The United States National Security Council (NSC) is the principal forum used by the President of the United States for consideration of national security, military, and foreign policy matters. Based in the White House, it is part of the Executive Office of the President of the United States, and composed of senior national security advisors and Cabinet officials.
The United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is a cabinet-level executive branch department of the U.S. federal government created to protect the health of the U.S. people and providing essential human services. Its motto is "Improving the health, safety, and well-being of America". Before the separate federal Department of Education was created in 1979, it was called the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW).
Louis Wade Sullivan is an active health policy leader, minority health advocate, author, physician, and educator. He served as the Secretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services during President George H. W. Bush's Administration and was Founding Dean of the Morehouse School of Medicine.
Andrew S. Natsios is an American public servant and Republican politician from Massachusetts, who served in a number of positions in the administrations of Governor Paul Cellucci and President of the United States George W. Bush.
The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health is the public health school of Harvard University, located in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, Massachusetts. The school grew out of the Harvard-MIT School for Health Officers, the nation's first graduate training program in population health, which was founded in 1913 and then became the Harvard School of Public Health in 1922.
Donald Ainslie Henderson was an American medical doctor, educator, and epidemiologist who directed a 10-year international effort (1967–1977) that eradicated smallpox throughout the world and launched international childhood vaccination programs. From 1977 to 1990, he was Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Later, he played a leading role in instigating national programs for public health preparedness and response following biological attacks and national disasters. At the time of his death, he was Professor and Dean Emeritus of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Professor of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as Distinguished Scholar at the UPMC Center for Health Security.
Howard Kyongju Koh is the former United States Assistant Secretary for Health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), after being nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2009.
William Raymond Steiger is a Public Policy Fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.. He served as Chief of Staff at the United States Agency for international Development from 2017 to 2021. Previously, Steiger was the chief program officer at Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon, an organization affiliated with the George W. Bush Institute, which works to reduce deaths from cervical cancer and breast cancer in low- and middle-income countries. He was the Special Assistant to the Secretary for International Affairs and the Director of the Office of Global Health Affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) during the George W. Bush Administration, with a portfolio that included HIV/AIDS, malaria, avian flu and pandemic-influenza preparedness.
Daniel I. Wikler is an American public health educator, philosopher, and medical ethicist. He is currently the Mary B. Saltonstall Professor of Population Ethics and Professor of Ethics and Population Health in the Department of Global Health and Population of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. He is Director and a core faculty member in the Harvard Program in Ethics and Health (PEH). His current research interests are ethical issues in population and international health, including the allocation of health resources, health research involving human subjects, organ transplant ethics, and ethical dilemmas arising in public health practice, and he teaches several courses each year. He is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution.
Joxel García is a Puerto Rican physician and a retired four-star admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. He served as the fourteenth Assistant Secretary for Health (ASH), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from March 13, 2008, to January 20, 2009. He served as the Director of Health in the District of Columbia. He served as the Executive Director of the MD Anderson Cancer Control and Prevention Platform and Member of the Leadership Team of the MD Anderson Moon Shots program until May 2017 before joining American Express as Vice President and Chief Medical Officer.
Farah Pandith is an American academic of Indian descent. She was appointed the first-ever Special Representative to Muslim Communities in June 2009 by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The position was made specifically for her after she briefed Secretary Clinton about her work in the Bush Administration. She had the rare distinction of being a political appointee for two Republican presidents and President Obama. When she was the Special Representative she traveled to almost 100 countries. After serving under both Secretaries Clinton and John Kerry, she left government. She said she came to Washington after 9/11 again and wanted to serve – she left after more than a decade in public service. She worked at USAID and then went to the National Security Council and then the U.S. Department of State. When she left in 2014, she returned to her home state of Massachusetts.
