Impact! Classmate Discussions
Sever Hall (second floor)
These interactive breakout sessions will be led by classmates working to improve our communities, our nation, and our world. We will collaborate in answering, “How can we make a difference? What can we do, in practice, to effect change?”
Click each session’s title for details on the topic, and for speaker bios.
• Equity/Justice/Development Town Hall – New Ideas
2:00-2:50 PM Sever Hall Room 213
Dayna Cunningham, Clinton Collins, Jr., Maddy DeLone, Erika (Peterson) Munson, Cecile Scoon
• Silence=Death: HIV/AIDS and the Class of 1981
2:00-2:50 PM Sever Hall Room 214
Jeff Burack, David Margolis, Lisa Hirschhorn, Ben Schatz, Ann Stapleton
• Envisioning and Contributing to the Future of Education
3:00-3:50PM Sever Hall Room 213
Judy Bigelow, Chris Gabrieli, Nancy Northrop, Chris Owens, Felisa Tibbitts
• The New Global Health: It’s Not Just for Doctors
3:00-3:50PM Sever Hall Room 214
Vivian Lee, Andy Pugh, Marilyn Butler, Lisa Hirschhorn, Brian Mullaney
• Sustainable Cities
3:00-3:50PM Sever Hall Room 203
Cara Seiderman, Alberto Knoepfler, Roger Platt, Vince Marazita, Jennifer Hernandez
• Achieving Leaps Forward in Population Health
4:00-4:50 PM Sever Hall Room 203
Karen Scott, Dayna Bowen Matthew, Jessica Banthin, Stephen Warnke, Amy Boesky, Arnold Chen
• Energy, Carbon, and the Clean Pivot
4:00-4:50 PM Sever Hall Room 214
Morry Cater, Clair Mays Poumadere, Dave Smith, Bob DiMatteo, Rob Stowe
Details for the Impact! sessions:
Equity/Justice/Development Town Hall – New Ideas
2:00-2:50PM Sever Hall Room 213
Dayna Cunningham, Clinton Collins, Jr., Maddy DeLone, Erika (Peterson) Munson, Cecile Scoon
Classmates working in a variety of social justice fields invite you to join a town hall session to discuss key questions. On one hand we find growing inequality, record levels of incarceration, hateful political discourse; on the other, growing marriage equality and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). What is happening in our country? Is an inclusive US society even possible? Where do the biggest challenges lie? What new ideas are driving breakthroughs in these areas? What will we do, individually and collectively, to address these challenges? Come join the discussion, share your ideas and learn from others.
Speaker Details:
Clinton Collins (U of Michigan Law, ’88), is Minnesota Managing Attorney, GEICO Staff Counsel and board chair, Minneapolis Urban League. Clinton has served as an Air Force Judge Advocate, a member of the Minneapolis Civil Rights Commission and board member, Minnesota Professional Responsibility Board. Clinton lives in north Minneapolis, one of the most economically and socially challenged sections of the Twin Cities, with his family.
Maddy deLone (HSPH ’84; NYU-JD’94) is the Executive Director of the Innocence Project, as non-profit legal services and public policy organization that uses DNA to free innocent people from prison who were convicted of crimes they didn’t commit and works to reform the criminal justice system to prevent wrongful convictions from happening in the first place and to make it more fair and just. Maddy has been working in the areas of prison health, prisoners’ rights, and criminal justice reform since she started working as a health administrator at Rikers Island jail complex in NYC in 1985.
Dayna L. Cunningham (NYU-JD ’86; MIT Sloan–MBA ’04) Dayna L. Cunningham is Executive Director of MIT Community Innovators Lab (CoLab), a planning and development lab in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning. CoLab supports the development and use of knowledge from excluded communities to deepen civic engagement, improve community practice, inform policy, mobilize community assets, and generate shared wealth.
Erika Peterson Munson is co-founder of Mormons Building Bridges — a community dedicated to making Latter-day Saint homes, congregations and communities safe and welcoming for LGBTQ people. She is Class XII Dean and member of the English Department at Waterford School, an independent K-12 school in Sandy Utah. She and her husband Shipley (’80) parent their five children to greater and lesser degrees while discovering the low-pressure, high-reward joy of spending time with their two grandchildren.
