Meet the participants taking part in the project
Dr Akshar Abbott, Director, Community for Innovation in Vision Care (CIViC)
US National Academy of Medicine
Dr Akshar Abbott is an ophthalmologist and medical retina specialist working to bring critical retina subspecialty services to the rural Midwest. After growing up in his beloved home state of West Virginia, he completed his undergraduate, medical school and ophthalmology residency training at the University of Pittsburgh before completing his fellowship in Medical Retina at the National Institutes of Health. In addition to his clinical role, he is currently a graduate student in Epidemiology at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, a Scholar in Diagnostic Excellence at the National Academy of Medicine, and a 2023 Obama Foundation Leader.
Dr Abbott works across the disciplines of telehealth, climate justice, and rural health to design and deploy high-quality ophthalmic subspecialty care programs in rural areas of critical need. His work focuses on leveraging telehealth technology to reimagine the delivery of medical services, decarbonizing medicine while allowing people to be seen where they are. For him, this work centres on the core aspiration of our democracy – the uncoupling of demographics and destiny, empowering all Americans to live their fullest lives independent of who they are or where they live.
Dr Deepa Jayakody Arachchillage, Honorary Senior Lecturer and MRC CARP Fellow, Imperial College London
Academy of Medical Sciences
Dr Deepa J Arachchillage is a consultant haematologist specialised in haemostasis and thrombosis, honorary senior lecturer, and MRC CARP Fellow at Imperial College London. She graduated in medicine in Sri Lanka and completed her specialist haematology in the UK, and MD (res) at University College London in 2015. She was named National Institute for Health and care Research/British Society for Haematology (BSH) researcher of the year 2021. She has published over 100 peer-reviewed publications. Her research interests are antiphospholipid syndrome (APS), immunothrombosis, acquired bleeding disorders including thrombosis and bleeding related to extracorporeal membrane oxygenation and cardiopulmonary bypass.
She has led several national guidelines and is a member of the BSH Thrombosis and Haemostasis Task Force. She is a member of several national steering committees including British Society for Haemostasis and Thrombosis (BSHT), National External Quality Assurance Scheme UK and a Co-Chair of the International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis Scientific and Standardization Subcommittee on Lupus Anticoagulant/Antiphospholipid Antibodies and a member of the international Extracorporeal Life Support Organization (ELSO) Scientific Oversight Committee. She serves as Research Advisory Group for autoimmune rheumatic diseases for Versus Arthritis, UK on the Editorial board of the Seminars in Thrombosis & Haemostasis and the section (haematology) editor for Journal of Clinical Medicine.
Professor Peter Bannister, Managing Director, Romilly Life Sciences
Academy of Medical Sciences
Peter Bannister (MEng DPhil MBA CEng FIET) has a research background in medical imaging and artificial intelligence from Oxford, leading to successful commercial solutions with Siemens Healthineers and Rolls Royce plc. He was selected as an inaugural Future Leader in Innovation, Enterprise, and Research (FLIER) by the Academy of Medical Sciences (AMS), also serving on Council, and continues to contribute to AMS strategy on healthcare technology adoption and the application of artificial intelligence. He is Healthcare Spokesperson for the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), IET Sustainability and Net Zero Policy Centre Chair, and honorary Professor at the University of Birmingham Centre for Regulatory Science and Innovation.
Peter has led the successful product commercialisation and strategic growth for multiple healthcare and life sciences businesses including start-ups, held senior technical and commercial leadership roles in global digital health and clinical research organisations and successfully delivered major international collaborations with leading academic clinical institutions and multinationals including GE, Canon, Bayer Consumer Health, and Novartis. He has chaired several NIHR funding programmes including the NHSX AI Award and most recently the £45m DHSC Healthtech Research Centres call and is a non-executive director for the Life Sciences Hub Wales.
Dr Amy Booth, Medical Practitioner and DPhil Candidate at the IRIHS Research Group, University of Oxford
UK Young Academy
Dr Amy Booth is a medical practitioner from South Africa. While working during the COVID-19 pandemic, she became aware of the environmental impact of health systems, prompting her to embark on research in this area. She is currently based at the University of Oxford where she is doing doctoral research, funded by a Rhodes Scholarship, on the carbon footprint of the pharmaceutical supply chain. She concurrently co-runs a Sustainable Health Care course at Oxford.
