MD

Dr Fiona Wood is an Australian plastic surgeon with over 20 years experience specialising in burns. She is a consultant plastic surgeon at Fiona Stanley Hospital and Perth Children's Hospital. She is also the Director of the Burns Service of Western Australia and is the co-founder of the first skin cell laboratory in WA. Her lab uses a technology that involves spray-on skin to help patients recover from severe burns.

Dr Wood was named a Member of the Order of Australia in 2003. That same year and a year later she won Western Australian Citizen of the Year for her contribution to the field of burns research. A year later in 2005 her contribution to burns care was further recognised when she won Australia’s highest accolade, Australian of the Year.

Dr Rishi Manchanda is a physician, author and healthcare leader who has spent more than a decade developing strategies to improve health outcomes in resource-poor communities. He has served as Director of Social Medicine for a network of community health centres in Los Angeles and as the lead primary care physician for homeless Veterans. He is also the President of HealthBegins, a social enterprise that provides healthcare professionals and community partners with tools to improve the care they provide to people in their local communities.

Dr BJ Miller is a practicing hospice and palliative care physician and a triple amputee. He is one of the world’s leading public ambassadors for palliative care and dying well. He currently sees patients and caregivers via telehealth through Mettle Health, a company he co-founded. His 2015 TED Talk, “What Really Matters at the End of Life,” has received more than 11 million views to date. He has also written a book, A Beginner’s Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death, and has been featured in numerous publications, including the New York Times, NPR and PBS.

Dr Sandeep Jauhar is a US cardiologist and writer for The New York Times. He has written three books. His most recent, Heart: A History, is beautifully written and tells the colourful history of the doctors who risked their careers and the patients who risked their lives for us to learn what cardiologists today know about the heart. As well as The New York Times, Dr Jauhar’s opinions have appeared on NPR, CNN and MSNBC, and his essays have been published in Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal and Slate.

Dr Vikram Patel is a psychiatrist and Professor at Harvard’s Department of Global Health and Population. In 2015 he was listed in TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential persons of the year. He is an Adjunct Professor and joint Director of the Centre for Chronic Conditions and Injuries at the Public Health Foundation of India; a Professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine; and the Co-founder of Sangath—an Indian NGO, which won the MacArthur Foundation’s International Prize for Creative and Effective Institutions in 2008 and the World Health Organization’s Public Health Champion of India award in 2016.

Dr Patel has served on several WHO Government of India committees and his work on the burden of mental disorders, their association with poverty and social disadvantage, and the use of community resources to deliver interventions has been recognised by the Chalmers Medal from the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in the UK, the Sarnat Medal from the US National Academy of Medicine, and the Humanitarian Prize from the Brain & Behaviour Research Foundation.

Dr Daniel Kraft is a physician-scientist, inventor and entrepreneur. He has been the Chair of Medicine at Singularity University since the organisation's inception in 2008, and is also the founder and chair of Exponential Medicine, a program that explores convergent, rapidly developing technologies and their potential in biomedicine and healthcare.

With over 25 years in the field, Dr Kraft has worked as a surgeon in the United States fighter pilot squadron and was shortlisted as a NASA astronaut. He is the inventor of multiple biomedical devices, including the MarrowMiner, an FDA-approved device for the harvest of bone marrow. His academic research has focused on stem cell biology and regenerative medicine, stem cell derived immunotherapies for cancer, and bioengineering human T-cell differentiation. His research has been published in journals that include Nature and Science, and he has presented six different TED talks.

Dr. Richard Weller is a UK academic dermatologist whose views have been published in New Scientist, BBC, Sydney Morning Herald and more. He is an honorary NHS Consultant Dermatologist with a particular interest in medical dermatology and eczema. 

In his TED talk, Could the sun be good for your heart, which has reached more than one million people, Dr Weller explains how his research shows that nitric oxide—a chemical transmitter stored in huge reserves in the skin—can be released by UV light to great benefit to both blood pressure and the cardiovascular system. To help people get the benefit of the sun while protecting themselves from skin cancer he has produced the world’s first nitric oxide promoting sunscreen.

