Meet the Speakers

Chief Executive Officer, Mount Sinai Health System
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Kenneth L. Davis, MD is the Chief Executive Officer of the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, one of the nation’s largest integrated health systems, which includes the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, eight hospitals, and more than 400 ambulatory sites. He is a leader in the move away from fee-for-service medicine to population health with the aim of keeping more patients healthy and out of the hospital. As a neurobiologist, Dr. Davis conducted pioneering research that led the FDA to approve four of the first five drugs for treating Alzheimer’s disease. In 2002, he was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Davis is one of the most highly cited researchers in the field of brain diseases. His awards include the George H. W. Bush Lifetime of Leadership Award from Yale. In 2014 he was named a trustee of the Aspen Institute.

Vice President and Chief Diversity Operations Officer, Mount Sinai Hospital Groups
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Pamela Abner, MPA, CPXP is the Vice President and Chief Diversity Operations Officer for the Mount Sinai Hospitals Group. She has more than fourteen years of experience working with industry leaders to establish strategic and innovative programs for diversity, inclusion, and equity. Utilizing research methodologies, creating education curriculum, and applying best practices, she continuously seeks to help organizations identify discriminatory practices and disparities. A certified patient experience professional and unconscious bias educator, she focuses on eliminating barriers to care, employment, and education for underserved and underrepresented groups, and fostering relationships with community partners.

Ms. Abner received her bachelor’s degree from Brown University and master’s degree in Public Administration from Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. A frequent presenter in national forums, she was named one of the Most Influential Women in Corporate America in 2019 by Savoy Magazine and a Notable Woman in Talent Resources by Crain’s New York Business in 2020.

Director, Icahn Genomics Institute

Associate Director, Marc and Jennifer Lipschultz Precision Immunology Institute

Professor, Genetics and Genomic Sciences
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
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Brian Brown, PhD is a world-renowned expert in genetic engineering and gene therapy, immunology, biotechnology, and genomics. He is Director of the Icahn Genomics Institute, Associate Director of Mount Sinai’s Marc and Jennifer Lipshultz Precision Immunology Institute (PrIISM), and Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, and Dermatology.

Dr. Brown was one of the first to describe how the innate immune system responds to gene therapy, which had a major impact on the field, and he invented an entirely new form of targeting expression of RNA, DNA, and viral therapeutics. His technology is now being used in therapies undergoing human clinical trials for treatment of different types of cancers.

Dr. Brown is also an inventor of a number of important genomics technologies, and has made many high-impact scientific discoveries, particularly in the field of immunology, including the discovery of some of the mechanisms that control how the immune system develops, functions, and controls tumor growth.

Medical Director, The Health Center at Hudson Yards

Professor, Medicine, Pulmonary, Critical Care, Sleep Medicine, and Infectious Diseases, Mount Sinai Health System
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Louis DePalo, MD, FCCP, is Medical Director of The Health Center at Hudson Yards and Professor of Medicine, Pulmonary, Critical Care, Sleep Medicine, and Infectious Diseases at Mount Sinai Health System. A physician-scientist, DePalo is highly skilled in the implementation of digital technologies in health system settings. He is a fellow of the American College of Chest Physicians and a member of the American College of Physicians, the Society of Critical Care Medicine, and the American Thoracic Society. DePalo is a Stony Wold-Herbert Fund recipient and was co-investigator on an NIH contract for “A Case Control Etiologic Study of Sarcoidosis”. DePalo has held clinical and academic appointments at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Executive Vice President and Chief Population Health Officer, Mount Sinai Health System
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Robert Fields, MD is a family medicine physician and serves as Executive Vice President and Chief Population Health Officer at the Mount Sinai Health System. In this role, Dr. Fields leads a network of hospitals and physicians managing $3.5 billion of medical spending for more than 450,000 patients in the New York metropolitan region. Dr. Fields also leads system strategy and operations for managed care and value-based contracting and population health analytics. Dr. Fields came to Mount Sinai in March of 2018 as Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer for Population Health and oversaw the redesign of clinical operations for value including care management, provider engagement, quality programs, remote monitoring and condition management, social determinants, and other aspects of the system’s population health strategy.

