Speakers
Romilla Batra, MD, MBA
Chief Medical Officer
Premera Blue Cross
Professor of Medicine
The Paul Merage School of Business, UC Irvine
Romilla Batra, MD, MBA
Prior to joining Premera, Batra spent more than 12 years at SCAN Health Plan, a national not-for-profit Medicare Advantage plan based in California. She spent nearly nine years there as Chief Medical Officer where she was accountable for SCAN’s overall clinical strategy and operations to improve overall member experience and clinical outcomes. She provided oversight for value-based programs, clinical teams, pharmacy programs, Stars initiatives, community-based efforts, and SCAN’s provider performance improvement strategy.
Previously, Batra ran primary care clinics at University of California Irvine and Indiana University. She is an internist by training and continues to volunteer and teach in the medical and business schools at University of California Irvine.
Batra serves on the Board of Advisors for the Center of Health Care Management and Health Policy at the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California Irvine. She also is active with the American Heart Association, including serving as the 2023 Chair of the Los Angeles Go Red for Women movement.
She holds a Doctor of Medicine degree from UCLA and a Master of Business Administration from the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California Irvine.
Sherry A. Glied, PhD
Wagner School of Public Service, NYU
Sherry A. Glied, Ph.D.
In 2010, Glied was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services, and served in that capacity from July 2010 through August 2012. She had previously served as Senior Economist for health care and labor market policy on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in 1992-1993, under Presidents Bush and Clinton, and participated in the Clinton Health Care Task Force. In 2016-2017, she served as a member of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking. She is currently chairing New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s Commission on the Future of Health Care.
Glied is an economist. Her principal areas of research are in health policy reform and mental health care policy. She is the author of Chronic Condition (Harvard University Press, 1998), coauthor (with Richard Frank) of Better but Not Well: Mental Health Policy in the U.S. Since 1950 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), and coeditor (with Peter C. Smith) of The Oxford Handbook of Health Economics.
Glied is a member of the Board of Directors of Geisinger and of the Milbank Fund. She is a Nonresident Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution and has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, the National Bureau of Economic Research, the National Academy of Social Insurance, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Steve A. N. Goldstein, MA, MD, PhD, FAAP
Health Affairs, Susan & Henry Samueli College of Health Sciences, UC Irvine
Steve A. N. Goldstein, MA, MD, PhD, FAAP
Dr. Steve Goldstein is a nationally renowned physician-scientist, pediatric cardiologist, ion channel biophysicist and academic administrator. As Vice Chancellor of Health Affairs at UC Irvine, he oversees a $4.5 billion enterprise comprised of the Susan & Henry Samueli College of Health Sciences — encompassing the schools of medicine, nursing, pharmacy and public health, and six research centers and institutes of health — as well as the UCI Health delivery system. He is leading a major expansion rooted in a One Health vision that unites health disciplines in a Discover, Teach, Heal mission to advance the frontiers of healthcare and wellness while educating the diverse healthcare workforce of the future to provide whole-person, team-based, precision care. This has elevated the health system to top performer in the nation among academic health systems. Goldstein holds an MD and PhD from Harvard University. He has been a senior leader at Yale University, the University of Chicago, Brandeis University and Loyola University Chicago; and serves as an advisor to the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and nonprofits committed to health; he is the recipient of numerous honors.
Mark Ghaly
Mark Ghaly
Dr. Mark Ghaly was appointed Secretary of the California Health and Human Services Agency in early 2019 by Governor Gavin Newsom and recently stepped down after nearly 6 years of service. In serving California, Dr. Ghaly had the privilege of working with partners across diverse sectors and disciplines to improve the lives and life chances of ALL Californians. This was especially true during our response to the COVID-19 Pandemic but spanned his entire tenure.
Dr. Ghaly’s experience as a community-oriented, primary care pediatrician allowed him and his team to work across California’s health care and social services safety net systems, to promote and advance a whole person, whole community, approach to integrating services. He and his team worked to ensure that CalHHS services and programs are equity-anchored and person-centered for ALL, but especially the most vulnerable Californians.
