Appendix B

Speaker Biographies

Lee Daugherty Biddison, M.D., M.P.H., is an associate professor of medicine in the Johns Hopkins Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and the chief wellness officer for Johns Hopkins Medicine. She is associate faculty in the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality and a contributing scholar in the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Dr. Daugherty Biddison’s research interests include hospital operations, patient safety, critical care disaster response, and physician well-being. In addition to her research responsibilities, Dr. Daugherty Biddison also serves as the vice chair for clinical affairs for the Department of Medicine in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She chairs the department’s Clinical Directors Council and co-chairs the Clinical Affairs Planning and Strategy team. She also serves as a member of the Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Credentials Committee. Immediately prior to becoming chief wellness officer, she served on the Dean’s Task Force on Joy in Medicine. As part of that work, she co-chaired the Working Group on Culture and Work-life Balance and served as the lead author of the summary report of the task force. She currently represents Johns Hopkins on the National Academy of Medicine Action Collaborative on Clinician Well-Being and Resilience.

Dr. Daugherty Biddison completed her undergraduate studies in journalism at Washington and Lee University, magna cum laude, and received her medical degree from the Georgetown University School of Medicine, cum laude. She is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa and Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Societies. She completed her internal medicine residency at the University of Pennsylvania and her pulmonary and critical care medicine

fellowship at Johns Hopkins, where she also earned her master of public health degree.

Garry DeJong, M.S., is currently the director of emergency management for the University of Colorado Boulder. Previously, Mr. DeJong was the operations and response section chief/Emergency Support Function #8 lead for the Office of Emergency Preparedness and Response for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. Mr. DeJong has more than 30 years of experience in fire, EMS, and emergency services leadership. He is a lifelong learner and enjoys helping others. Mr. DeJong earned a bachelor’s degree from Southern Illinois University in education, training, and development and a master of science degree in executive leadership from Grand Canyon University. He is an alumnus of the Regional Institute for Health and Environmental Leadership through the University of Denver and of the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative through the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Sheri Fink, M.D., Ph.D., is the author of The New York Times best-selling book Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (Crown, 2013) about choices made in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She is a correspondent at The New York Times, where her and her colleagues’ stories on the West Africa Ebola crisis were recognized with the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, the George Polk Award for health reporting, and the Overseas Press Club Hal Boyle Award. Her story “The Deadly Choices at Memorial,” co-published by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, received a 2010 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting and a National Magazine Award for reporting. A former relief worker in disaster and conflict zones, Dr. Fink received her M.D. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. Her first book, War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival (Public Affairs Books, 2003), is about medical professionals under siege during the genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Five Days at Memorial was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction, the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for nonfiction, the Ridenhour Book Prize, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Book Award, the American Medical Writers Association Medical Book Award, and the National Association of Social Workers Science in Society Journalism Book Award.

Dan Hanfling, M.D., is a consultant on emergency preparedness, response, and crisis management. He is a contributing scholar at the Center for Health Security, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; Clinical Professor of Emergency Medicine at The George Washington University;

and adjunct faculty at the George Mason University Schar School of Public Policy and Government. He currently serves as the co-chair of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Forum on Medical and Public Health Preparedness for Catastrophic Events.

Dr. Hanfling spent 18 years as a principal advisor to the Inova Health System (Falls Church, Virginia) on matters related to emergency preparedness and response. He continues to practice emergency medicine at Inova Fairfax Hospital’s Trauma Center, and is an operational medical director for a regional helicopter Emergency Medical Services (EMS) service. He was instrumental in founding one of the nation’s first health care coalitions, the Northern Virginia Hospital Alliance, created in October 2002.

His areas of expertise include biodefense and mass-casualty management, catastrophic disaster response planning with particular emphasis on scarce resource allocation, and the nexus between health care system planning and emergency management. In addition to his hospital and EMS clinical responsibilities, he serves as a medical team manager for the Fairfax County-based Federal Emergency Management Agency and U.S. Agency for International Development–sanctioned international urban search and rescue team (VATF-1, USA-1), and has responded to catastrophic disaster events across the globe.

Dr. Hanfling received his undergraduate degree in political science from Duke University, including a general course at The London School of Economics and Political Science, and completed his medical degree at Brown University. He completed his internship in internal medicine at Brown University and his emergency medicine training at the combined George Washington and Georgetown University residency program. He has been board certified in emergency medicine since 1997.

Danita Koehler, M.D., is the rural medical director for Tanana Chiefs Conference, a tribal consortium of 42 villages spread over a vast geographical area of interior Alaska, many of which are not connected by a road system and most of which are hundreds of miles from the nearest hospital. Her interest in crisis standards of care arises from early experiences in the war-torn refugee camps on the Thai–Cambodian border following the Pol-Pot genocide and famine of the late 1970s, and from a lifetime of working in remote Alaska community hospitals or village community health centers, where prolonged emergency and critical care services are necessary due to limited air medevac services and extreme weather conditions. She is a fellow of the National Association of EMS [Emergency Medical Services] Physicians and a former chair of their Rural Committee; a former chair of the Alaska Council of EMS; and in 2013 she participated as reviewer for the First Aid section of the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation and Crisis Standards of Care—Emergency Medical Services. Dr. Koehler

completed her family medicine residency in Spokane, Washington, after graduating from the University of Washington School of Medicine in 1989.

Charles Little, D.O., FACEP, is an emergency physician and medical director of emergency management at the University of Colorado Hospital. Dr. Little has been involved in emergency response since 1975 as a firefighter, wildland firefighter, and paramedic in Colorado. He currently is an associate professor of emergency medicine and public health at the University of Colorado Denver and at the Colorado School of Public Health, where he runs an M.P.H. certificate in emergency preparedness. Dr. Little has directed and provided austere care with the National Disaster Medical System Disaster Medical Assistance Team CO-2 and was the chief medical officer for the former weapons of mass destruction response team National Medical Response Team Central. Dr. Little is a physician advisor for the North Central Region Healthcare Coalition and advises the Colorado Department of Health and Environment on issues related to emergency and disaster care and crises standards of care.

Nicole Lurie, M.D., M.S.P.H., is currently the strategic advisor to the chief executive officer of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. She is also a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School, a member of the research faculty at Massachusetts General Hospital, and an honorary fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. She served an 8-year term as Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). In that role, she led the HHS response to numerous public health emergencies ranging from infectious disease to natural and human-made disasters, and is responsible for many innovations in emergency preparedness and response. She also chaired the Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise, a government-wide organization ultimately responsible for the development of medical countermeasures, including vaccines against pandemics and emerging threats. Prior to federal service, she was the Paul O’Neill Professor of Policy Analysis at RAND, where she started and led the public health preparedness program and RAND’s Center for Population Health and Health Disparities. She has also had leadership roles in academia as a professor of medicine and public health at the University of Minnesota, as a medical advisor to the commissioner at the Minnesota Department of Health, and as the principal deputy assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Lurie received her B.A. and M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and completed her residency and public health training at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research has focused on access to and quality of care, health system redesign, equity, mental health, public health, and

preparedness. She has received numerous awards and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. She continues to practice clinical medicine in a community clinic in Washington, DC.

Anita Patel, Pharm.D., M.S., is a senior special advisor and the lead for pandemic medical care and countermeasures with the Influenza Coordination Unit in the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She is a clinical pharmacist with more than 13 years of experience in managing and improving programs related to public health response, including implementing new strategies and improving systems for drug and vaccine dispensing and administration, creating new tools for communication and surveillance, and science-based operational solutions. Prior to her role in NCIRD, Dr. Patel spent more than 10 years providing scientific oversight, management, strategic development, and budget planning for the CDC’s strategic national stockpile. Her past experience also includes having a key role in CDC’s medical countermeasures response efforts for various responses, including Hurricane Katrina, the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, and the 2014 Ebola response. Dr. Patel graduated with a doctorate in pharmacy from the University of the Sciences, Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, and completed a 2-year Rutgers postdoctoral pharmaceutical industry fellowship. She also holds a master’s degree in biosecurity and disaster preparedness from the Saint Louis University College for Public Health and Social Justice.

Satish Pillai, M.D., M.P.H., is the acting director for the Division on Preparedness and Emerging Infections in the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He oversees management of a diverse group of scientific and operational programs, including the Laboratory Response Network, the Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity program, and the Emergency Preparedness and Response Branch, which houses CDC’s regulatory affairs activities. Since joining CDC as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer in 2011, he has participated in infectious disease investigations and outbreak responses including CDC Emergency Operations Center (EOC) responses, such as the 2013 H7N9 influenza, 2014 MERS-CoV, 2014–2016 Ebola, 2016–2017 Zika, and 2017 hurricane EOC responses. During these past three responses, Dr. Pillai took on increasingly challenging leadership responsibilities, including serving as deputy incident manager and incident manager. Most recently, he served as the 2018 March–April border health team lead in Uganda, supporting Ebola preparedness along the Uganda–Democratic Republic of the Congo border. He is a subject-matter expert in medical care and medical countermeasure use for anthrax, botulism, and pandemic influenza.

Dr. Pillai completed his undergraduate degree (B.A., summa cum laude, biology, 1993) and his medical degree (M.D., Alpha Omega Alpha, 1997) at Case Western Reserve University. He completed his internal medicine residency at University Hospitals, based in Cleveland, Ohio, and received his infectious diseases training (Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, 2000–2003) and M.P.H. (2011) at Harvard. He is a diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine (Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases).

Winfred Rawls, M.B.A., M.S., is the deputy director and emergency officer for the Illinois Department of Public Health, Office of Preparedness and Response. Mr. Rawls is responsible for the overall operations of the Division of Disaster Planning & Readiness, the Division of Emergency Medical Systems and Highway Safety, the Division of Grants & Financial Management, and the Serve Illinois Commission. In April 2009, Mr. Rawls served as the department’s incident commander for H1N1 and Ebola responses. He currently serves as chair, Local Health Department Executive Advisory Group; chair, Public Health and Emergency Preparedness Task Force; co-chair, Public Health Committee of the Illinois Terrorism Task Force; and as a member of the Board of Directors for Illinois 2-1-1. For the past 6 years, he has served on the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials Directors of Public Health Preparedness Executive Committee for Department of Health and Human Services Regions 3 & 5.

Prior to joining state government, Mr. Rawls’s career reflected consistent progression with the U.S. Army from an initial position of communications officer to positions as the senior presidential communications officer and the assistant chief of operations for the White House Communications Agency during the Clinton and Bush administrations. With 20 years of distinguished military service, his career culminated in preparedness roles at the Pentagon and the White House during the September 11 response. After military service, Mr. Rawls joined private industry as an information technology executive, where he served as an assistant chief information officer, and a vice president of information technology in the semiconductor and pharmaceutical industries.

Mr. Rawls’s formal education includes an M.B.A., an M.S. in telecommunications management, and a B.B.A. degree in business administration and accounting with specialized training in leadership, management, operations, information technology, telecommunications, logistics, and public health and health care system preparedness. He is a graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and of the Armed Forces Staff College for joint military services. He is also a graduate of the National Preparedness Leadership Institute at Harvard.

His awards and honors are numerous. After 20 years of service, he attained the rank of lieutenant colonel and upon retirement was awarded the Legion of Merit. Other key awards include the Meritorious Service Medal with two Oak Leaf Clusters, and the Bronze Star Service Medal from combat operations in the 1990–1991 Gulf War. Mr. Rawls is also an army parachutist. While in private industry, he was nominated by his peers and selected to the Who’s Who in Executive and Professionals (2005–2006). Mr. Rawls has been with the Illinois Department of Public Health since July 2008.

Colleen M. Ryan, M.D., FACS, is a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, and has 30 years of clinical experience in burn surgery at the Sumner M. Redstone Burn Center at the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Shriners Hospitals for Children–Boston. Dr. Ryan has clinical experience in responding to several burn-surge disasters including the 2003 Rhode Island Station Nightclub Fire. She is the chairperson of the Organization and Delivery of Burn Care Committee of the American Burn Association and serves as the American Burn Association representative to Dr. Robert Kadlec, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response. Dr. Ryan has authored more than 200 publications including topics in burn prevention, burn management, burn outcomes, and disaster response. Dr. Ryan is a graduate of Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and of the Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, DC. She completed her surgical residency and fellowship at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and at the Hammersmith Hospital at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School in London, respectively.

Judy Seaberg, R.N., P.H.N., M.S., MNCEM, has worked in public health emergency preparedness for several years and is currently the health care preparedness program manager at the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH). She supervises programs and staff in areas of health care preparedness and medical surge. Prior to working for MDH, Ms. Seaberg’s experience included medical, surgical, and critical care nursing in a hospital setting; occupational and industrial hygiene program supervision; and local public health preparedness. Ms. Seaberg also retired as a nurse in the U.S. Air Force Reserve.

Eric Toner, M.D., is a senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and a senior scientist in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Department of Environmental Health and Engineering. He is an internist and an emergency physician. His primary areas

of interest are health care preparedness for catastrophic events, pandemic influenza, and medical response to bioterrorism. He is the managing editor of the online newsletter Clinicians’ Biosecurity News and is an associate editor of the journal Health Security (formerly Biosecurity and Bioterrorism), the leading peer-reviewed journal in this field.

Dr. Toner has authored scores of scholarly papers and government reports on health care and pandemic preparedness, and he has organized numerous meetings of national leaders on the topics of hospital preparedness, pandemic influenza, emerging infectious diseases, mass-casualty disasters, biosecurity, biosurveillance, and nuclear preparedness. He has spoken at many national and international conferences on a range of biosecurity topics and has appeared on a number of high-profile national television and news features on pandemic flu and bioterrorism preparedness. He has been the principal investigator of several U.S. government-funded projects to assess and advance health care preparedness. Dr. Toner has served on a number of national working groups and committees, including the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Forum on Medical and Public Health Preparedness for Catastrophic Events.

Dr. Toner has been involved in hospital disaster planning since the mid-1980s. Prior to joining the Center, he was the medical director of disaster preparedness at the St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, Maryland, where he practiced emergency medicine for 23 years. In 2003, he spearheaded the creation of a coalition of disaster preparedness personnel from the five Baltimore County hospitals, the health department, and the Office of Emergency Management. During this time, he also headed a large emergency medicine group practice and co-founded and managed a large primary care group practice and an independent urgent care center. Dr. Toner received his B.A. and M.D. from the University of Virginia. He trained in internal medicine at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine.

Jonathan White, Ph.D., LCSW-C, CPH, is a commander in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, a clinical social worker, and an emergency manager specializing in the needs of children and vulnerable populations in crisis events. He is presently stationed in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), where he is the director of recovery in the Office of Emergency Management and Medical Operations. In that role, he also serves as the national coordinator for the Health and Social Services Recovery Support Function. In 2018–2019, he led the mission to reunify children separated from their parents at the U.S. border as the federal health coordinating official for the reunification mission, and served as the HHS operational lead for the effort to identify possible children of potential class members in the Ms. L. v. ICE case. Prior to joining ASPR,

he was the deputy director for children’s programs in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) Office of Refugee Resettlement, where he led the Unaccompanied Alien Children Program, which provides care and services to 40,000–60,000 children and youth (annually), who enter the United States without parents or legal guardians. He previously served as a senior adviser in ACF’s Immediate Office of the Assistant Secretary, responsible for crisis management, public health, and strategic initiatives. Prior to that he served as deputy director of ACF’s Office of Human Services Emergency Preparedness and Response. Earlier in his social work career he was an oncology social worker with the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. He is a Maryland licensed certified social worker–clinical, a Maryland certified clinical social work supervisor, and a National Board of Public Health Examiners-certified public health professional. He has deployed or held national-level leadership roles in more than 50 domestic disaster, public health emergency, unaccompanied alien children influx, and programmatic crisis events.

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