Dean, Artificial Intelligence and Human Health

Co-Director, Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health

Professor, Computational Pathology and Computer Science
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
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Thomas J. Fuchs, DRSc is a scientist in the groundbreaking field of Computational Pathology, focused on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze images of tissue samples to identify disease, recommend treatment, and predict outcome. In 2020, he was appointed Co-Director of the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health at Mount Sinai, Dean of AI and Human Health, and Professor of Computational Pathology and Computer Science at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Before joining Mount Sinai, Dr. Fuchs was Director of the Warren Alpert Center for Digital and Computational Pathology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Associate Professor at Weill Cornell Graduate School for Medical Sciences. He co-founded Paige AI in 2017 and led its growth to the leading AI company in pathology. He is a former research technologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and visiting scientist at the California Institute of Technology.

Director, Center of Advanced Circuit Therapeutics

Professor, Neurology, Neurosurgery, Psychiatry, and Neuroscience

Mount Sinai Professor of Neurotherapeutics
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
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Helen Mayberg, MD is a Professor of Neurology, Neurosurgery, Psychiatry, and Neuroscience, the Mount Sinai Professor in Neurotherapeutics, and Founding Director of the Nash Family Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Known for studies of brain circuits in depression and her pioneering deep brain stimulation research, her work combines cutting-edge imaging strategies, quantitative behavioral metrics, and rigorous clinical trials to define brain-based biomarkers that will optimize treatment selection for individual depressed patients at all stages of illness. She leads a patient-focused research team of neurologists, psychiatrists, neurosurgeons, neuroscientists, and engineers whose shared mission is to advance precision surgical treatments for complex neuropsychiatric disorders. A member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Inventors, she participates in a wide variety of scientific and advisory activities across multiple fields in neuroscience.

Horace W. Goldsmith Professor and Chair, Microbiology

Professor, Medicine
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
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Peter Palese, PhD is the Horace W. Goldsmith Professor and Chair of Microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. His research focuses on RNA-containing viruses, especially influenza viruses. He has been a pioneer in the field of reverse genetics for negative-strand RNA viruses, which is crucial for the study of the structure/function relationships of these viruses’ genes, for investigations of viral pathogenicity, and for the development and manufacture of novel viral vaccines. In recent years, Dr. Palese and his Mount Sinai collaborators, Adolfo Garcia-Sastre, PhD, and Florian Krammer, PhD have directed most of their efforts at developing a universal influenza vaccine and a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine for low- and middle-income countries. Dr. Palese is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.

Executive Director, Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery
Mount Sinai Health System

Professor, Medicine
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
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Joshua Safer, MD is the Executive Director of the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery in New York City and Professor of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Dr. Safer co-authored the Endocrine Society transgender medical care guidelines, along with the most recent reviews of transgender medicine in The New England Journal of Medicine and Annals of Internal Medicine. Dr. Safer is the medical curriculum lead for the Global Education Institute of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and a member of WPATH’s Standards of Care revision committee. In addition, Dr. Safer co-authors the transgender hormone section for the medical resource UpToDate.

Dr. Safer was the inaugural president of the United States Professional Association for Transgender Health. He has also advised a diverse array of institutions on transgender medical care, including the United States military, the International Olympic Committee, and World Athletics.

Endowed Professor, Psychiatry and Neuroscience of Trauma
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
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Rachel Yehuda, PhD is a leader in traumatic stress studies, conducting research on cortisol and epigenetic mechanisms that has revolutionized the understanding of the neurobiology and treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Dr. Yehuda is the endowed Mount Sinai Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience of Trauma at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Director of Mental Health at the James J. Peters Veterans Affairs Medical Center. In 2020, she established and now directs the Center for Psychedelic Psychotherapy and Trauma Research.

Dr. Yehuda has authored more than 500 academic papers in the field of PTSD and intergenerational trauma. In 2019, she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine for her seminal contributions to understanding the psychological and biological impact of traumatic stress.