Dr. Ghaly holds the deep belief that together our collective efforts can not only serve Californians well today but set us on a path where ALL Californians have a brighter and healthier future. Nothing he does can be done well without the support of his wife, Dr. Christina Ghaly, and his 4 children.
Katie Heidorn, MPA
State Health Policy
CHCF
Katie Heidorn, MPA
Katie Heidorn is the director of state health policy at CHCF, where she leverages the foundation’s data, expertise, and partnerships to help California’s state government make informed decisions about health care. Katie is based in CHCF’s Sacramento office.
Katie has nearly two decades of experience working in health policy, government, and nonprofits and is a skilled leader, facilitator, and communicator. She comes to CHCF after more than two years as executive director for the Insure the Uninsured Project (ITUP). Before that, Katie was the government affairs advocate for Health Net and the development director and policy lead at the nonprofit California Coverage and Health Initiatives. Katie spent a decade in California state government, including as a deputy secretary for the California Health and Human Services Agency and principal consultant in the Senate Appropriations Committee. She is also an alumna of the California Senate Fellows Program.
Katie received her master’s degree in Public Administration from the University of Southern California and bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Comparative Literature from the University of California, Davis.
Kristen Hwang, MJ, MPH
Health Reporter
CalMatters
Kristen Hwang
Sara G. Murray, MD, MAS
UCSF Health
Associate Chief Medical Information Officer, Inpatient Care
UCSF Health
Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine and Associate Chief
Division of Clinical Informatics and Digital Transformation (DoC-IT)
Sara G. Murray, MD, MAS
Sara Murray, MD, MAS, is Vice President, Chief Health AI Officer for UCSF Health. She is Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine and serves as Associate Chief for Health System Partnerships in the Division of Clinical Informatics and Digital Transformation (DoC-IT).
Dr. Murray is a strategic health system leader for informatics, digital health, and data science. Her team builds infrastructure and governance processes to ensure deployment of impactful and ethical AI, evaluates commercially available tools and algorithms for trustworthiness prior to implementation, and develops new machine learning models to address pressing health system problems. She is responsible for the overall vision and strategy for the use of AI at scale to transform healthcare delivery at UCSF Health and beyond. She spends her clinical time attending on the hospital medicine service.
Khang Nguyen, MD
Southern California Permanente Medical Group
Chief Medical Officer, Care Navigation
Permanente Federation
Khang Nguyen, MD
Dr. Khang Nguyen is the Assistant Executive Medical Director for Care Transformation at the Southern California Permanente Medical Group and Chief Medical Officer for Care Navigation at the Permanente Federation. With over 20 years at Kaiser Permanente, he has progressed from Staff Physician to Physician Leader.
As the SCPMG transformation leader, Dr. Nguyen guides innovative solutions to address evolutions in health care and consumer expectations. He oversees the KPSC Regional Virtual Medical Director, ensuring high-quality care through technology and innovation. His contributions include a 24/7 digital front door, a unified contact number (1-833-KP4-CARE), and on-demand care delivery options like Get Care Now and E-Visits. He leads several committees focused on transformation initiatives.
Dr. Nguyen has held key roles, including Physician Leader for various specialties in the Orange County service area and Physician in Charge at Mission Viejo Medical Offices. He began his Family Medicine residency in 2001 at the Kaiser Permanente Fontana Medical Center and holds degrees in Biochemistry and Medicine from UC Davis.
Outside work, he promotes the Thrive lifestyle, enjoying tennis, gardening, and gourmet food.
Andrew Odegaard, MPH, PhD
Associate Professor Epidemiology and Biostatistics
Joe C. Wen School of Population & Public Health, UC Irvine
Andrew Odegaard, MPH, PhD
Nico Pronk, PhD, MA
Chief Science Officer
HealthPartners, Inc.
