After spending most of her career as a project manager and management consultant, Shireen decided to change paths and pursue her passion to become a “nutri-prenuer.” While managing her own illness, she realized the importance of cultural nutrition education paired with an empowering, patient-centered care model to close gaps in health equity for minorities. Her startup is called Yumlish, creating an AI-powered, culturally relevant nutrition therapy platform for minorities with diabetes that addresses socioeconomic barriers to dietary adherence.
With a passion for health and wellness, 10 years of professional experience in fitness and health coaching, and current research on health equity, Romy Antoine began his career in 2012 by creating a science-backed fitness media company, RippedNFit. Romy holds a degree in Biology and Exercise Science from the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia and was able to use his fitness knowledge to dispel myths and communicate to subscribers and followers how to improve their lifestyles and manage any chronic conditions. Over the course of 5 years, he grew the website to gain the attention of over 250,000 monthly viewers.
Romy also worked as a personal trainer and health coach with clients who were either diabetic or pre-diabetic and received additional education on management strategies to help clients come off their medication. At the beginning of his personal training career, Romy worked at gyms in low-income areas and had the opportunity to train clients dealing with multiple chronic conditions.
Romy continued to build RippedNFit, but also took on community roles with non-profits such as Proceed Inc, where he worked with preschool-aged children and their families on how to increase activities at home and how to eat for better health. Through these roles as well as through some of his consulting positions, Romy started to see the disparities, impact of health education, and lack of high-quality access for lower income individuals. Romy helped the San Antonio American Heart Association by doing local outreach to provide blood pressure screens and nutritional advice at Black Churches and the YMCA.
As Romy continued to improve personal wellness, he found an opportunity in corporate wellness by providing workshops for companies. Drawing on his second passion for technology and artificial intelligence, this opportunity eventually led Romy to create technology to support these employees, which is how One Stop Wellness started. Romy has spoken at countless conferences and received The 2018 Young Wellness Professional Award by the National Wellness Institute. He also published a book titled The Ultimate Guide to Engaging Millennials discussing the shifts that would happen in the workplace, all of which came to fruition due to the pandemic.
Dr. Kimberly Gandy is a physician/scientist and entrepreneur with 25 years of experience in healthcare, her clinical and scientific career including institutions such as Duke and Stanford. Having been a leader in her field of transplantation, she has led international committees in translational medicine and been selected by her peers as one of the nation’s top doctors. Having cared for patients in transplantation and congenital heart disease, she has a deep understanding of the importance and issues involved in motivating patients to be adherent. Kim founded Play-it Health and for the past 8 years has developed Play-it Health’s platform, which is considered one of the most versatile platforms in the virtual care management space and has been selected by multiple institutions as their choice platform on which to study long-COVID. Over the years, the platform has been recognized by multiple groups for innovation, including the American Diabetes Association and the American Heart Association.
Dr. Katherine Grill received a BS in Art Therapy, MA in Psychology, and PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience. While completing her PhD, she worked at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC conducting NIH research. She was also the co-founder of a community health program for young adults called Mindful Millennials. In 2017, Dr. Grill moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to learn about using technology to increase access to mental health care. In 2018 she founded Neolth, a technology company that provides personalized, on-demand mental health support to teens through a self-guided platform.
As the Co-founder and CEO of Neolth, Dr. Grill has won numerous awards, including the 2021 Timmy Finalist as a Best Tech for Social Good company (competition ongoing), 2020 Startup of the Year EdTech award, Top 100 Startup in 2020 by SOTY, Top 100 company in 2020 by Pepperdine University, the SoGal San Francisco Regional Pitch Competition, and the SoGal Global Finals Pitch Competition, the largest pitch competition for female founders in the world. She led the company to receive a $700,000 pre-seed investment, with notable investors like Techstars and Telosity. She was invited to and participated in the Techstars accelerator (which has a less than 1% acceptance rate), the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center’s Milestone Makers program, and the Headstream program (the youth mental health accelerator supported by Pivotal Ventures). She has been featured in numerous articles and received press for her work with Neolth, including being featured in Forbes alongside the founders of Bumble and Zyper in 2021 as a leading female founder and being honored with a display on the Nasdaq Tower in Times Square in 2020.
Dr. Grill lives in the Bay Area with her husband and co-founder, Lukas Grill, and their two huskies, Kai and Leo. In her free time, Katherine enjoys hiking, swimming, baking, and learning German.
Dr. Yair Saperstein is a board-certified internal medicine physician affiliated with Mount Sinai Hospital. He is a member of Alpha Omega Alpha (AOA) and graduated from Albert Einstein College of Medicine with distinction in research in global health and from Yeshiva College as valedictorian. Previously, Dr. Saperstein co-founded two non-profit organizations, StartScience.org and Teach4Kids.org, and served as the inpatient medicine chief resident at Kings County Hospital. Additionally, Yair is an acclaimed classical concert pianist and recreational ukulele jammer and has won numerous awards, including The Jewish Week’s “36 under 36” most influential Jewish Americans, and was a semifinalist in the Dell Social Innovation Challenge.
Gerald “Jerry” Wilmink, PhD is an American health entrepreneur, biomedical engineer, and inventor. Before joining CarePredict as the Chief Business Development Officer, he founded WiseWear in 2013. WiseWear, like CarePredict, was a senior health technology company that developed IoT products to keep seniors healthy, safe, and secure. Jerry’s former experience also includes founding and growing the first Terahertz biosensing laboratory in the Department of Defense (DoD) and serving as a program manager for the U.S. government’s $3 Billion SBIR/STTR product commercialization program.
