Dr. Conway is Chief Medical Officer for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and Director of the Center for Clinical Standards and Quality. This Center is responsible for all quality measures for CMS for all settings, quality improvement programs in all 50 states, value-based purchasing programs, clinical standards and survey and certification of all providers across the nation, and all coverage decisions for treatments and services for CMS. The Center budget exceeds $1.3 billion annually. Previously, he was Director of Hospital Medicine and an Associate Professor at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. He was also AVP Outcomes Performance, responsible for leading measurement, including the electronic health record measures, and facilitating improvement of health outcomes across the health care system, including all Divisions and Institutes. Previously, he was Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. In 2007-08, he was a White House Fellow assigned to the Office of Secretary in HHS and the Director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. As Chief Medical Officer, he had a portfolio of work focused primarily on quality measurement and links to payment, health information technology, and policy, research, and evaluation across the entire Department. He also served as Executive Director of the Federal Coordinating Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research coordinating the investment of the $1.1 billion for CER in the Recovery Act. He was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar and completed a Master’s of Science focused on health services research and clinical epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
 

Previously, he was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, serving senior management of mainly health care clients on strategy projects. He has published articles in journals such as JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, and Pediatrics and given national presentations on topics including health care policy, quality of care, comparative effectiveness, and hospitalist systems. He is a practicing pediatric hospitalist, completed pediatrics residency at Harvard Medical School’s Children’s Hospital Boston, and graduated with High Honors from Baylor College of Medicine. He is married with three children.
 

Richard Hamermesh is the MBA Class of 1961 Professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School where he teaches in the MBA Program and is the Faculty Chair of the HBS Healthcare Initiative. Richard created and teaches the second-year MBA elective, Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital in Healthcare. Previously, he was the Course Head for the required first year course entitled The Entrepreneurial Manager. In addition Richard participates in several HBS Executive Education programs.

 

From 1987 to 2001, Richard was a co-founder and a Managing Partner of The Center for Executive Development, an executive education and development consulting firm. Prior to this, from 1976 to 1987, he was a member of the faculty of the Harvard Business School.

 

Richard is also an active investor and entrepreneur, having participated as a principal, director, and investor in the founding and early stages of over 20 organizations. These have included start-ups, leveraged buy-outs, industry roll-ups, and non-profit foundations. He was the founding president of the Newton (MA) Schools Foundation and served on the editorial board of the Harvard Business Review. He is currently on the Boards of one public and two private corporations, as well as two non-profit Boards. From 1991 to 1996, he was the founding Chairman of Synthes Spine, Inc. Richard is the author or co-author of five books, including New Business Ventures and the Entrepreneur. His best-known book, Fad-Free Management, was published in 1996. He has published numerous articles and more than 100 case studies. His most recent article, "Realizing the Potential of Personalized Medicine", appeared in the Harvard Business Review(October 2007). Richard received his AB from the University of California, and his MBA and DBA from HBS. He is married, has two children, and his hobbies include tennis, skiing, and yoga.

 

Dr. Herman is an investigator in the Center for Molecular and Human Genetics, The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, and Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, The Ohio State University College of Medicine. She is the current President of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics. She received her medical degree and a PhD in biochemistry from Duke University and completed a residency in pediatrics and a fellowship in genetics at Baylor College of Medicine. She is board-certified in pediatrics and clinical and biochemical genetics. Dr. Herman divides her time between her clinical practice of pediatric genetics and molecular genetics research, focusing on mouse models of selected human developmental disorders. She is an author on more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and has had research funding from the National Institutes of Health, the March of Dimes, and the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Recently, her research has extended to the genetics of autism spectrum disorders, and she is the Principal Investigator of a large, multisite project funded by the Department of Defense to develop a local registry of autism families and to identify autism susceptibility genes.

Dr. Herman has served as a regular member of the NIH Genome and Mammalian Genetics study sections and was the first Chair of the NIH Genetics of Health and Disease study section. She has served on the editorial boards of Human Molecular Genetics and Mammalian Genome and is currently a member of the Faculty of 1000 editorial board in Medical Genetics. She has presented invited talks at national and international meetings on topics ranging from Inherited Disorders of Cholesterol Biosynthesis to the Genetics of Autism. She has been named in Best Doctors continuously since 1996, with listings in the fields of medical genetics and pediatric metabolic diseases.
 

Raju Kucherlapati, Ph.D. is the Paul C.Cabot Professor in the Harvard Medical School Department of Genetics. He is also a professor in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Dr. Kucherlapati was the first Scientific Director of the Harvard Medical School-Partners Healthcare Center for Genetics and Genomics. His research focuses on gene mapping, gene modification, and cloning disease genes. During 1989-2001, Dr. Kucherlapati was the Lola and Saul Kramer Professor of Molecular Genetics and Chairman of the Department of Molecular Genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. He was previously a professor in the Department of Genetics at the University of Illinois, College of Medicine. He began his research as an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemical Sciences at Princeton University.

 

He has chaired numerous NIH committees and served on the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research and the NCI Mouse Models for Human Cancer Consortium. He is also a member of the Cancer Genome Atlas project of the National Institutes of Health. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a member of Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

 

Dr. Kucherlapati received his B.S. and M.S. in Biology from universities in India, and he received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana, as well as conducting post-doctoral work at Yale University.

 

Dr. Sawyers is President of the American Association for Cancer Research and was recently appointed by President Obama to the National Cancer Advisory Board. He is past President of the American Society of Clinical Investigation, and serves on the National Cancer Institute's Board of Scientific Councilors. He is also a Member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Sawyers has received numerous accolades, including the AACR-Richard & Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award, the Dorothy P. Landon-AACR Prize for Translational Cancer Research, the Doris Duke Distinguished Clinical Scientist Award, the American Society of Clinical Oncology David A. Karnofsky Award, and most recently the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the 2013 American Cancer Society/Society of Surgical Oncology Basic Science Lecture.
 

Scott Weiss, M.D., M.S. is currently Scientific Director of the Partners HealthCare Center for Personalized Genetic Medicine (PCPGM) and Associate Director, Channing Laboratory, and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. In this latter capacity, he leads a 28 investigator, 120 person research group examining the environmental and genetic origins of asthma and COPD.

 

He has authored or coauthored over 500 publications and four books in the area of asthma and COPD risk factors, natural history, and genetics. His initial work concerned the role of airways responsiveness and environmental tobacco smoke exposure in asthma and COPD, the effect of allergen exposure and airways responsiveness on markers of inflammation and the combined effect of these factors on the development of COPD. In 1996, he developed a strong interest in the genetics of asthma and his work over the past 14 years has focused on this, and novel environmental exposures such as vitamin D and the bowel flora. His laboratory is the only laboratory in the world that has active NIH research in the areas of asthma genetics, asthma pharmacogenetics, and COPD genetics. He is the principal investigator or co-investigator on a total of six separate NHLBI-funded grant proposals in the area of the genetics of asthma and Asthma Pharmacogenetics, including a MERIT award.