President
HealthPartners Institute
Nico Pronk, Ph.D., M.A., FACSM, FAWHP
Dr. Nico Pronk is President of the HealthPartners Institute and Chief Science Officer at HealthPartners, Inc. and holds an academic appointment as Affiliate Full Professor of Health Policy and Management at the University of Minnesota, School of Public Health in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He continues to serve as a Co-Investigator on research studies in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts.
Nico’s work is focused on connecting scientific evidence of effectiveness with practical applications of programs and practices, policies and systems that measurably improve population health and well-being. His work applies to the workplace, the health system setting, and the community and involves development of new models to improve health and well-being at the research, practice and policy levels.
He was confirmed by the White House to serve as co-chair of the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services’ Advisory Committee on National Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Objectives for the year 2030 (aka “Healthy People 2030”). Nico is the current Chair for the Roundtable on Obesity Solutions at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. He serves on various health-related committees and boards including the scientific advisory board for the Health Enhancement Research Organization (HERO) and is the founding and past president of the International Association for Worksite Health Promotion.
He is widely published in both the scientific and practice literatures and is an international speaker on population health and well-being. Dr. Pronk received his doctorate degree in exercise physiology at Texas A&M University and completed his post-doctoral studies in behavioral medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
HealthPartners Institute is one of the largest medical research and education centers in the Midwest with approximately 400 staff. The Institute has about 450 studies underway each year, trains more than 700 medical residents and fellows and more than 2000 students. HealthPartners, founded in 1957 as a cooperative, is an integrated, non-profit, member-governed health system providing health care services and health plan financing and administration. It’s the largest consumer governed nonprofit health care organization in the United States.
Dean A. Rosen, JD
Partner
Mehlman Consulting
Dean A. Rosen, JD
A partner at Mehlman Consulting, Dean Rosen is one of Washington’s foremost experts on America’s complex health care system—and a master of both the politics and policies that shape it. He has more than two decades’ experience developing and advancing health policy initiatives on Capitol Hill and in the private sector.
Rosen advises a wide range of health care stakeholders, from established health system players to startups trying to gain a foothold in Washington, DC. He has represented health systems and hospitals, medical colleges and physician specialty organizations, health insurers, clinical laboratories, biopharmaceutical companies, nonprofit foundations and large national employers. He helps clients impact national policy and navigate the transformational health system changes taking place in the aftermath of the Affordable Care Act, and efforts to reform the ACA.
Prior to joining Mehlman Consulting, Rosen held a series of high-level positions in both the private sector and government, including on key committees in both the Senate and House. As the Chief Healthcare Advisor to then-Sen. Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN), a leading voice on national medical and health issues, he helped draft and navigate to final passage landmark legislation creating a Medicare prescription drug benefit. Rosen also helped pass patient safety legislation and laws in the wake of the September 11 and bioterrorism attacks in 2001 to ensure that local, state and national public health systems had new authorities and additional resources to respond to future threats.
Earlier, Rosen served as Staff Director for the Senate Subcommittee on Public Health, Majority Counsel for the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee and Health Policy Coordinator for the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources (now the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee). While at Ways and Means, he played a leading role in crafting the Medicare provisions of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. At Labor, he was the lead Senate staffer in drafting the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA).
Rosen’s policy, legal and management experience ranges beyond Capitol Hill. He served as Senior Vice President of Policy and General Counsel for the Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA), and practiced law at Dow, Lohnes and Albert- son in Washington, DC.
Rosen serves on the Board of Directors of David A. Winston, Health Policy Fellowship, and on the Advisory Boards of the Robert Wood Johnson Health Fellows, and Society of Health Policy Young Professionals. He is a visiting professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health. Rosen holds a JD from Syracuse University School of Law, MS from Syracuse University S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and received his BS from the Boston University.