Jerry has penned 6 patents, published 50 technical manuscripts, and has delivered over 200 presentations at leading business and technical conferences including CES, RISE, TEDMED, SXSW, and SPIE. He co-chairs Consumer Technology Association’s (CTA) initiative on Artificial Intelligence in healthcare. Jerry was recognized as the 2019 Argentum Senior Living Leader Under 40. He also previously served as an advisor for the United States National Academy of Sciences NRC, SMART, and NDSEG programs.
Jerry earned his BS, MS, and PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University, a research associateship with the National Academy of Science, and an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin.
Sathya Elumalai is a healthcare executive with over 15 years of experience working with payers, providers, pharmaceuticals, and patients. Mr. Elumalai is the Founder, President, and CEO at Aidar Health, a digital medicine company based on Baltimore. At Aidar Health, Inc., Mr. Elumalai has developed MouthLab, a revolutionary tricorder-style health assessment device that measures 10+ health parameters in 30 seconds, and an AI-enabled enterprise platform, which leverages data science and AI technology to create a new kind of personalized experience for people with chronic conditions.
In addition to his efforts at Aidar, Mr. Elumalai also serves as an Advisory Board Member at Rutgers University, Scientific Merit Reviewer at the National Science Foundation, Executive Member of Forbes Business Council, and an Ambassador & Merit Reviewer at the Patient-Centered Outcome Research Institute.
Mr. Elumalai holds a dual master’s degree, with a Master of Public Health and an MBA in Healthcare Management from the prestigious Johns Hopkins University. He is also a certified professional in healthcare quality and safety with over 10 years of diverse leadership experience at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institute.
Mr. Elumalai is a proven leader recognized for building scalable processes, integrating analytics into decision making, improving customer satisfaction, and driving large-scale digital transformations in healthcare.
Don Vetal is a global executive with more than 25 years of experience in the travel and health services industries. Mr. Vetal has participated in C-level roles within the three largest Assistance firms in the world, AXA Assistance, United Healthcare International, and most recently as North America President of Travel & Health at Generali Global Assistance. These organizations provide international healthcare and travel support services to many of the largest accident and health insurers, credit card issuers, and Fortune 500 companies in the US. During his tenure, his organizations won a number of industry awards, including France’s prominent National Quality Award for service.
Mr. Vetal holds a business degree from Robert Morris University and is a US patent holder.
Currently Mr. Vetal is CEO and co-founder of LyfLynks, Inc., leveraging his extensive experience developing global solution platforms to deliver a comprehensive solution for caregivers and the aging marketplace in the US.
Jeffrey Yang is the Chief Technology Officer at Lyfebulb. He spent the past 20 years working with early-stage companies and helped launch over 50 companies and products. He founded Arabella LLC, a digital product agency, in 2011, which was acquired by Roman Health Ventures in 2018. As a specialist in building product and engineering teams for early-stage companies, he has worked with some of the most innovative healthcare companies such as Oscar Health, Ro, and Calibrate. Jeff received his BS in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.
Dr. Abigail Silva is a trained epidemiologist with more than two decades of experience in both public health practice and research. She has spent much of her career promoting health equity in all aspects of her work, including teaching. During her career, she has published over 30 peer-reviewed manuscripts, authored six book chapters, and presented her work at national and international conferences. Dr. Silva has also meaningfully served both the research and local communities.
Dr. Silva’s work has been funded by foundations, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the VA’s Health Services Research and Development Service. Her work encompasses three main areas: 1) inequities in care and outcomes; 2) the role of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on health care access, utilization, and outcomes; and 3) the COVID-19 pandemic in communities of color. Her contributions to health equity research include evaluating cancer-related care and outcomes and various causes of mortality. Toward the latter, she recently collaborated on a book titled, Unequal Cities: Structural Racism and the Death Gap in America’s Largest Cities, which highlights the need to focus on city-level data as a means of moving toward racial health equity and outlines a path forward by adopting a broader perspective that includes reducing structural racism and increasing community empowerment to improve public health research and policy.
Dr. Silva is also actively leveraging electronic administrative and medical record data as well as public health surveillance data to determine if the expansion of health insurance under the ACA has improved health care access and reduced racial/ethnic inequities. Her work related to the COVID-19 pandemic includes co-leading efforts by the COVID Equity Response Collaborative at Loyola (CERCL). This interprofessional collaborative of academic, community, public, and institutional partners catalyzed to reduce the harm caused by COVID-19 among at-risk populations by increasing testing and vaccination, supporting contact tracing efforts, and providing social support for those directly impacted by the virus. She received funding from the Walder Foundation as part of the Chicago Coronavirus Assessment Network (CAN) to provide free COVID-19 testing in hard-hit communities in suburban Cook County, biobank nasopharyngeal samples for emerging pathogen surveillance, identify (via questionnaire) possible transmission routes through social network and epidemiologic analyses, and conduct serologic surveillance of immune response through serial antibody testing. Additionally, she is a co-lead of the NIH-funded Chicagoland COVID Collaborative, part of the Community Engagement Alliance, which aims to share scientific expertise and conduct extensive community outreach that will enhance current and future COVID-19 vaccination, prevention, mitigation, and response efforts in Black and Latinx populations.
In addition to her active involvement in several University-affiliated committees, she also serves as a member of the Institutional Review Board for a safety-net hospital, a Commissioner for the Board of Health of a suburban village, and a regular manuscript reviewer for several journals.
Dr. Silva holds a Master of Public Health and a PhD in public health sciences from the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health. She also completed a post-doctoral fellowship in health services research at the Center of Innovation for Complex Chronic Healthcare at Hines Jr. VA Hospital where she still holds a partial research appointment. Prior to her academic career, she worked as a senior epidemiologist at the Sinai Urban Health Institute and a lead epidemiologist at the Chicago Department of Public Health.