Harriet A. Washington, MA

Harriet A. Washington, MA is a science writer, editor and ethicist who is the author of Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Informed Consent in Medical Research (2021, Columbia Global Reports); and A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind. She has been Writing Fellow in Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, the 2015-2016 Miriam Shearing Fellow at the University of Nevada’s Black Mountain Institute, a Research Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School, Visiting Fellow at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, a visiting scholar at DePaul University College of Law and a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University. She has also held fellowships at Stanford University, and teaches bioethics at Columbia University, where she delivered the 2020 commencement speech to Columbia’s School of Public Health graduates, and won the 2020 Mailman School Of Public Health’s Public Health Leadership Award, as well as the 2020-21 Kenneth and Mamie Clark Distinguished Lecture Award. In 2016, she was elected a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, and in 2021, the American Medical Writers Association gave her the Walter C. Alvarez Award.

Jack Resneck Jr., MD

Jack Resneck Jr., MD, became president of the American Medical Association in June 2022. For more than 20 years, Dr. Resneck has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to organized medicine. He is a passionate advocate for physicians and patients, a prominent spokesperson for innovation, and a champion for a more equitable health care system.

Rupa Marya, MD

Dr. Rupa Marya is a physician, activist, writer, mother, and a composer. She is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where she practices and teaches internal medicine. Her work sits at the nexus of climate, health and racial justice. She is a co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition, a collective of health workers committed to addressing disease through structural change. At the invitation of Lakȟota health leaders, she is helping to set up the Mni Wiconi Health Clinic and Farm at Standing Rock to decolonize medicine and food. Dr Marya is also co-founder and executive director of the Deep Medicine Circle, an organization committed to healing the wounds of colonialism through food, medicine, story and learning. Working with Association of Ramaytush Ohlone, she developed the Farming is Medicine project, where farmers are recast as ecological stewards under Indigenous leadership, and food is liberated from the market economy. Dr Marya was recognized in 2021 with the Women Leaders in Medicine Award by the American Medical Student Association. She was a reviewer of the American Medical Association's Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity. Dr. Marya was appointed by Governor Newsom to the Healthy California for All Commission, to advance a model for universal healthcare in California. She has toured twenty-nine countries with her band, Rupa and the April Fishes, whose music was described by the legend Gil Scott-Heron as “Liberation Music.” Her book on the health impacts of colonialism, which articulates a bold new paradigm for diagnosis — Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice — written with Raj Patel will be out internationally August 2021.

David Ansell, MD, MPH

David Ansell, MD, MPH is the Michael E Kelly Presidential Professor of Internal Medicine and Senior Vice President/Associate Provost for Community Health Equity at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. He is a 1978 graduate of SUNY Upstate Medical College. He did his medical training at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. He spent 13 years at Cook County as an attending physician and ultimately was appointed Chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine at Cook County Hospital. From 1995 to 2005 he was Chairman of Internal Medicine at Mount Sinai Chicago. He was recruited to Rush University Medical Center as its inaugural Chief Medical Officer in 2005, a position he held until 2015. His research and advocacy has been focused on eliminating health inequities. In 2011 he published a memoir of his times at County Hospital, County: Life, Death and Politics at Chicago’s Public Hospital. His latest book is The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills was published in 2017.