Cecile Scoon is a small town civil rights lawyer in North Florida, commonly called “L.A.,” for “Lower Alabama.” After graduating from U. Virginia School of Law,’84, she spent five years as an active-duty Air Force JAG prosecuting in military courts martial. She retired from the A.F. Reserves as a Major in 2005. Cecile attempts to protect the rights of those wronged at work due to their race, religion, age, disability, place of birth, or unwanted sexual advances made to them. Cecile is the President of the Bay County League of Women Voters and on the Board of Directors for the Florida League of Women Voters.
When not burning the midnight oil drafting lengthy pleadings, Cecile enjoys parenting her three children, 20, 22, and 25 along with running, gardening, painting, and watching soccer with her best friend, husband, law partner, and LWV member, Alvin Peters.
Silence=Death: HIV/AIDS and the Class of 1981
2:00-2:50PM Sever Hall Room 214
Jeff Burack, David Margolis, Lisa Hirschhorn, Ben Schatz, Ann Stapleton
HIV emerged as a global epidemic as we completed our time at Harvard, and has since infected more than 70 million people. The AIDS pandemic has deeply affected the world, and shaped the lives and careers of many in the class of 1981. Through work spanning community activism, science, and care and treatment, much progress has been achieved. Now nearly 40 million people live with HIV around the world, many on effective treatment with substantial reductions in deaths and new infections. Work continues to improve access to effective treatment and prevention therapies, develop a preventive vaccine, and find a cure, to achieve the goal of an “AIDS-free generation”.
This HIV/AIDS work has influenced how we respond to other health challenges, from breast cancer to Ebola. We invite you to a conversation around experiences, lesson learned, and roads traveled, and hope that you will come and share your perspectives.
Speaker Details:
Jeff Burack is Medical Director of the East Bay AIDS Center, a large community hospital-based HIV clinic serving a predominantly indigent population in and around Oakland, CA. He supervises outpatient and inpatient care, and heads research projects on HIV prevention and treatment. He is Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and of Bioethics and Medical Humanities at UC Berkeley.
David Margolis became interested in HIV as the pandemic emerged during his medical training. Trained at Tufts, the New England Medical Center, the Laboratory of Clinical Investigation at the NIH, and Program in Molecular Medicine at UMass, he has cared for people with HIV and studied the interactions between HIV and the host cell on the molecular level for his entire career. For the last 12 years, he and many collaborators have begun to develop drug and immunotherapy approaches to target persistent HIV, to develop the tools needed to cure HIV infection. He is the director of the UNC HIV Cure Center, funded in part by a public-private partnership between UNC and Glaxo SmithKline, principal investigator for the NIH-sponsored Collaboratory of AIDS Researchers for Eradication (http://www.delaneycare.org), and a professor of Medicine, and Microbiology & Immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Lisa Hirschhorn trained as an HIV physician in the 1980’s and is currently an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She works to expand and improve care and treatment in HIV and other areas of health, in resource-limited settings in the US and globally. After 9 years at Partners in Health, she now works at Ariadne Labs, an innovation partnership between Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Ben Schatz founded the AIDS Civil Rights Project in 1985, the first national program dedicated to HIV-related impact litigation. In 1991 he started a national program for HIV+ heath care workers and went on to become Exec. Director of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association. In 1992, Ben authored then-candidate Bill Clinton’s HIV and gay rights policy papers and later served on President Clinton’s Presidential Advisory Committee on HIV/AIDS, where he chaired the Discrimination Committee. In 1993 Ben co-created The Kinsey Sicks, America’s Favorite Dragapella Beautyshop Quartert, as an antidote to homorespectability and to promote joy in the face of too many years of grieving. Two of Ben’s four co-founders went on to die HIV-related deaths. The group, the joy and the grieving still continue.
Ann Stapleton is Professor of Medicine in the Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Medical Director of the Clinical Research Center at the University of Washington in Seattle. She became an HIV primary care physician in 1987, influenced by her training in HIV epicenters, first during medical school in the Bronx (Einstein), then during internal medicine residency at UCSF. She also provides inpatient HIV consultation at Harborview Medical Center, a public hospital in Seattle.
Envisioning and Contributing to the Future of Education
3:00-3:50PM Sever Hall Room 213
Judy Bigelow, Chris Gabrieli, Nancy Northrop, Chris Owens, Felisa Tibbitts
Classmates with a variety of experience and perspectives on education invite you to join a town hall session to discuss education today and in the future. What will be the required knowledge base for the next 20 to 100 years – academically and technologically? How should education address social justice and equality issues of today and tomorrow? What will we do, individually and collectively, to improve public education, in particular? Come join the discussion, share your ideas and learn from others.