She has previously consulted with the World Health Organization on the role of environmental sources in contributing to antimicrobial resistance, with the United Nations on developing a standardised framework for measuring sustainability, is a member of an EU-wide Erasmus+ project on sustainable prescribing and sits on the Global Lethal Humidity Council. She has several publications on the intersection of climate and health and has presented on this topic on multiple national and international platforms, including featuring on the BBC Focus on Africa podcast. She is a member of the first cohort of the UK Young Academy.
Dr Claire Bourke, Senior Lecturer in Immunobiology, University of Glasgow
Academy of Medical Sciences
Dr Bourke is a Senior Lecturer in Immunobiology at the University of Glasgow and hold honorary positions at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), UK, and Zvitambo Institute for Maternal and Child Health Research, Zimbabwe. The broad aim of Claire’s research is to understand how infectious exposures shape the functional immune response to new challenges, focusing on paediatric undernutrition and its in utero origins. Claire has collaborated with colleagues in sub-Saharan Africa on translational immunology and population health projects since 2005, most recently joining a Wellcome-funded consortium investigating how extreme heat can exacerbate inflammation during pregnancy.
Dr Alice Bowen, Royal Society/EPSRC Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow, University of Manchester
UK Young Academy
Dr Alice Bowen is a Royal Society/EPSRC Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow; she started her fellowship at the University of Oxford in 2016 and moved to The University of Manchester in 2019, where she is part of the team running the EPSRC-funded National Research Facility for Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR). Alice obtained her MChem (2008) and DPhil (2013) in Chemistry, from University of Oxford, followed by a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship at Goethe University in Frankfurt. Her research interests lie in the field of pulsed EPR, specifically, applications to structural determination of biological and chemical systems and quantum information processing. Her group both use and develop pulsed EPR methodologies, in particular they have been at the forefront of recent developments in light-induced EPR techniques. Alice has recently undertaken a Royal Society Science Policy Placement in the Department of Science Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and is a member of the UK Young Academy.
Dr Yutong Cai, Lecturer in Environmental Epidemiology, University of Leicester
Academy of Medical Sciences
Dr Yutong Cai was medically trained in preventive medicine, before completing postgraduate studies in epidemiology (MSc, 2011) and environmental epidemiology (PhD, 2016) at Imperial College London. Before joining the University of Leicester, he was a research fellow at Imperial College London and a senior epidemiologist at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on studying the population health impacts of physical environmental exposures, in particular air pollution and traffic noise, in diverse geographical settings.
Recently, he has expanded the research portfolio to understand biological mechanisms underlying the observed epidemiological associations, as well as to investigate health impacts of climate change in vulnerable populations. Several of his past research endeavours have informed the discussion of relevant policies in the UK and beyond. To date he has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles in prestigious environmental health and medical journals.
Dr Kai Cheong, Honorary Clinical Assistant Professor in Paediatric and Adolescent Medicine, University of Hong Kong (HKU)
US National Academy of Medicine
Dr Kai Cheong is a specialist in Paediatric Immunology, Infectious Diseases and Allergy, and an Honorary Clinical Assistant Professor in Paediatric and Adolescent medicine at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). She currently serves as clinical service lead for an integrated, multidisciplinary and holistic Paediatric Immunology and Rheumatology team at Hong Kong Children’s Hospital. With diverse work experiences in both the developing and the developed world, she has spearheaded a team to develop and run a paediatric field hospital with humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) in South Sudan during the civil war and continues advocacy and fundraising for MSF.
She was awarded the Bill Marshall Memorial Fund Fellowship (2017) to work in gene therapy and haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HCST) for primary immunodeficiencies at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital (UK), and since 2014 has co-founded and led a successful public–private partnership program in HK bridging the funding gap for expensive imaging and drugs.
Dr Cheong is passionate about overcoming the barriers to achieving universal equitable healthcare access, including climate change-related inequities, through convening global cross-sectoral engagement, collaborative strategies and policy design that genuinely drive health systems transformation. As a NAM-HKU Fellow in Global Health Leadership focused on the US and Asian-Pacific contexts of healthcare delivery, her work focuses on integrating innovative technology into high-quality, ‘treat-to-target’, inclusive and community-centred healthcare systems in a sustainable, equitable and impactful manner.
