Meet The Judges

Priya Agrawal, MD

Dr Priya Agrawal is passionate about improving health equity worldwide. She is a trained obstetrician and gynaecologist from the UK, global women’s health expert and digital innovator. She believes that many global issues like inequity in health are too big for one sector or institution to solve alone and specializes in multisectoral partnerships. She is currently working as Executive Director, Vaccines & Women’s Health, for Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. and she previously launched and led Merck for Mothers (Merck’s 500 million dollar commitment to reducing deaths from pregnancy and childbirth). Prior to working with the private sector, she was Director of Research and Innovation for the Women and Health Initiative at the Harvard School of Public Health and was Obstetric Lead on the World Health Organization's Safe Childbirth Checklist Program in India in addition to being medical director for Jacaranda Health — a social enterprise focused on delivering high quality, affordable maternal and child health services in the slums of Nairobi — leveraging process innovation. She has worked and traveled in more than 45 countries using the introduction of simple and sustainable innovations to improve the health outcomes for underserved women and their families. In 2012, her contributions to global health were recognized with the Harvard School of Public Health Alumni Award for Public Health Professionals. She is a regular speaker on issues of global health and was recently honored with the Forbes Impact Award in Advocacy.

Her undergraduate education was at Oxford and Cambridge, she received her masters in public health from Harvard on a Fulbright scholarship and is currently completing her PhD at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Seth Berger

Seth Berger earned his MBA in 1993 from the Wharton School and his Bachelor of Arts in Economics from University of Pennsylvania in 1989. Seth is the Managing Director of the Sixers Innovation Lab Crafted by Kimball, supporting rapidly growing, early-stage companies in the consumer product space and providing speed and flexibility, individualized, industry-leading consulting and investment opportunities to startups with potential. Seth has been the CEO of four businesses in the consumer space – AND 1, HoopsTV.com, Lightning Gaming and Gravy Train – and his fifth “venture” has been to build an elite high school basketball program as Head Coach.

He and his wife, Christelle – also a Wharton School graduate – have three boys. They also have guardianship of five brothers from overseas who attended the Westtown School and now live with the family. Prior to Wharton, Seth was Legislative Director for US Representative Harold Ford, Sr. from 1989-1991. He was, at 21-years old, the youngest Legislative Director on Capitol Hill. He is still waiting for his first 10-day contract in the NBA.

Donald A. Goldmann, MD

Dr. Don Goldmann has decades of experience in helping health care systems and clinical teams improve the quality, safety, and value of the care they provide to their patients. He brings an uncommonly broad, clinical, scientific, and academic background to this work.

As Chief Scientific Officer, Emeritus, and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Dr. Goldmann focuses on deepening the credibility of improvement and implementation science by forging relationships with key scientific, academic, and health services research organizations. He has experience across the translational research continuum (bench science, epidemiology, clinical trials, and implementation research). He has participated in the development of numerous quality measures, especially in pediatrics and infection prevention. He lectures and writes on the value of quality indicators in value-based payment, benchmarking, and improvement. He advances the rigor of IHI's results-oriented work by deploying sound project design and program evaluation methods appropriate for the context in which improvement initiatives are conducted. Dr. Goldmann advocates for integration of improvement science and HIT/technology to accelerate progress towards vibrant and effective learning health systems, clinical decision support, and population health and equity.

Dr. Goldmann explores new ways to teach, bringing promising innovations to in-person and distance-learning. He is lead faculty for a IHI/HarvardX Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Practical Improvement Science and is leveraging the MOOC in a large national collaborative to reduce inappropriate antibiotic prescribing – an HHS and global priority. He is Co-director for the Harvard-Wide Pediatric Health Services Research Fellowship Program he founded (funded since 1994 via NRSA T32 Training Grants). He leads a Harvard College General Education course that explores how infectious diseases lead to social injustice and influence history, art, and literature.

Dr. Goldmann has a keen interest in helping clinical teams integrate rigorous quality improvement into their routine work, while mitigating clinician burnout and liberating the intrinsic motivation that clinician bring to health care. He is particularly devoted catalyzing sustainable improvement in under-resources settings globally and in engaging medical trainees in quality improvement.

Dr. Goldmann serves as Chair of the AHRQ National Advisory Council and on the Board of AcademyHealth and is Vice-Chair of the Advisory Committee of the Institute for Medicaid Innovation. He also serves on a number of advisory committees and boards, including the National Quality Forum’s Primary Care and Chronic Illness Standing Committee. He is Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School and Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, and Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Dr. Lucy Kalanithi

Dr. Lucy Kalanithi is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the widow of the late Dr. Paul Kalanithi, author of the #1 New York Times bestselling memoir When Breath Becomes Air, to which she wrote the epilogue. She completed her medical degree at Yale, where she was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha national medical honor society, her residency training at the University of California-San Francisco and a postdoctoral fellowship in healthcare delivery innovation at Stanford's Clinical Excellence Research Center. Drawing on experiences as a physician and caregiver, she has interests in health care value, meaning in medicine, patient-centered care and end-of-life care. She serves on leadership boards for TEDMED, the American College of Physicians and the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care. She was a speaker at TEDMED in 2016 and has appeared on NPR, PBS Newshour, Yahoo News with Katie Couric, Elle and in The New York Times. Dr. Kalanithi is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and an honoree of Mass General Cancer Center's the one hundred. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her daughter Cady.

Joelle Pineau, PhD

Joelle Pineau is an Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar at McGill University where she co-directs the Reasoning and Learning Lab. She also leads the Facebook AI Research lab in Montreal, Canada. She holds a BASc in Engineering from the University of Waterloo, and an MSc and PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Pineau's research focuses on developing new models and algorithms for planning and learning in complex partially-observable domains. She also works on applying these algorithms to complex problems in robotics, health care, games and conversational agents. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and the Journal of Machine Learning Research and is currently President of the International Machine Learning Society. She is a recipient of NSERC's E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship (2018), a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) and in 2016 was named a member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists by the Royal Society of Canada.

Carla M. Pugh, MD, PhD, FACS

Carla Pugh is a Professor of Surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine. She is also Director of the Technology Enabled Clinical Improvement (T.E.C.I.) Center. Her clinical area of expertise is Acute Care Surgery. Dr. Pugh obtained her undergraduate degree at U.C. Berkeley in Neurobiology and her medical degree at Howard University School of Medicine. Upon completion of her surgical training at Howard University Hospital, she went to Stanford University and obtained a PhD in Education. She is the first surgeon in the United States to obtain a PhD in Education. Her goal is to use technology to change the face of medical and surgical education.

Her research involves the use of simulation and advanced engineering technologies to develop new approaches for assessing and defining competency in clinical procedural skills. Dr. Pugh holds three patents on the use of sensor and data acquisition technology to measure and characterize hands-on clinical skills. Currently, over two hundred medical and nursing schools are using one of her sensor enabled training tools for their students and trainees. Her work has received numerous awards from medical and engineering organizations. In 2011, Dr. Pugh received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Barak Obama at the White House. She is considered to be a leading, international expert on the use of sensors and motion tracking technologies for performance measurement. In 2014, she was invited to give a TEDMED talk on the potential uses of technology to transform how we measure clinical skills in medicine. This year, Dr. Pugh was inducted into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

Colleen Wyse

Colleen Wyse is the Founder of the Philadelphia Trunk Show, a lively experiential evening of fashion for emerging designers presented in the Parisian atelier style. Previously, she was VP, Strategic Initiatives, for Visit Philadelphia where she directed advertising, marketing and partnerships for the nation’s sixth largest city. Wyse spent 13 years in leading national and international marketing and sales teams at such iconic publications as Vogue, Glamour, W Magazine, In Style and WWD/Women’s Wear Daily. She has also served as the director of strategic marketing alliances for HSN, Home Shopping Network, where she forged partnerships between the network and global brands such as Toyota, Norwegian Cruise Lines and Kraft Foods. Early in her career, she was the marketing and program director at the Rialto Square Theatre in Joliet, IL. A devoted patron of the arts, Wyse has served on the boards of the David Straz Center for the Performing Arts in Tampa and the University of South Florida’s Graphicstudio. She is currently on the Board of the Philadelphia Fashion Incubator and a Trustee for the University of St. Francis, her alma mater. Wyse is married to Dr. Stephen Klasko, the president and CEO of Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health in Philadelphia. In their free time, the couple enjoys traveling, art collecting and spending time with their families.