Dr Mark Tyndall is a physician, epidemiologist and public health expert. He has worked as the Director of the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control and as a Professor of Medicine at the School of Population and Public Health at UBC. Dr Tyndall was one of North America’s earliest advocates for harm reduction programs and was at the forefront of North America’s first legally sanctioned supervised injection facility—INSITE—which was established in Vancouver in 2003. He has also recently launched The MySafe project—an opioid dispensing machine that resembles an ATM and gives people addicted to opioids access to a prescribed amount of medical-quality hydromorphone. He developed the project in an attempt to reduce the number of deaths via overdose in Vancouver.

Dr Nina Shapiro is a paediatrician who is the Director of Paediatric Otolaryngology and a Professor of Head and Neck Surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and Cornell University and has spent more than two decades working in clinical and academic medicine. 

As well as being a paediatric surgeon, Dr. Shapiro is the author of ‘HYPE: A Doctor’s Guide to Medical Myths, Exaggerated Claims and Bad Advice, and two other books. She writes regularly for several notable publications and has appeared on various talk shows to discuss medicine. Her views have been published in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, NPR and BBC.

Dr Donald Berwick is a Harvard-trained paediatrician and a leading authority on health care quality improvement. He co-founded the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in 1991 and was the CEO for two decades, turning the organisation into the world’s leading institution for quality improvement in healthcare.

In 2005, he was knighted by the Queen for his work with the NHS and in 2010 he was appointed by President Obama to serve as an Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He has also served on President Clinton’s Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Healthcare Industry.

He currently serves as Lecturer in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School.

Dr Jud Brewer is an addiction psychiatrist and internationally known expert in treating addictions with mindfulness. He has spent the past 20 years at Yale, MIT and Brown University studying how our brains form negative behaviour patterns, bad habits and addictions. 

His TED talk—a simple way to break a bad habit—is in the top 50 most viewed TED talks of all time. It has received more than 25 million views.

Dr Barbara Natterson-Horowitz is a cardiologist and Professor at Harvard University’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. Dr Natterson-Horowitz also co-directs UCLA’s Evolutionary Medicine Program and is a Professor of Medicine at UCLA's Division of Cardiology. As well as being a physician Dr Natterson-Horowitz has also had the unique experience of operating on dozens of different species of animals, working as a consultant surgeon for the Los Angeles Zoo. She has operated on everything from apes to birds, big cats to sea mammals.

Along with veterinarian Kathryn Bowers, Dr Natterson-Horowitz wrote the book ‘Zoobiquity: The Astonishing Connection Between Human and Animal Health’ where she shares her multispecies patient insights. The book became a New York Times bestseller. 

Dr. Thomas Insel is an American neuroscientist and psychiatrist who led the US National Institute of Mental Health from 2002 until 2015. During his tenure his team spent more than $20 billion in research. The most of any mental health organisation in the world.

During his time at the NIMH Dr Insel focused a lot on serious mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, bipolar illness, and major depressive disorder. He also established autism as a major area of focus and led a large increase of funding for autism research.

After his time at the National Institute of Mental Health he did a stint leading the Mental Health Team at Verily Life Sciences—formerly Google Life Sciences—before launching his own company MindStrong with two other founders. MindStrong is attempting to transform mental health through innovations in virtual care, data measurement, and data science.

Dr. Ron Epstein is a Harvard trained family physician who started out practicing in the 70s when the HIV epidemic was just emerging and there was no treatment. Since then he has spent 40 years working in end of life and advanced cancer care. Dr. Epstein is also a lifelong meditator and mindfulness coach, and is the co-director of Mindful Practice Programs, which offer 4-day retreat-like workshops for doctors, to show them how they can provide better care for their patients by taking better care of themselves. These retreats show clinicians not only mindfulness techniques for dealing with stress, but also how to build resilience and how to protect yourself from burnout and bitterness by getting out of your own way. Dr. Epstein also wrote the book ‘ATTENDING—Medicine, Mindfulness, and Humanity’. The first published book on mindfulness and medicine.

Dr David Riedel is an Associate Professor of Medicine and the Director of the Infectious Disease Fellowship Program at the University of Maryland’s hospital. When we spoke Baltimore was experiencing its expected peak week of COVID cases. At his hospital they had just over 50 patients with COVID, with 50% of patients on respirators. In the conversation we cover the full gamut of what’s happening with COVID in Baltimore and nearby New York. We also talk about what he has learned from the virus as an infectious disease specialist.