth Basketball Guidelines, and the AMSSM Position Statement on Overuse Injuries and Burnout in Youth Sports. He serves on the editorial boards of Current Sports Medicine Reports and the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine.

Dr. DiFiori has served as a medical consultant for the NHL Players Association and as a team physician for the United States Olympic Committee for several international competitions, including US Soccer, USA Basketball, and the XIII Pan American Games.

His sports medicine practice at HSS focuses on the care of competitive athletes and active individuals of all ages. 

Dr. David Helfet is a renowned expert in orthopedic trauma surgery. He is chief emeritus of the Orthopedic Trauma Service at both Hospital for Special Surgery and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. Additionally, he is the designated orthopedic trauma specialist for the Fire Department of New York (FDNY), the New York Police Department (NYPD), and the New York State Police, providing advanced orthopedic care to members who are injured in the line of duty. 

His areas of expertise include minimally invasive fracture surgery; fractures and dislocations of both the upper and lower extremities (shoulder, upper arm, elbow, forearm, hip, upper leg, knee, lower leg, ankle, etc.); fractures of the pelvis and acetabulum; complex fractures with angular deformities and/or bone defects; poly-trauma patients with orthopedic injuries; fractures in adolescents, adults and senior populations; periprosthetic fractures; insufficiency fractures; corrective osteotomies (long bones and pelvic osteotomies); unhealed fractures, including non-unions; malunions; hip dysplasia; chronic post-partum pelvic pain and/or instability.

Dr. Helfet has published extensively on orthopedic trauma topics, including peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. He frequently presents at both national and international conferences on treatment of orthopedic trauma. He has received visiting lectureships, including the Presidential Guest and Watson-Jones Memorial Lecture of the British Orthopaedic Association, and has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards. He received the Orthopedics Blue Ribbon Article Award for outstanding contribution to the orthopedic literature in 2019, the HSS Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015, and has been named in Castle Connolly's "America's Top Doctors" every year since 2002. 

Amanda Jo LeBlanc, Ph.D. joined the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute in January of 2012 and serves as an assistant professor in the Department of Physiology at the University of Louisville. Dr. LeBlanc has an extensive research background in cardiovascular physiology, focusing almost exclusively on myocardial perfusion and function in models of both aging and gender-specific cardiology. Dr. LeBlanc鈥檚 research focus is on myocardial and microvascular regenerative medicine in a model of advanced age, sex-specific coronary physiology, regulation of blood flow, cell-based delivery and therapeutics, adipose-derived cells and microvessels, fabrication of tissue-engineered patches, and neovessel formation, inosculation, and network maturation.

Before coming to CII for additional postdoctoral training, Dr. LeBlanc completed her primary postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Cardiovascular and Respiratory Research at West Virginia University, where she had previously earned her Ph.D. in Exercise Physiology in 2008. She received her B.S. in Exercise Science from Indiana University in 2002 and her M.S. in Exercise Physiology from the University of Louisville in 2004.

The current projects in the LeBlanc laboratory: 1) reversing age-related coronary microvascular dysfunction through the use of an adipose-derived cell therapy, 2) determining how thrombospondin-1 signaling and reactive oxygen species generation contributes to the age-related decline in coronary flow reserve, and 3) identify circulating biomarkers and aberrant microvascular signaling processes related to patients with microvascular angina.

It is projected that by 2035, the number of people in the US over the age of 65 years old will be greater than the number of people below 18 years old. This projection illustrates the massive shift in the United States to an aged population. With the aging population comes challenges because of the increase costs and burdens of the diseases that accumulate with age. In our lab, we study the aging process in order to understand how to make people age slower. Our goal is not to make it possible to live 150 years, but rather to extend the period spent free of disease. In other words, rather than increase the lifespan, we aim to increase the healthspan. Of particular interest to our lab is how to maintain muscle, which is important for maintaining independence and a healthy metabolism. In our laboratory we use models that live longer than they should, to understand what gives rise to increased healthspan. We focus on how to maintain proteins in a “young” state so that cells and tissues can continue to function normally and absent of disease. Of particular interest are mitochondria since these cellular organelles seem to be central to the aging process. Our research seeks to determine if we can maintain the quality of proteins in mitochondria to maintain overall health. In a tissue like muscle, it is our hope that maintaining mitochondria will help preserve muscle function with age. Importantly, it is always our goal to take what we learn in our laboratory experiments and translate them into human treatments that improve human healthspan.