Speaker Details:
Judy Bigelow, Director, Fordham Street Foundation. The Foundation makes grants and supports collaborative efforts to improve public education and reduce racial disparities in academic opportunities and outcomes.
Chris Gabrieli is CEO of Empower Schools, Chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education and a Lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education
Nancy Northrop, Co-Chair, Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council, NYC
Chris Owens: Chris is the Director of The Re-Entry Bureau for the Kings County District Attorney’s office (Brooklyn, NY) and also supervised youth diversion programs for 18 months. He is also President of the non-profit Central Brooklyn Martin Luther King Commission. Chris is a former community school board member and an education non-profit administrator. He and his wife have two sons – a college freshman and a high school sophomore.
Felisa Tibbitts, Teachers College of Columbia University. Felisa is a faculty member in the International Education Program and her teaching and research focuses on peace, human rights and democratic citizenship education. Previously she founded and directed an international organization called Human Rights Education Associates and continues to engage with UN agencies and other organizations engaged in the international human rights movement.
The New Global Health: It’s Not Just for Doctors
3:00-3:50PM Sever Hall Room 214
Vivian Lee, Andy Pugh, Marilyn Butler, Lisa Hirschhorn, Brian Mullaney
Most of our class has been fortunate enough to have lived and worked in countries with the most advanced healthcare services, technologies and medical diagnostics, devices, drugs and vaccines. Much of the world is far worse off, faced with multiple obstacles that limit their access to safe and affordable health care. Some of our classmates have invested their time, effort, or money toward finding solutions to these enormous global health challenges, addressing deficiencies in healthcare systems, training healthcare workers, and producing diagnostics and medicines specifically for use in developing areas of the world.
Many more opportunities exist for people in our class who have strong skills in other fields to become involved, helping to address social inequities, building advocacy, and strengthening management and leadership.
Come listen as panelists share their experiences, and learn how you can have an impact today, working together to make a difference in global health.
Speaker Details:
Moderator
Vivian Lee
- Managing Director
- Aqua Partners LLC
- Strategy consulting for life science industry
From Haiti to Ebola: A role for management skills in humanitarian relief
Andy Pugh
- Senior executive for non-profits and humanitarian response
- Adjunct Professor
- University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public and International Affairs
Priorities in global health: Moving beyond the infectious diseases
Marilyn W. Butler, MD, MPhil, MPH
- Professor of Surgery
- Oregon Health and Science University
- Founder, Global Paediatric Surgery Network
Global Health in 2016: Where do you fit in?
Lisa Hirschhorn, MD, MPH
- Associate Professor of Medicine
- Department of Global Health and Social Medicine
- Harvard Medical School
- Director of Implementation and Improvement Sciences at Ariadne Labs
You don’t have to be a doctor to make a difference in global health
Brian Mullaney
- Co-Founder and former 10+ year CEO of Smile Train, which has provided 1.2 million free surgeries and raised $1+ billion
- Producer of Smile Pinki, winner of the 2009 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject, describing the journey of a destitute Indian child from her village to a hospital where her cleft palate was repaired by surgeons working for Smile Train
- Current Founder/CEO of WonderWork, which is providing 100,000 surgeries annually to tackle blindness, clubfoot and burns
Making our cities better: design using sustainable transportation, buildings, and materials
3:00-3:50PM Sever Hall Room 203
Cara Seiderman, Alberto Knoepfler, Roger Platt, Vince Marazita, Jennifer Hernandez
The session will consist of a series of quick presentations, making for a lively and engaging format.
Roger will speak on the increase in socially responsible investing with a focus on real estate and infrastructure investment and its relationship to global efforts to address climate change.
Cara will examine the details of planning: who spends more at local shops? Which cities are safest? How does a community stay fit? Who lives longest? The confluence of city design, transportation planning, healthy populations, thriving economies, success in schools AND solving climate change – it’s all here! In a few minutes, you’ll learn fun facts to know and tell about how the most successful, healthy, livable cities are those where people fill the public streets and spaces and getting around is on foot, bike and transit.
Jennifer will discuss the relationship between environmental/zoning laws and poverty/transportation/housing challenges, reinforcing the need for a multi-disciplinary approach to sustainable cities initiatives.
Vince will speak about sustainability from a building materials and building life cycle standpoint.
