2019 LEAP Workshop Speakers and organizers
Below are the confirmed speakers, listed in order of the agenda, for the 2019 LEAP Workshop at Public Citizen.
Anthony D. So
Anthony D. So, MD, MPA, is the second Professor of the Practice and Founding Director of the Innovation+Design Enabling Access (IDEA) Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Based in Health Systems in the Department of International Health, the IDEA Initiative fosters innovation and design of new technologies for greater health access and impact. He also serves as thematic lead of the Transformative Technologies and Institutions arm of the Johns Hopkins Alliance for a Healthier World. As Director of the Strategic Policy Program of ReAct--Action on Antibiotic Resistance, he works with a global network dedicated to meeting the challenge of antimicrobial resistance, and his program serves as the Secretariat to the Antibiotic Resistance Coalition. Previously, Dr. So has served as the Director of the Duke Program on Global Health and Technology Access, as Associate Director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Health Equity Program, and as Senior Advisor to the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for Health Care Policy and Research. He was named a White House Fellow during the Clinton Administration and subsequently received the Secretary’s Distinguished Service Award for shepherding the Liaison Office for Quality in support of the President’s Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry and the Consumer Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. Most recently, he served as Co-Convener of the UN Interagency Coordination Group on Antimicrobial Resistance. Currently, Dr. So serves on the Boards of two of the nation’s most prominent consumer and healthcare groups, Public Citizen and Community Catalyst.
Zain Rizvi
Zain Rizvi is an expert on drug pricing. He has provided technical assistance to state and national governments, coordinated civil society coalitions, and published on intellectual property, access to medicines and global health. He was a Gruber Fellow at SECTION27, a Johannesburg-based public interest organization. Zain obtained a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was student director of the Yale Global Health Justice Partnership. He has a bachelor’s degree from McMaster University and has published in medical and legal journals, including The Lancet and the Yale Journal of Law & Technology.
Steve Knievel
Steve Knievel is an advocate for Public Citizen's Access to Medicines program, focusing on expanding affordable access to medicines. Knievel is an expert in policy matters affecting drug pricing and access to medicines in the United States. He has worked to develop and advance federal policy measures to lower prescription drug prices, including policies to facilitate government drug price negotiation, stop price spikes, and curb monopoly abuses of industry. Knievel brings to Public Citizen his knowledge and experience in domestic and international campaign work, including thorough policy analysis, lobbying, communications and coalition building.
Peter Lurie
Peter Lurie is President of Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). CSPI is one of the oldest independent, science-based consumer advocacy organizations with an variety of accomplishments and a clear and ambitious agenda for improving the food system to support healthy eating. Previously, Lurie was the Associate Commissioner for Public Health Strategy and Analysis at the Food and Drug Administration, where he worked on antimicrobial resistance, transparency, caffeinated beverages, arsenic in rice, fish consumption by pregnant and nursing women, expanded access to investigational drugs, and prescription drug abuse. Prior to that, he was Deputy Director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, where he addressed drug and device issues, co-authored the organization’s Worst Pills, Best Pills consumer guide to medications, and led efforts to reduce worker exposure to hexavalent chromium and beryllium. Earlier, as a faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco and the University of Michigan, he studied needle exchange programs, ethical aspects of mother-to-infant HIV transmission studies, and other HIV policy issues domestically and abroad.
Laura Marston
Laura Marston has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 23 years, since age 14. She is an Intellectual Property attorney and a relentless patient advocate for affordable insulin in the United States. In 2016, Laura’s story of struggling to afford insulin was published on the front page of the Washington Post in an article that ultimately broke the story of astronomical insulin prices to Congress and the United States public. Laura was interviewed by Sarah Kliff for the pilot episode of Vox Media’s podcast, “The Impact,” and was invited to the White House by then-President Obama to discuss insulin prices and the Affordable Care Act. Laura has written and published numerous opinion pieces on insulin prices, including one featured in the British Medical Journal, and regularly co-authors essays on insulin prices with representatives such as Nevada State Senator Yvanna Cancela, who passed the country’s first insulin price transparency law in 2017. She also helped write the February 2019 “Drug Pricing” episode of The Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, which focused on the rapidly rising price of insulin in the United States.