Dr. Beall is a physical anthropologist whose research focuses on human adaptation to high-altitude hypoxia, particularly the different patterns of adaptation exhibited by Andean, Tibetan and East African highlanders. Her current research deals with the genetics of adaptive traits and evidence for natural selection, with the role of nitric oxide in oxygen delivery at high altitude and with the human ecology of high-altitude Tibetan nomads.

Professor Beall is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Heinrich Lab investigates physiological responses to hypoxia and high altitude.  Human populations have evolved for thousands of years in high-altitude environments on the Tibetan Plateau, the Andean Altiplano, and the Ethiopian highlands.  There is large variation in the adaptive strategies utilized by different high-altitude groups to survive in these environments, highlighting the significance of genetic variation in our physiological responses to environmental stress. Understanding the diversity of physiological responses to high altitude will provide insights into how we respond to chronic hypoxia as a result of disease. 

Awards
NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Institutional National Research Service Award (F32), National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), Genetic determinants of variation in the hypoxic ventilatory response in low- and high-altitude populations, 2016

Grover C. Stephens Memorial Fellowship Award, UC Irvine, 2013

Best Poster Award, Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, 2012

Jonathan Wade Psoras Award, Arizona State University, 2010

Ametek-Edax Best Poster Award, Arizona Imaging and Microanalysis Society, 2010

In the summer of 2005, Catherine Ivy and her husband Ben were on vacation when Ben started to complain that his thumb was going numb. Shortly after their trip, Ben went to get what he thought was a pinched nerve examined, only to discover he had an aggressive form of brain cancer called glioblastoma multiforme. On Thanksgiving Day, just four months later, Catherine lost her husband and found herself defeated by a disease that didn鈥檛 seem to have a cure in sight. Instead of being consumed by her grief, just a few months after Ben鈥檚 passing, Catherine changed the mission of their recently established Foundation to find a cure for brain cancer so that others wouldn鈥檛 have to suffer the same fate.

Since the inception of the Ben & Catherine Ivy Foundation, Catherine Ivy has become a trailblazer within the medical community. In 2014, she was honored by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) with the John S. McCain Leadership Award, which recognizes leadership and dedication making a significant impact in the fight against disease and helping patients worldwide. Catherine has also been instrumental in finding ways to bring major institutional collaborators together to fight brain cancer and she has been honored by a variety of her partners for the Foundation鈥檚 investment in finding a cure.

Without Catherine鈥檚 pioneering leadership, compassion and perseverance the industry-leading and live-saving work at the Ivy Brain Tumor Center would not be possible. She is not only the reason the needle is moving forward on brain cancer research, but she is the reason why millions of people across the world impacted by brain cancer are finding a sense of hope.

My research centers on the physiological mechanisms underlying the normal maternal physiological responses to pregnancy and the pregnancy complications of fetal growth restriction and preeclampsia. I use the chronic hypoxia of residence at high altitude (>2500 m or 8000 ft) as a natural laboratory for studying these mechanisms since high altitude exerts one of the strongest influences on fetal growth (being second in magnitude only to gestational age) and triples the frequency of preeclampsia. With students, fellows and faculty colleagues from obstetrics & gynecology and other disciplines (anesthesiology, anthropology, cancer biology, genetics, medicine, pediatrics, physiology, and public health) and the aid of NIH, NSF or other federal funding, we have published more than 200 articles documenting the effects of chronic hypoxia on maternal and fetal well being. In particular our human studies have shown that altitude lowers birth weight an average of 102 g/1000 m and is associated with less pregnancy-associated rise in uterine artery blood flow, due in turn to smaller uterine artery diameters. Experimental animal studies have shown that chronic hypoxia vs. normoxia reduces uterine artery nitric oxide production, vasodilator response to flow, growth and remodeling, suggesting that chronic hypoxia interferes with the normal maternal uterine vascular responses to pregnancy. Multigenerational populations (Andeans, Tibetans) are largely protected from hypoxia-associated fetal growth restriction, due in part to being able to attain greater uterine artery diameter and blood flow than shorter-term residents (Europeans, Chinese). Our recent whole-genome scan and gene-expression studies have identified several genes likely involved. Current work is aimed at identifying the specific gene variants and physiological mechanisms by which they exert their effects with hopes that such studies will aid not only in understanding processes of evolutionary adaptation but also our ability to identify persons at risk for pregnancy complications and/or design more effective therapies for their treatment or prevention.

Education:
BA, Anthropology (1968), Smith College
PhD Biomedical Anthropology (1973), University Michigan (Ann Arbor).