Avik Roy, MD
President
Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity
Avik Roy
Avik Roy is the President of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP.org), a think tank improving the lives of Americans on the bottom half of the economic ladder using freedom, innovation, and pluralism. Roy’s work has been praised on both the right and the left. National Review called him one of the nation’s “sharpest policy minds,” while the New York Times’ Paul Krugman concedes, “Roy is about as good as you get in this stuff…he actually knows something.” Roy also serves as the Policy Editor at Forbes; on the Advisory Boards of the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream and the Bitcoin Policy Institute; and as a Senior Advisor to the Bipartisan Policy Center. He has advised several presidential candidates, including Marco Rubio, Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney. Roy was educated at MIT, where he studied molecular biology, and the Yale University School of Medicine.
Donna H. Ryan, MD
Pennington Biomedical Research Center
Donna H. Ryan, MD
Donna Ryan is Professor Emerita at Pennington Biomedical in Baton Rouge, LA, USA where she had a 25-year career in clinical research in obesity. She was an Investigator on POUNDS Lost, Look AHEAD, DPP, DASH and other studies of the health benefits of weight loss by diet, lifestyle intervention and medications. She was PI of a series of studies over 25 years funded by the US Department of Defense targeting military nutrition. Her personal research studied improving primary care management of obesity.
She has been an active member and former President of The Obesity Society (North America) and World Obesity Federation. Dr. Ryan was Co-Chair of the SELECT Trial Steering Committee a cardiovascular outcome trial with semaglutide. She is currently a member of the Data Safety Monitoring Committees for setmelanotide and retatrutide. She has more than 300 publications, is a frequent speaker on obesity and diabetes treatments and remains an active consultant and advisor to companies developing drugs, devices, lifestyle programs and medical approaches to obesity management.
Hope Jensen Schau, MBA, MA, PhD
Center for Health Care Management and Policy,
The Paul Merage School of Business, UC Irvine
Hope Jensen Schau, MBA, MA, PhD
Hope Jensen Schau is a three-time UCI alumna (MBA, MA, PhD). She joined the UCI Paul Merage School of Business in 2023 as the Faculty Director of the Center for Health Care Management and Policy, and the inaugural Gilly Family Endowed Chair in Marketing. Previously she served as a professor of marketing, entrepreneurship, and innovation at the University of Arizona Eller College of Management, including 7 years as the Associate Dean of MBA Programs, and 2 years as the Executive Director of the McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship. Her research focuses on the impact of technology on markets and marketplace relationships, practice and innovation diffusion, consumption and patient journeys, ‘big data’ text analysis, business ecosystems, and algorithmic biases. Her research has been funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, Marketing Science Institute, Filene Research Institute, the Center for Research on Information Technology in Organizations (CRITO), and the McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship. She has published in premier research venues including the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, Journal of Retailing, and the Journal of Advertising. Her research has been featured in press outlets such as Wired, Reuters, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and on Today, Good Morning America, Tokyo 2020 Olympic Coverage, and National Public Radio.
Mark Sendak, MD, MPP
Duke Institute for Health Innovation
Mark Sendak, MD, MPP
Mark Sendak, MD, MPP is the Population Health & Data Science Lead at the Duke Institute for Health Innovation (DIHI), where he leads interdisciplinary teams of data scientists, clinicians, and machine learning experts to build technologies that solve real clinical problems. Together with his team, he has built tools to transform chronic disease management within an Accountable Care Organization and detection and management of inpatient deterioration within hospitals. He has integrated dozens of data-driven technologies into clinical operations and is a co-inventor of software to scale machine learning applications and real-world evidence generation across health systems. He leads the DIHI Clinical Research & Innovation scholarship, which equips medical students with the business and data science skills required to lead health care innovations. He co-leads Health AI Partnership, a learning collaborative to advance the safe, effective, and equitable use of AI software within healthcare delivery organizations.