Manon Ress
Dr. Manon Ress is a Founder and Acting Director of the Union for Affordable Cancer Treatment (UACT). Beginning with her work at Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), Dr. Ress’ mission has focused on the protection on consumer and user rights in intellectual property norm setting, the development and use of open standards, open access publishing, the development of open access user generated databases, and the use of prizes and other alternative reward mechanism to reward creative and inventive activity. She has been an active participant at the World Intellectual Property Organization’s meetings of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights, and other multilateral and regional forums that discuss intellectual property rights, innovation and related topics.
In 2010, Dr. Ress was diagnosed with cancer and began to hear from patients around her about the struggles they faced in gaining access to the treatments they critically needed. She began to focus her advocacy skills towards improving access to and innovation of cancer treatments in the US and globally. As one of the founding members of UACT, Dr. Ress has represented UACT from its inception, delivering interventions before the US International Trade Commission, World Health Organization, and monitoring policy talks at forums such as the negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, where many IP norms that impact drug pricing are decided.
Too often, patients’ voices are not heard in the very meetings where their fates are being decided. Through UACT, Dr. Ress seeks to educate and empower patients’ to demand openness and transparency in drug pricing and the policies that impact pricing. Dr. Ress holds a B.A. and a Master’s Degree from the Université de Nice, France as well as a Master’s and a Ph.D. from Princeton University.
Reshma Ramachandran
Reshma Ramachandran, MD, MPP is a Family Medicine resident at Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center and Associate of the IDEA (Innovation+Design Enabling Access) Initiative in the Department of International Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Prior to this role, Reshma worked as an Assistant Scientist as part of the IDEA Initiative at Johns Hopkins, where she focused on antimicrobial resistance and access to medicines including state drug pricing proposals. She and her colleagues supported efforts in Maryland to curb high drug prices by helping draft legislation, providing background materials, and offering testimony at the Maryland General Assembly. She also helped edit the White Paper co-authored by the Yale Global Health Justice Project and Universal Healthcare Foundation of Connecticut entitled, “Curbing Unfair Drug Prices: A Primer for States.” Reshma trained in both medicine at the Alpert Medical School at Brown University and in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Previously, she served as the first PharmFree Fellow with the American Medical Student Association focused on removing the undue influence of pharmaceutical companies on both prescribing and medical education from academic medical centers. She also currently serves as a board member of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM) North America and part of the National Steering Committee for the Doctors for America Drug Affordability Action Team.
Avanthi Jayaweera
Avanthi Jayaweera is a fourth-year medical student at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) School of Medicine and serves as the Vice President for Leadership Development on the Board of Trustees for the American Medical Student Association (AMSA). Prior to this role, she served as the 2018 AMSA Education and Advocacy Fellow where she worked closely with AMSA’s National Leaders on major educational programming and advocacy campaigns related to gun violence prevention, civic engagement, access to medicines, and affordable healthcare. As the AMA Fellow, she traveled to multiple medical schools to host advocacy skills workshops to train students on how to be effective advocates for patients. She also organized AMSA’s Advocacy Leadership Summit to engage students in initiatives related to lowering drug prices and addressing the alarming influence of the pharmaceutical industry on medical education and public policy. As a medical student at VCU, she is currently designing an advocacy and leadership curriculum to prepare medical trainees to face and challenge systemic barriers to health as future physician leaders.
Josh Sharfstein
Dr. Josh Sharfstein is serves as Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement and Professor of the Practice in Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is also director of the Bloomberg American Health Initiative. He has previously served as Health Secretary for the State of Maryland, as Health Commissioner for the City of Baltimore, as Principal Deputy Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and as professional staff for Congressman Henry A. Waxman. He is the author of the Public Health Crisis Survival Guide: Leadership and Management in Trying Times, and co-author of The Opioid Epidemic: What Everyone Needs to Know, both published by Oxford University Press.
Leana Wen
Dr. Leana Wen is an emergency physician, public health leader, and a passionate advocate for patient-centered health care reform. The author of the critically-acclaimed book, When Doctors Don’t Listen, her TED talk on transparency in medicine has been viewed nearly 2 million times. In 2019, Dr. Wen was named one of TIME 100’s Most Influential People.
Dr. Wen is currently a Visiting Professor of Health Policy and Management at the George Washington University School of Public Health, where she is also the Distinguished Fellow at the Fitzhugh Mullan Institute of Health Workforce Equity. She has served as President/CEO of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. As the first physician to lead Planned Parenthood in nearly 50 years, Dr. Wen’s worked to expand comprehensive healthcare for vulnerable women and families. Previously, she was the Health Commissioner for the City of Baltimore, where she led the nation’s oldest continuously operating health department in the U.S. to fight the opioid epidemic, treat violence and racism as public health issues, and improve maternal and child health.
Jamie Love
James Love is Director of Knowledge Ecology International. His training is in economics and finance, and work focuses on the production, management and access to knowledge resources, as well as aspects of competition policy. The current focus is on the financing of research and development, intellectual property rights, prices for and access to new drugs, vaccines and other medical technologies, as well as related topics for other knowledge goods, including data, software, other information protected by copyright or related rights, and proposals to expand the production of knowledge as a public good. James Love holds a Masters of Public Administration from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a Masters in Public Affairs from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He advises UN agencies, national governments, international and regional intergovernmental organizations and public health NGOs, and is the author of a number of articles and monographs on innovation and intellectual property rights.
Rob Weissman
Robert Weissman has served as President of Public Citizen since 2009. He is a lawyer who has focused on intellectual property and access to medicines, among many other issues. He was part of the team of people who helped drive down the price of HIV/AIDS drugs in developing countries – dropping prices by more than 99 percent and enabling more than 15 million people to get access to lifesaving treatment – and he has helped conceptualize a number of legislative proposals to rein in excessive drug prices in the United States.
Matt Wellington
Matt Wellington is the Program Director for U.S. PIRG in its work to reduce antibiotic use in industrial agriculture. Matt works to build relationships with key stakeholders across the country including medical professionals, responsible farmers, and food industry leaders to demonstrate support for and trigger movement toward more responsible antibiotics use. He also oversees campaign operations with hundreds of organizers and volunteers across the country to eliminate routine antibiotic use in industrial agriculture. In the last few years he has helped convince both Subway and KFC to greatly reduce the use of antibiotics in their meat supply. These commitments from major corporate actors help to push the meat industry away from overusing our life-saving medicines. Matt’s work has resulted in hundreds of thousands of people promoting antibiotic stewardship through grassroots actions including petitions and social media actions. Matt also works to engage health professionals more deeply across the country, and as a result has launched a new project—the Health Professional Action Network (HPAN), a network of more than 40,000 health professionals who have taken action on the issue of antibiotic overuse.
Organizers
Anthony So
Anthony D. So, MD, MPA, is the second Professor of the Practice and Founding Director of the Innovation+Design Enabling Access (IDEA) Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Based in Health Systems in the Department of International Health, the IDEA Initiative fosters innovation and design of new technologies for greater health access and impact. He also serves as thematic lead of the Transformative Technologies and Institutions arm of the Johns Hopkins Alliance for a Healthier World. As Director of the Strategic Policy Program of ReAct--Action on Antibiotic Resistance, he works with a global network dedicated to meeting the challenge of antimicrobial resistance, and his program serves as the Secretariat to the Antibiotic Resistance Coalition. Previously, Dr. So has served as the Director of the Duke Program on Global Health and Technology Access, as Associate Director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Health Equity Program, and as Senior Advisor to the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for Health Care Policy and Research. He was named a White House Fellow during the Clinton Administration and subsequently received the Secretary’s Distinguished Service Award for shepherding the Liaison Office for Quality in support of the President’s Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry and the Consumer Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. Most recently, he served as Co-Convener of the UN Interagency Coordination Group on Antimicrobial Resistance. Currently, Dr. So serves on the Boards of two of the nation’s most prominent consumer and healthcare groups, Public Citizen and Community Catalyst.
Peter Maybarduk
Peter Maybarduk helps partners around the world overcome high-price pharmaceutical monopolies and secure the benefits of science, technology and culture for all. He is an intellectual property expert and is available to discuss drug pricing, trade and technology policy. Peter’s analysis and strategy helped eliminate many harmful measures from the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership. His work has yielded HIV/AIDS medicine price reductions, new state access to medicines policies and global shifts toward anti-counterfeiting policies that safeguard generic competition. Peter has provided technical assistance to international organizations and to public agencies and civil society groups in more than three dozen countries. He is a visiting fellow with the Information Society Program at Yale Law School. He obtained a J.D. from Berkeley Law School (University of California), where he was the editor of the California Law Review. He obtained a bachelor’s degree with honors in anthropology, magna cum laude, The College of William & Mary. Peter’s prior work includes cultural ethnography in South America’s Orinoco river delta and organizing campaigns for voting rights and living wages, among others. He is the co-founder of International Professional Partnerships for Sierra Leone, dedicated to supporting public sector development in one of the world’s least developed countries. Peter has been quoted in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Times of India, The Guardian and other major papers.
Steve Knievel
Steve Knievel is an advocate for Public Citizen's Access to Medicines program, focusing on expanding affordable access to medicines. Knievel is an expert in policy matters affecting drug pricing and access to medicines in the United States. He has worked to develop and advance federal policy measures to lower prescription drug prices, including policies to facilitate government drug price negotiation, stop price spikes, and curb monopoly abuses of industry. Knievel brings to Public Citizen his knowledge and experience in domestic and international campaign work, including thorough policy analysis, lobbying, communications and coalition building.
Reshma Ramachandran
Reshma Ramachandran, MD, MPP is a Family Medicine resident at Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center and Associate of the IDEA (Innovation+Design Enabling Access) Initiative in the Department of International Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Prior to this role, Reshma worked as an Assistant Scientist as part of the IDEA Initiative at Johns Hopkins, where she focused on antimicrobial resistance and access to medicines including state drug pricing proposals. She and her colleagues supported efforts in Maryland to curb high drug prices by helping draft legislation, providing background materials, and offering testimony at the Maryland General Assembly. She also helped edit the White Paper co-authored by the Yale Global Health Justice Project and Universal Healthcare Foundation of Connecticut entitled, “Curbing Unfair Drug Prices: A Primer for States.” Reshma trained in both medicine at the Alpert Medical School at Brown University and in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Previously, she served as the first PharmFree Fellow with the American Medical Student Association focused on removing the undue influence of pharmaceutical companies on both prescribing and medical education from academic medical centers. She also currently serves as a board member of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM) North America and part of the National Steering Committee for the Doctors for America Drug Affordability Action Team.
Prateek Sharma
Prateek Sharma is a Research Associate with ReAct North America and the Innovation + Design Enabling Access (IDEA) Initiative in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Before joining ReAct, he was a graduate student at the “Do Bugs Need Drugs?” program at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. Additionally, gained training in global health through an internship with the World Health Organization Head Quarter. He received a Masters of Science degree in Population and Public Health from the University of British Columbia.
Joshua Woo
Currently, Josh is an undergraduate student at the Johns Hopkins University studying Public Health Studies and Economics. Before attending Hopkins, he attended Riverside High School in Greer, South Carolina. Josh has a variety of research interests, and in addition to working with the TTI arm of the Alliance for a Healthier World, has worked with ReAct - Action on Antibiotic Resistance. Moreover, he has worked in Clemson University's Drug Design, Development, and Delivery (4D) lab, along with the Johns Hopkins Drug Discovery Program on a variety of projects, from nanoparticle therapy to HIV/AIDS research.
Josh also enjoys traveling and volunteering abroad, and has participated in a number of health initiatives abroad, from the rural villages of Siem Reap, Cambodia to the towns of Anconcito, Ecuador. In addition to global health, he is especially passionate about reducing health inequity and increasing access to healthcare and open science abroad. Outside of his academic studies, Josh enjoys hiking and exploring new cultures, meeting new people, and trying new foods.