Dr Ying Ying Goh, Director and Health Officer, City of Pasadena Public Health Department
US National Academy of Medicine
Dr Ying-Ying Goh, MD, MSHS, is the Director and Health Officer of the City of Pasadena Public Health Department and a board-certified paediatrician. She recently served as a Senior Policy Advisor in the Biden Administration working on health issues including reproductive healthcare access, maternal and women’s health, and youth mental health. In Pasadena, she served as incident commander for the COVID-19 and mpox responses. Her professional experience includes clinical paediatric practice, healthcare management consulting, and community-based participatory research to improve nutrition and physical activity for youth.
Dr Goh earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Public Policy at Stanford University, a Doctor of Medicine Degree at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and a Master of Health Services Research Degree from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. She completed paediatric residency training at Children’s Hospital Boston/Harvard University and Boston Medical Center/Boston University. She is an adjunct faculty member at the Kaiser Permanente Tyson School of Medicine.
Dr Sally Hargreaves, Associate Professor in Global Health, St Georges Hospital, University of London
Academy of Medical Sciences
Sally Hargreaves is an Associate Professor in Global Health at St George’s Hospital (University of London). She leads the Migrant Health Research Group, a multi-disciplinary team with a particular focus on vaccination, COVID-19, and health promotion and prevention in migrant and ethnic minority populations. She has experience working in a variety of research, consultancy, and lecturing posts relevant to designing and evaluating complex interventions in healthcare, with a strong focus on participatory research and co-design.
Dr Ehsan Hoque, Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Rochester
US National Academy of Medicine
Dr Ehsan Hoque is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rochester where he co-leads the Rochester Human-Computer Interaction (ROC HCI) Lab. His work focuses on understanding human behaviour and designing systems to improve equity in healthcare and education, benefiting those with communication challenges, including autism and PTSD.
Dr Hoque earned his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2013, where his dissertation of “Using Computers to Help with Conversations” was highlighted by the MIT Museum as one of MIT’s most unconventional inventions and received the ACM Ubicomp 10-year-impact award in 2023. This work has inspired “Presenter Coach” in Microsoft PowerPoint, used by millions every day.
Dr Hoque’s ideas and impact have been recognized through the MIT Technology Review's Top Innovators Under 35 Award in 2016 and the Early Career Award from the US Army Research Office. In 2017, Science News named him one of the one of 10 early- to mid-career scientists to watch. In 2020, he was recognized by the US National Academy of Medicine as an emerging leader in health and medicine. Dr Hoque serves on the board of the Health Sciences Policy by US National Academies and is a Distinguished Member of ACM.
Dr Jerreed Ivanich, Assistant Professor, Colorado School of Public Health
US National Academy of Medicine
As a member of Alaska's Metlakatla Indian Community (Tsimshian), Jerreed is dedicated to health research for North American Indigenous (Alaska Native, American Indian, First Nations, and Native Hawaiian) populations. Dr Ivanich is an Assistant Professor at the Colorado School of Public Health, Centers for American Indian and Alaska Native Health, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Center for Indigenous Health. He is also an Aspen Ascend Fellow (2023 cohort) and a National Academy of Medicine's Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine Scholar. Additionally, Dr Ivanich is the Director of the University of Colorado's American Indian and Alaska Native Health certificate program. His work meets at the intersections of prevention science, social network analysis, and adolescent health to reduce substance use and suicide in tribal communities.
Dr Ruth Payne, Senior Clinical Lecturer, University of Sheffield
Academy of Medical Sciences
Dr Ruth Payne is a senior clinical lecturer at the University of Sheffield with a CCT in Infectious Diseases and Microbiology. She works clinically as a consultant microbiologist 50% of the time at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals. Her research interests are in conducting clinical vaccine trials, particularly focusing on early-phase trials and the innate immune response to vaccination. She previously worked at the Jenner Institute in Oxford on the development of blood-stage malaria vaccines, which formed the basis for her PhD. During the COVID-19 pandemic she was a member of the BSI COVID-19 Taskforce, which sought to highlight research gaps and inform policy, as well as improving communication with scientists, government and the general public on topics including vaccines and SARS-CoV-2 immunology.
Dr Jenny Rivers, Director of Research & Development, Barts Health NHS Trust
Academy of Medical Sciences
Dr Jenny Rivers joined Barts Health NHS Trust in October 2023 to develop and deliver the Trust’s research strategy. In this role, Jenny oversees the Trust’s research resources and infrastructure, including the Joint Research Management Office with Queen Mary University of London, the NIHR Barts Health Clinical Research Facility and Biomedical Research Centre and hosts the Local Clinical Research Network, supporting clinical research delivery across North London.
