The Questions We Pursue

Speaker Series

This series was launched as a platform to hear from diverse professionals on what problems they are working to solve.

​The goal is to learn more about the work being done and what our (individuals, organizations, or society) role could be in helping solve these issues. It features global experts shaping their fields.

Latest Episode


Dr. Charlene Hope

Chief Pharmacy Quality &
Medication Safety Officer
University of Chicago Medicine

All Guest Speakers

  • Moz Siddiqui

    Head, Private Sector Partnerships and Innovation
    Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance

  • Dr. James G. Stevenson

    Chief Clinical Officer, Omnicell
    Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan College of Pharmacy

  • Dr. Claire Bloomfield

    Deputy Director, Data for R&D, Center for Improving Data Collaboration
    NHS Transformation Directorate

  • Dr. Julie Lauffenburger

    Assistant Professor
    Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School

  • Dr. Adanna Chukwuma

    Senior Health Economist
    World Bank Group

  • Dr. Catherine Duggan

    Chief Executive Officer
    International Pharmaceutical Federation

  • “Modern injustices of today, of modern day, is lack of equitable access to healthcare for real disadvantaged communities globally, and within that children. I think one of the things that I’m trying to solve for is how do we improve access to children in some of the poorest countries who often have the largest burden of disease and constraint - and increase that access to one of the most cost-effective interventions out there, which is vaccines.”

    Moz Siddiqui

  • “Today's medication use process is highly dependent on manual processes and involves very disjointed and fragmented technology. The goal is to automate and transform the medication use processes across the care continuum in order to reduce the dependence on human performance and to enable advanced data analytics to achieve improved outcomes.”

    Dr. James G. Stevenson

  • “The challenge I’m working in is how can we support both national and international research and innovation with health data.”

    Dr. Claire Bloomfield

  • “I am working on solving how to improve prescribing and long-term use of medications in chronic diseases and studying whether technology and other tools help improve these issues.”

    Dr. Julie Lauffenburger

  • "The ability to access health care of high quality is sometimes the difference between living and dying. And yet, 172 million people are pushed into poverty from paying for care every year and almost 1 billion poor people are further impoverished from health care costs. My work focuses on supporting governments to address this challenge: how can we improve financial access to high-quality health care, particularly in low-and-middle income countries?”

    Dr. Adanna Chukwuma

  • ’Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the vision of FIP was for a world where everyone had access to safe, effective and affordable medicines…. This vision stands ever stronger and in stark contrast to the inequities we have seen in access to the COVID-19 vaccines and services globally. It is therefore an imperative for me, as CEO of FIP, to ensure that access to services, medicines and care is equitable across communities, ages, abilities,  and ethnicities, across regions and the globe and is sustainable in terms of our impact on the environment, our management of waste in medicines and their use and the services we provide. This is not limited to managing COVID-19 and future pandemic, but also to the iceberg of health and care needs the pandemic has exposed.”

    Dr. Catherine Duggan

  • Dr. David W. Hutton

    Associate Professor, Health Management and Policy
    University of Michigan

  • Dr. Kylee Funk

    Associate Professor, College of Pharmacy
    University of Minnesota

  • Dr. Ankur Pandya

    Associate Professor of Health Decision Science, Department of Health Policy & Management, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

  • Dr. Jenny Bingham

    Assistant Professor of Practice, University of Arizona
    Senior Manager of Pharmacy
    Special Projects, VillageMD

  • Dr. Brookie Best

    Dean, UC San Diego Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences

  • Kate Klein

    Administrative Director, Robert J. Havey, MD Institue for Global Health
    Northwestern University

  • "I am working to solve questions about efficiently allocating healthcare resources. In particular, I use mathematical models to simulate the overall long-term costs and health effects of new interventions in order to answer these questions."

    Dr. David Hutton

  • “I am studying how pharmacists providing comprehensive medication management impact the quadruple aim.” 

    Dr. Kylee Funk

  • "One out of every six dollars spent in the US is on health care. How do we know if this spending provides good value or if these dollars could have been better spent elsewhere in the health care system or other sectors?"

    Dr. Ankur Pandya

  • “The challenge I am working on is how we can support clinicians with readiness tools to prepare for the provision of care via telehealth and digital health.”

    Dr. Jenny Bingham

  • "I try to figure out how to safely use needed medications during pregnancy, lactation and childhood. People often need to use medications during pregnancy, breastfeeding and in children. For pregnancy and lactation especially, scientific studies are usually lacking entirely, leaving patients and clinicians to guess (with no evidence) at correct doses, timing and selection of necessary treatments."

    Dr. Brookie Best

  • “At the Havey Institute for Global Health, we work to expand knowledge, capacity and equity in global health through transdisciplinary research and education partnerships. I try to find the best ways to connect faculty, residents, and students with collaborators worldwide to collaborate, and, in a sustainable way, work together to tackle problems that disproportionately impact low-and-middle income countries.”

    Kate Klein

  • Claudia Martinez

    Research Programme Manager
    Access to Medicine Foundation

  • Vivek Natarajan

    Research Lead
    Google

  • Dr. Katherine Meese

    Assistant Professor, Department of Health Services Administration
    University of Alabama at Birmingham

  • Eden S. Porsangi

    Director, Modern Work Technical Sales, Healthcare Life Sciences
    Microsoft

  • Dr. Kurt Henke

    Assistant Director of Pharmacy Operations
    Johns Hopkins Medicine

  • Dr. Charlene Hope

    Chief Pharmacy Quality and Medication Safety Officer
    University of Chicago Medicine

  • “How to incentivize the pharma industry to increase access to medicine for people living in low-and middle-income countries?”

    Claudia Martinez

  • "Building AI systems that can accelerate biomedical discovery, augment our care providers and help scale personalized care to billions worldwide."

    Vivek Natarajan

  • “In its simplest form, healthcare is humans working with humans to heal humans. We must re-humanize healthcare. We have to understand how we can stop breaking our humans, and how we can fix them. Our future depends on it." 

    Dr. Katherine Meese

  • “The problem that I am currently trying to solve for is using technology improve employee experience in healthcare. This includes topics such as the challenging work conditions our healthcare workers are at risk of such as mental health problems and the global workforce crisis that is on the horizon.”

    Eden S. Porsangi

  • "I’m working to solve the problem of inefficient pharmacy operations by streamlining processes and adopting technologies that enhance patient access and care, allowing pharmacists to take on more clinical roles. Additionally, I’m focused on the need for pharmacists to lead the charge in shaping the future of our profession, which includes redefining roles and responsibilities within the field."

    Dr. Kurt Henke

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Please note that the views and opinions of the guests and speakers in our events do not necessarily reflect those of Salus Vitae Group or the Host.