Richard Alan Cash, M.D., M.P.H. is an American global health researcher, public health physician, and internist. He is a Senior Lecturer in International Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. Cash began his international career over 40 years ago when he was assigned by NIAID of the NIH to the Pakistan-SEATO Cholera Research Laboratory (CRL) in Dhaka, East Pakistan. While there, he and his colleagues developed and conducted the first clinical trials of oral rehydration therapy (ORT) in adult and pediatric cholera patients and patients with other infectious causes of diarrhea. This technology matches the volume of fluid losses from dehydration patients with the volume they consume so that the fluid replacement packets greatly reduce or completely replace IV therapy, which was then the only current treatment for cholera. Discoveries in ORT have been estimated to have saved over 50 million lives worldwide. World Health Organization (WHO) estimates are that at least 60 million children have been spared painful deaths because of ORT. They also conducted the first field trials of ORT, the first community-based trials of ORT, and the first use of amino acids (glycine) as an additional substrate. In the late 1970s, Cash worked with BRAC on their OTEP, which taught over 13 million mothers and caregivers how to prepare and use ORT in the home using the "pinch and scoop" method.
Norman Daniels is an American political philosopher and philosopher of science, political theorist, ethicist, and bioethicist at Harvard University and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Before his career at Harvard, Daniels had built his career as a medical ethicist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and at Tufts University School of Medicine, also in Boston.
Sameh El-Saharty is an Egyptian medical doctor and global health expert, who works as Lead Health Policy Advisor at The World Bank in Washington, DC. Dr. El-Saharty joined the Bank in 1998 and was the first Egyptian to work in the health, population, and nutrition (HNP) sector at the World Bank since its establishment. During this period, he was responsible for leading the health policy dialog and health strategy development for client countries as well as managing several programs and projects amounting to more than $3.5 billion in more than 25 countries in three world regions. Before his current position, he was the Program Leader for Human Development, responsible for the HNP, education, social protection and labor markets in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. He also held the position of Adjunct Assistant Professor of International Health at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
Jimmy J. Kolker is an American diplomat. He was the ambassador to Burkina Faso from 1999 to 2002 and Uganda from 2002 to 2005. He was Chief of the HIV/AIDS Section at UNICEF’s New York headquarters from 2007 to 2011. From 2011 to 2017, Ambassador Kolker was Assistant Secretary for Global Affairs, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, DC.
Brett P. Giroir is an American pediatrician, former U.S. assistant secretary for health, four-star admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and acting FDA commissioner. Dr. Giroir currently serves as CEO and a member of the Board of Directors for Altesa BioSciences, Inc, a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company focusing on developing new treatments for respiratory viruses and global viral threats. He is also a co-founder and independent director for Revelar Biotherapeutics, and an independent director for OncoNano Medicine. His non-profit activities include Board service on the Global Virus Network and Remote Area Medical (RAM), and he remains active in global humanitarian initiatives in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. He previously served as the 16th assistant secretary for health during the Trump administration from February 15, 2018, to January 19, 2021. He concurrently served as the secretary's principal public health and science adviser, the senior adviser for the Health Resources and Services Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration as well as the senior adviser to the secretary for Opioid Policy. From 2020 to 2021, he served additionally as the director of the U.S. coronavirus diagnostic testing, and as the U.S. representative on the World Health Organization Executive Board. As COVID-19 testing czar, he was part of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
Susan Jane Blumenthal is an American physician, global health expert, psychiatrist and public health advocate. With more than two decades of service as a senior government health leader in the administrations of four U.S. presidents, Blumenthal served as the first Deputy Assistant Secretary for Women's Health and director of the Office on Women's Health within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), as well as Assistant Surgeon General of the United States and senior global health advisor within the HHS. She also was a research branch chief at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the chair of the NIH Health and Behavior Coordinating Committee. As of 2016, she has served as the senior medical and policy advisor at amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research, a senior fellow in health policy at New America, and a clinical professor at Tufts and Georgetown Schools of Medicine. Blumenthal is the Public Health Editor of the Huffington Post. She is married to United States Senator Ed Markey.
Barry R. Bloom is Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and Joan L. and Julius H. Jacobson Professor of Public Health in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases and Department of Global Health and Population in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, where he served as dean of the faculty from 1998 through December 31, 2008.
Frederick M. "Skip" Burkle, Jr. is an American physician known for his work in human rights, international diplomacy and peacemaking, humanitarian assistance, and disaster response. He has been called "the single most talented and experienced post-conflict health specialist working for the United States government." His medical qualifications include pediatrics, emergency medicine, psychiatry, public health, and tropical medicine.
Nina Schwalbe is an American public health researcher who is the founder of Spark Street Advisors, a public health think tank based in New York City. Schwalbe specializes in vaccines. She has previously worked at Gavi, UNICEF and USAID.