Albert will talk about sustainable architecture in home design, presenting ideas on site placement, response to local climate such as passive solar design and cross ventilation, use of sustainable materials as well as local manufacturing, and solar power systems. The houses are located in Central America where many local constraints and the exorbitant price of energy make these ecological solutions more necessity than an enlightened vision. Many of these ideas, however, can be exported to rich countries like the US and implemented, especially in areas with similar climates.
Roger Platt serves as Senior Vice President, Strategic Planning for GBCI, that administers on behalf of its sister organization – U.S. Green Building Council – the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design or “LEED” green building rating system in 150 countries. Roger focuses on new environmental rating tools aimed at creating more sustainable – and more investable – buildings, neighborhoods and cities.
Cara Seiderman is Transportation Program Manager for the City of Cambridge, overseeing the City’s bike share program and managing the Bicycle and Pedestrian Mobility Program. Ms. Seiderman has worked in an advisory capacity for several state and national design and technical guides, and frequently gives presentations and workshops on pedestrian and bicycle facility planning, traffic calming, and livable city design. She holds Masters Degrees in City and Regional Planning and Landscape Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Bachelor’s Degree in environmental policy from Harvard University. Ms. Seiderman was a Fulbright Scholar at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.
Vince Marazita moved to Italy on a Rotary International Fellowship after graduating from Harvard, and lived there for 6 years, teaching in the Architectural Department of the University of Genoa in Northern Italy. He came back to the USA as a consultant for the Italian Government (ICE – Istituto per il Commercio Estero) and has worked in the International dimensions stone industry since 1986. Vince served on the National CES Quality Control Committee for the American Institute of Architects and he also served on the jury for the National CES Awards for the AIA. He was Education Director for the Marble Institute of America and was a contributing editor to the Marble Institute’s Design Manual. He is also a member of the Quarries committee to create a BEST PRACTICES standard for Sustainability in Natural Stone Processing.
Jennifer Hernandez leads the West Coast Land Use and Environment Practice Group for Holland & Knight, a San Francisco law firm. She has achieved national prominence in her work on brownfields redevelopment, wetlands and endangered species, and master planned community projects. She also chairs a conference on Climate Change Law in California, and has written and spoken extensively on the topic. Her climate change practice currently includes integrating climate change requirements (relating to greenhouse gas emissions as well as water supply, flood and fire risk, and other topical areas) into the environmental analyses required by the California Environmental Quality Act. She has taught land use and environmental law for the University of California and Stanford Law School. She has a J.D. from Stanford Law School as well as a B.A. from Harvard.
Alberto Knoepfler is the founder of ACK Architecture in Miami, with projects in the United States and Central America. Over the past decade ACK has been responsible for a wide range of work, from masterplans in Nicaragua, Mexico and Costa Rica, homes, multi-family developments in Florida, store designs, and commercial buildings. A native of Nicaragua, Albert has an undergraduate degree in Engineering from Harvard University and a Master’s in Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Achieving Leaps Forward in Population Health
4:00-4:50PM Sever Hall Room 213
Karen Scott, Dayna Bowen Matthew, Jessica Banthin, Stephen Warnke, Amy Boesky, Arnold Chen
We will create a dialogue from several different perspectives – private and public health systems, public health professionals and clinicians, public health lawyers, health insurers, advocates, and policymakers –and inspire a rich conversation among our panelists and members of the audience, on how we in the public health and health care worlds can drive the population health agenda.
Karen Scott is currently the Chief Medical Officer in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Karen’s medical career has focused on health care and public health policy, and improving the quality and safety of health care services. She has held senior roles in national philanthropy, and public and academic hospital systems in New York City.
Dayna Bowen Matthew is a health and constitutional law professor at the University of Colorado Law School, currently on leave in Washington D.C. After serving last year as a Senior Advisor to the EPA’s Office of Civil Rights, Dayna became a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellow where she now works on health law and policy for the U.S. Senate. Dayna specializes in developing law and policy to incentivize delivery and payment models that address the health of vulnerable populations. Dayna has just published a book titled, Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care. Back in Boulder, Colorado, Dayna lives with her husband and classmate, Thomas L. Matthew, M.D. (A.B. ’81) where together, they work to eradicate health inequality here in America and in East Africa.
Jessica Banthin is a senior manager at the Congressional Budget Office with a background in health economics. The Congressional Budget Office is a non-partisan agency responsible for advising the U.S. Congress on budget and economic issues and for estimating the budgetary costs of federal legislation. Since her arrival at CBO in 2011, Jessica has focused primarily on analyses and cost estimates related to the Affordable Care Act, which was enacted in 2010 and is estimated to expand health insurance coverage to 24 million people by 2017. Prior to joining CBO, Jessica worked for many years at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. She earned her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland at College Park.