This is Jenny’s third NHS role; she was at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust for five years, in the role of Acting Director of Research & Innovation for the last seven months, following her role as Associate Director of Research at the Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust. Prior to these roles, Jenny worked in a variety of research management roles at the University of Liverpool, most recently Research and Impact Manager for the Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences.
Jenny is an experienced research leader, having led large teams (c. 200 staff), driven research strategy across the NHS, academia and beyond, and managed operations, governance and finance across complex and diverse research portfolios.
Jenny has a BSc in Bioveterinary Science and a PhD in Biochemistry and has held postdoctoral academic positions in higher education and industry, including a collaborative Knowledge Transfer Partnership applying analytical proteomics to the dairy industry.
Dr Chinmoy Sarkar, Associate Professor at the Department of Urban Planning and Design, University of Hong Kong
US National Academy of Medicine
Dr Chinmoy Sarkar is an Associate Professor at the Department of Urban Planning and Design and Co-director of the Healthy High Density Cities Lab (HealthyHDCities), HKUrbanLab within the Faculty of Architecture at The University of Hong Kong. He is also an Honorary Member of the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, UK. His research interests lie in the field of Healthy Places and Cities, specifically in employing urban science, urban design and public health principles and sophisticated geospatial modelling and epidemiologic techniques to understand the socio-spatial production and distribution of health in cities.
Over the past 15 years, Dr Sarkar’s work has focused on the environmental determinants of health, leveraging the power of big data, algorithms and smart technologies towards evidence-based research. Dr Sarkar is also the concept lead and developer of the UK Biobank Urban Morphometric Platform (UKBUMP), the largest individual-level built environment–health exposure database, comprising more than 750 individual-level built environment morphological metrics (morphometrics) for half a million Britons. As the inaugural NAM-HKU International Fellow in Global Health Leadership (2019-22), he has contributed to the final report of NAM’s Global Roadmap for Healthy Longevity.
Dr Allison Squires, Professor and the Director of the Global Consortium of Nursing and Midwifery Studies (GCNMS), Rory Meyers College of Nursing, New York University
US National Academy of Medicine
Allison P Squires, PhD, RN, FAAN is a Professor and the Director of the Global Consortium of Nursing and Midwifery Studies, or GCNMS. The GCNMS is an 82-country research consortium focused on research capacity-building in nursing and midwifery globally. The consortium's current collaboration is examining the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the nursing and midwifery workforces globally. Domestically, her research focuses on improving immigrant and refugee health outcomes with a special interest in addressing inequities resulting from language discordance during a healthcare encounter.
Professor Squires has consulted with the Migration Policy Institute and the World Bank on nursing and health workforce issues and produced several major policy analyses with their teams. A prolific writer, Squires has authored over 200 publications, including 125+ in peer-reviewed journals. She has served 10 years as an associate editor of the International Journal of Nursing Studies. From 2019 to 2020, she was the Distinguished Nurse Scholar in Residence for the National Academy of Medicine where she worked on the consensus study "Future of Nursing 2020–2030: Charting a Path to Achieve Equity". In 2023, she received the Outstanding Mentor Award from the Interdisciplinary Research Group on Nursing Issues interest group of Academy Health.
Professor Tony Yang, Associate Dean, George Washington University
US National Academy of Medicine
Dr Y Tony Yang is an endowed professor with tenure and an associate dean at the George Washington University. He is a program lead at the GW Cancer Center focusing on Cancer Control and Health Equity.
His research delves into the intersection of law and policy with healthcare delivery and population health outcomes. His scholarly contributions include over 175 peer-reviewed articles published in renowned journals (such as NEJM, JAMA, The Lancet, Health Affairs) spanning disciplines such as general medicine, oncology, paediatrics, health policy and services, public health, and health law. Notably, he authored a book on vaccine policy published by Springer Nature in 2023.
He has received accolades such as an Early Career Award for Excellence from the American Public Health Association and is a Distinguished Fellow of the National Academies of Practice. His work has garnered over $5.5 million in U.S. federal grants as principal investigator, including an active 4-year R01 grant from NIH-National Cancer Institute. His research projects have also been supported by various foundation funders like The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He holds a position on the Academy Health Education Council and serves on the Board of Directors for The American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics.