Speakers

NOTE: Biographies are presented in alphabetical order.

Richard H. Carmona, M.D., M.P.H., FACS
17th Surgeon General of the United States (2002-2006)
Distinguished Professor, Zuckerman College of Public Health, University of Arizona
Vice Chairman, Canyon Ranch
President, Canyon Ranch Institute

Born to a poor Hispanic family in New York City, Dr. Carmona experienced homelessness, hunger, and health disparities during his youth. The experiences greatly sensitized him to the relationships among culture, health, education and economic status and shaped his future.

After dropping out of high school, Dr. Carmona enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1967. While serving, he earned his General Equivalency Diploma and went on to become a combat-decorated Special Forces Vietnam veteran. After leaving active duty, he attended Bronx Community College of the City University of New York through an open enrollment program for veterans. He received an associate of arts degree. He then attended the University of California, San Francisco, where he received a bachelor of science degree (1977) and medical degree (1979). At the University of California Medical School, Dr. Carmona was awarded the prestigious gold-headed cane as the top graduate.

Trained in general and vascular surgery, Dr. Carmona also completed a National Institutes of Health-sponsored fellowship in trauma, burns, and critical care. Dr. Carmona was then recruited jointly by the Tucson (Arizona) Medical Center and the University of Arizona to start and direct Arizona’s first regional trauma care system. He went on to become the chairman of the State of Arizona Southern Regional Emergency Medical System, a professor of surgery, public health and family and community medicine at the University of Arizona, and the Pima County Sheriff’s Department surgeon and deputy sheriff. He is also a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons.

Public health came as a second career after Dr. Carmona went back to graduate school while working in order to complete a master’s degree in public health at the University of Arizona. His interest in public health stemmed from the realization that most of his patients’ illnesses and injuries were completely preventable.

Dr. Carmona has also served for over 20 years with the Pima County Sheriff’s Department in Tucson, including as deputy sheriff, detective, SWAT team leader and department surgeon. He is one of the most highly decorated police officers in Arizona, and his numerous awards include the National Top Cop Award, the National SWAT Officer of the Year, and the National Tactical EMS Award. Dr. Carmona is a nationally recognized SWAT expert and has published extensively on SWAT training and tactics, forensics, and tactical emergency medical support. Dr. Carmona has also served as a medical director of police and fire departments and is a fully qualified peace officer with expertise in special operations and emergency preparedness, including weapons of mass destruction.

In 2002 Dr. Carmona was nominated by the president and unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate to become the 17th Surgeon General of the United States. Dr. Carmona was selected because of his extensive experience in public health, clinical sciences, health care management, preparedness, and his commitment to prevention as an effective means to improve public health and reduce health care costs while improving the quality and quantity of life.

As Surgeon General, Dr. Carmona focused on prevention, preparedness, health disparities, health literacy, and global health to include health diplomacy. He also issued many landmark Surgeon General communications during his tenure, including the definitive Surgeon General’s Report about the dangers of second-hand smoke.

Dr. Carmona has published extensively and received numerous awards, decorations, and local and national recognitions for his achievements. A strong supporter of community service, he has served on community and national boards and provided leadership to many diverse organizations. Dr. Carmona currently serves as chairperson of the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease, Health and Wellness chairperson of the George Washington University Strategies to Overcome and Prevent (STOP) Obesity Alliance, honorary chair of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases’ Childhood Influenza Immunization Coalition, and is a member of the Board of Directors of Clorox, Healthline Networks, and the Vascular Disease Foundation, among others.

In 2006, Dr. Carmona successfully completed the statutory four-year term of the U.S. Surgeon General and was named to the position of vice chairman for Canyon Ranch, the country’s leading health and wellness company for over 30 years. He also serves as chief executive officer of the company’s Health division and oversees health strategy and policy for all Canyon Ranch businesses. He is president of the nonprofit Canyon Ranch Institute and the first Distinguished Professor of Public Health at the University of Arizona’s Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health.

Owen Garrick, MD, MBA
President, American Medical Association Foundation
Chief Operating Officer, Bridge Clinical Research

Dr. Garrick is Chief Operating Officer of Bridge Clinical Research. He has overall responsibility for the Clinical Trials, Research Analytics and Investigator Training business units. Bridge CRO is the leading company focused on increasing the participation of ethnic minority investigators and patients in industry and institution sponsored clinical trials. In addition to profit & loss responsibility for the business units, Dr. Garrick leads the company’s research efforts in diabetes and obesity, cardiovascular disease, and prostate cancer.

Dr. Garrick was formerly Director of Corporate Strategy and M&A at McKesson Corporation. He led McKesson’s effort in vertical integration and was responsible for evaluating and managing new initiatives and business opportunities for the pharmaceutical division. His responsibilities included overseeing market analysis, monitoring competitive activity and defining vision, strategies, and tactics for the company. Dr. Garrick also provided leadership in the planning, designing and integration of acquired business. Some of his key accomplishments included the $450M acquisition of D&K Healthcare, the launch of McKesson’s Generic Drugs Telesales Business Unit, and the development and launch of McKesson’s Drug Adherence Business.

Prior to McKesson, Dr. Garrick was the Executive Director and Global Head of M&A Negotiations at Novartis Pharmaceuticals. In this position he structured, negotiated and closed both M&A and complex license transactions. He specifically oversaw small and medium size company acquisitions, hybrid equity/license right deals, mature product divestments, and venture investments in biotechnology companies.

Previously he spent four years at Goldman Sachs in New York, functioning as an investment advisor working with private healthcare companies as they sought to grow, raise capital, and perform initial public offerings.

Dr. Garrick earned his MD from the Yale School of Medicine and his MBA from the Wharton School of Business. He holds an AB in Psychology from Princeton University and continues to be an active alumnus, serving on the national fundraising board.

Dr. Garrick also serves on several boards and professional committees, including Sutter Health, the New York Blood Center, and the American Medical Association Foundation where he is currently President-elect and has oversight of the Foundation’s Childhood Obesity Initiative.

Marc A. Nivet, Ed.D.
Chief Diversity Officer
Association of American Medical Colleges

Marc A. Nivet, Ed.D., is the Chief Diversity Officer for the Association of American Medical Colleges. Dr. Nivet is known for seeking out and connecting people and ideas, creating innovative collaborations that have been recognized nationally as models of success. Through his writing and lectures, he has worked to reframe the conversation around diversity, elevating diversity out of its silo and into the company of talent management and strategic planning as drivers of organizational transformation and performance improvement. In the context of academic medicine, this means linking diversity to the overall mission of better health outcomes for all.

He most recently served as Treasurer and COO for the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, which strives to foster innovation in health professional education and to align the education of health professionals with contemporary health needs and a changing health care system. Prior to the Macy Foundation, Dr. Nivet held an outreach role at the Sallie Mae Fund, the philanthropic arm of the SLM Corporation. Before that, he worked for seven years as the Associate Executive Director of the Associated Medical Schools of New York, where he oversaw several programs designed to increase enrollment and retention of minority students in the health professions. He gathered valuable on the ground experience as director of the Office of Minority Affairs at the New York College of Osteopathic Medicine from 1995 to 1998.

Dr. Nivet received his BA in Communications from Southern Connecticut State University and his MS in Higher Education/Student Development from Long Island University. He earned his Doctorate in Education from the University Of Pennsylvania.

A fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, Dr. Nivet is a past president of the National Association of Medical Minority Educators, which presented him with its Outstanding Service Award in 2006. He received the Riland Medal for Community Advocacy from the New York College of Osteopathic Medicine in 2009.  He currently serves in an advisory capacity for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s New Careers in Nursing Scholarship Program and the American Dental Education Association’s Commission on Change and Innovation in Dental Education.

Patricia J. Numann, M.D., FACS
President, American College of Surgeons
Professor of Surgery
Distinguished Teaching Professor
Distinguished Service Professor
Lloyd S. Rogers Professor of Surgery
Medical Director, University Hospital
State University of New York, Syracuse

Dr. Patricia J. Numann is a native New Yorker who was educated at the University of Rochester and obtained her medical degree and completed her general surgery residency at the State University of New York, Health Science Center at Syracuse. She holds Board Certification from the National Board of Medical Examiners and the American Board of Surgery.

Dr. Numann is an active member of numerous professional societies such as the American College of Surgeons, the American Medical Association, the Association of Endocrine Surgeons, the International Society of Surgery, and the American Surgical Association. She has served as Vice-President of the American Association of Endocrine Surgeons and President of the Association for Surgical Education. She is past Second Vice-President of the American College of Surgeons and past Chair of the American Board of Surgery, the first woman in either position. She was one of the founding members of the Association for Surgical Education and founded the Association for Women Surgeons. She was the first woman elected to the American Medical Association Council on Scientific Affairs.

Dr. Numann has received numerous honors and awards at the local, state and national level. She has received the Post Standard Woman of Achievement Award, the Onondaga County Physician Service to the Community Award, the New York State Woman of Accomplishment Award, and the Nina Starr Braunwald Award of the Association of Women Surgeons. She is listed in Best Doctors in America. She has been named, by the SUNY Board of Trustees, as a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor and a SUNY Distinguished Service Professor. She received the Upstate Medical University Distinguished Alumna Award and SUNY Alumna of Distinction Award. She served as Medical Director of University Hospital for 10 years. She was designated the Lloyd S. Rogers Professor of Surgery in 2000. She was inducted into the International Women Physicians’ Hall of Fame and named “Local Legend” to The National Library of Medicine’s “Changing Faces of Medicine” exhibit. In 2006 Dr Numann received AMWA’s highest award the Elizabeth Blackwell Medal for her contribution in the professional advancement and recognition of women. Dr. Numann was given The American College of Surgeon’s Distinguished Award at the Clinical Congress in October of 2006. She was first woman to receive this prestigious award.

Dr. Numann is particularly interested in education and has been distinguished as a teacher, receiving the Clinical Teacher of the Year Award twice. She has been regularly asked by the graduating medical students to serve as the Faculty Marshall or to deliver the Oath of Hippocrates. Dr. Numann’s scientific and clinical interests are in the area of thyroid and parathyroid disease and breast disease, founding The Breast and Endocrine Center which now bears her name. She was highly regarded as a clinical surgeon. She has published numerous articles, abstracts and book chapters. She is committed to equity for women.

Dr Numann serves on numerous community boards including the Everson Museum of Art, The Community Health Foundation of Western and Central New York, Vera House, Hospice of Central New York and the Greater Roxbury Learning Initiative Corporation.

In January of 2007 ,she retired from active clinical practice and as Lloyd S Rodgers Professor of Surgery but remains active in many teaching and organizational activities.

She was awarded Emeritus status by SUNY. She was elected First Vice president of the American College of Surgeons in October 2010. In April 2011 she became President Elect of the American College of Surgeons.

Robert Pearl, MD
Executive Director and CEO
The Permanente Medical Group
Kaiser Permanente

Dr. Robert Pearl is Executive Director and CEO of The Permanente Medical Group. As CEO of the largest medical group in the nation, comprising over 7,000 physicians and 25,000 staff members and operating 19 medical centers in Northern California, Dr. Pearl is responsible for the health care of over 3 million Kaiser Permanente members. In addition, he is the President and CEO of the MidAtlantic Permanente Medical Group, which comprises 1000 physicians, and is responsible for the health care of 500,000 Kaiser Permanente members in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia.

Board certified in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Dr. Pearl received his MD from Yale University School of Medicine. He completed his residency in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Stanford University and currently serves on the faculty as a Clinical Professor of Plastic Surgery. He is also on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he teaches courses on strategy and leadership, as well as lectures on the subject of health care technology.

Selected by Modern Healthcare as one of the most powerful physician leaders in the nation, Dr. Pearl has published more than 100 articles in various medical journals and has been a contributor to many books. He has made over 100 presentations at national meetings in the areas of both clinical medicine and medical economics. In the past several years, he has been a visiting professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Haas School of Business and Harvard School of Public Health. Recently, Dr. Pearl was a featured speaker at both the Commonwealth Club and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s National Quality Forum event.

Dr. Pearl is a frequent lecturer on the opportunities to use 21st Century tools and technology to improve both the quality and cost of health care, while simultaneously making care more convenient and personalized. He is both an advocate for the power of integrated, prepaid and technologically enabled health care delivery systems, and a strong believer that organizations like Kaiser Permanente in which physicians collaborate rather than compete, and in which a multi-specialty medical group works in partnership with a not-for-profit health plan and hospital system, are able to provide superior quality of care over fragmented insurance-based systems.

Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa, MD
Associate Professor of Neurosurgery and Oncology, Neuroscience and Cellular and Molecular Medicine
Johns Hopkins University

Dr. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa is an Associate Professor of Neurosurgery and Oncology, Neuroscience and Cellular and Molecular Medicine at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland. He serves as the director of the Brain Tumor Surgery Program at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Campus and the director of the Pituitary Surgery Program at Johns Hopkins Hospital.  Dr. Quiñones focuses on the surgical treatment of primary and metastatic brain tumors, with an emphasis on motor and speech mapping during surgery. He is an expert in treating intradural spinal tumors as well as brainstem and eloquent brain tumors in adults with the use of neurophysiological monitoring during surgery. He further specializes in the treatment of patients with pituitary tumors using a transphenoidal endonasal approach with surgical navigation and/or endoscopic techniques. He has a strong interest in treating patients with skull base tumors and the use of radiosurgery as an adjunct to the treatment of these lesions.

Dr. Quiñones conducts numerous research efforts on elucidating the role of stem cells in the origin of brain tumors and the potential role stem cells can play in fighting brain cancer and regaining neurological function.  In addition to leading the Brain Tumor Stem Cell Laboratory, he also heads the Neuro-Oncology Surgical Outcomes Research Laboratory where he is working to improve patient safety and maximize the efficacy of current treatment paradigms for patients with brain tumors.

Most recently, Dr. Quiñones was honored with a prestigious R01 grant from the National Institute of Health for his work with stem cells and cancer.  His awards include a $450,000 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Physician-Scientist Early Career Award as well as being named one of the 100 most influential Hispanics in 2008. Dr. Quinones was also awarded the Nickens Faculty Fellowship from the Association of American Medical Colleges, recognized for leadership in addressing inequities minorities face in medical education and health care.

Dr. Quiñones is a graduate of San Joaquin Delta College and the University of California at Berkeley where he received a BA in Psychology.  He received a medical degree from Harvard University, where he graduated cum laude. He went on to complete his residency in neurosurgery at the University of California, San Francisco, where he also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in developmental and stem cell biology.

NOVA Science Now profile of Dr. Quiñones-Hinojosa »

Danielle Salovich, MD
National President
American Medical Student Association

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