Stephen Warnke has been a New York City health care lawyer for the past 25 years, representing hospitals, health systems, chronic and long-term care providers, and provider-sponsored Medicaid health plans on regulatory, enforcement, policy and payment matters. He chairs FAIR Health, a charitable non-profit that publishes benchmark claims data drawn from a repository of over 150 million covered lives and is thus a major contributor to the health care cost and transparency debates. Stephen lives in Brooklyn with his wife Susan, supports the Affordable Care Act and is an occasional, ever appreciative consumer of health care services.
Amy Boesky is Professor of English and Director of the minor in Medical Humanities at Boston College, an undergraduate program that aims to deepen the study of health and health care practices by bringing the humanities and social sciences to bear on some of the fundamental ethical and policy issues we face today. Amy has published a memoir (What We Have, 2010) and edited a collection of essays (The Story Within, 2013) on issues related to genetics, risk, and identity–particularly BRCA, the so-called “breast cancer gene.” She is currently writing about representations of breast cancer from the early modern period to the present.
Arnold Chen is a senior clinician researcher at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. Mathematica is a nonpartisan research organization whose 1,200+ experts conduct policy research, data collection, and data analytics to improve public well-being for decision makers in public and private sectors, both in the U.S. and internationally. Since joining Mathematica 17 years ago, Arnold has focused on evaluating Medicare reform initiatives for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and more recently, for the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation. He also holds an ScM degree in Health Policy and Management from Harvard Chan School of Public Health, and is a primary care internist practicing at a federally qualified community health clinic that cares for a medically underserved population.
Energy, Carbon and the Clean Pivot
4:00-4:50PM Sever Hall Room 214
Morry Cater, Clair Mays Poumadere, Dave Smith, Bob DiMatteo, Rob Stowe
In December 2015, 195 nations pledged to make significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to avert the worst impacts of climate change. Though the United States Congress did not participate and continues to be polarized over the science, many of our institutions, industries, states and municipalities are moving ahead, assessing the risk and beginning to pursue strategic sustainability.
Come hear from Harvard classmates working on these issues and exploring new solutions at the global level, on the Hill and in the heartland. They will talk about the major disruption happening in energy and the electric utility industry as distributed renewable energies become increasingly cost competitive with fossil fuels. A virtuous cycle is taking hold, making the transition as much an economic imperative as an environmental one. What energy and carbon policy battles are being fought and won, what business models and technologies are wreaking havoc, and what new regulatory frameworks stand to underpin the transition to cleaner and more resilient energy systems and infrastructure? Join the conversation and consider key trends underway – from economic to cultural — as the world begins to not just reconcile the magnitude of the challenge, but also take full measure of the opportunity. Finally, we will posit a role our class and Harvard can play in accelerating the transition.
Speaker Details:
Morrow Cater ‘81 is President and Founding Principal of a bipartisan strategic communications and public policy firm specializing in working across political, economic, demographic and cultural lines to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy. Cater is a recognized expert on climate and clean energy issues, and spoke at the 2013 TED conference, about Bridging the Partisan Divide over Climate.
Robert DiMatteo ‘81 is Chairman and Founder of MTPV LLC having served as CEO from 2006-2015 and has spent over 25 years of his career pursuing clean energy technology and innovation. He became the recognized leader in the emerging micron-gap thermo-photovoltaic (MTPV) field, based on his graduate work at MIT, obtaining numerous patents and publishing a number of papers on clean energy technology and finance.
Claire Mays ’81 is a social psychologist and action researcher, who has resided in France since graduation. She’s leading a public survey on engagement with climate change and energy transition in four European nations, and can talk about nudges helping French and Spanish citizens to adapt their energy consumption behavior.
Dave Smith ‘81 has over 30 years of diverse energy industry and entrepreneurial experience with a background in efficiency, clean energy, project finance, and advanced energy infrastructure. His focus now is on the grid “edge” where the convergence of real-time data, cleaner distributed generation, energy storage and resilient microgrids are emerging to de-carbonize and strengthen the global electric grid.
Robert Stowe ’81 is an expert on international climate-change policy—including the Paris Agreement—at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Executive Director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program. He is managing a multi-year project to identify research-based options for elaborating and implementing the Paris Agreement.