Him and his team have published in top technical, clinical, and management venues. Their work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, MIT Technology Review, Wired, STAT News. He has served as an expert advisor to national organizations, including the American Medical Association, AARP, American Board of Family Medicine, White House Office of Science, Technology, and Policy, and National Academies of Medicine. In 2024, he was nominated by the Government Accountability Office to serve as a member of the Health Information Technology Advisory Committee (HITAC). Also in 2024, he testified before the US Senate Finance Committee during a hearing titled ‘Artificial Intelligence in Health Care: Promise and Pitfalls.” He serves on the board of Machine Learning in Healthcare (MLHC), the premier computer science conference exclusively dedicated to healthcare. He was named a STAT Wunderkind in 2020 for his efforts to responsibly build and integrate AI into clinical practice. He obtained his MD and Masters of Public Policy at Duke University as a Dean’s Tuition Scholar and his Bachelor’s of Science in Mathematics from UCLA, where he was awarded the Charles E. Young Humanitarian Award, the top honor for community service.
Marie Taillard, MBA, PhD
ESCP Business School, London
Marie Taillard, PhD
Marie Taillard is professor of Marketing and UK Head of Faculty at ESCP Business School where she holds the title of L’Oréal Professor of Creativity Marketing. She teaches across a wide range of graduate and executive programs including customized programs for global corporate partners in sectors ranging from technology and pharmaceuticals to beauty, luxury, and fast-moving consumer goods. Marie is also a certified Executive Coach and supports senior executives around the world in their leadership journeys.
Among her areas of expertise, Prof. Taillard focuses on digital transformation and its implications for marketers. She is the co-author of “Digital Makeover, How L’Oréal Put People First to Build a Beauty Tech Powerhouse” (Wiley, 2021). She is particularly interested in the human and social aspects of digital transformation for all stakeholders of a firm: its employees, its customers and its upstream and downstream channel partners.
In the classroom, Professor Taillard is acclaimed by students for her innovative pedagogical approaches, blending her professional experience, her empathetic style and her academic thought leadership.
Prior to her academic career, Professor Taillard held senior marketing positions in travel and hospitality in the United States. She holds a BA and an MA in Linguistics from the University of Southern California, an MBA from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business, and a PhD in Linguistics from University College London.
Sylvia J. Trujillo, MPP, JD
OCHIN
Sylvia J. Trujillo, MPP, JD
Sylvia J. Trujillo is the Vice President of Policy and Regulatory Affairs for OCHIN where she works closely with OCHIN’s leadership to identify and champion public policies that drive access and sustainability in healthcare. Sylvia has policy expertise at the leading edge of innovation including in the areas of health IT and digital health, genomics, new payment and delivery models, and artificial intelligence/augmented intelligence. Prior to joining OCHIN, Sylvia served for over a decade as Senior Washington Counsel for the American Medical Association (AMA) in D.C. where she collaborated with multi-disciplinary teams and diverse stakeholders to advance a wide variety of health care policies through Congress and federal agencies. She also was one of the primary architects of the AMA’s Digital Medicine Payment Advisory Group which was created to propose the development of new procedural coding solutions to account for rapidly evolving digital health modalities. She also served as an Assistant Regional Counsel and Litigation Attorney for the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services with a focus on quality of care, Medicaid coverage, hospital reimbursement. Sylvia earned her BA from Bryn Mawr College, a MPP from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and JD from University of California’s Berkley School of Law.
Amanda Velazquez, MD, DABOM
Jim and Eleanor Randall Department of Surgery, Center for Weight Management and Metabolic Health, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
Amanda Velazquez, MD, DABOM
Ian O. Williamson, PhD
Dean
The Paul Merage School of Business, UC Irvine
Ian O. Williamson, PhD
Ian O. Williamson is Dean of The UC Irvine Paul Merage School of Business. During his 22-year career, Williamson has served on several academic committees and on the boards of directors for a variety of nonprofit organizations. In addition, he has provided expert insights in the areas of organizational innovation and employee recruitment and retention to executives in more than 20 countries across six continents for companies such as CBRE, PwC, Lockheed Martin, Nestle and Accenture.
For more information, please contact:
Diane Ford, Assistant Director, CHCMP at forddm@uci.edu.
