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Amy Larocca
SPEAKER
Amy Larocca is an award-winning American journalist. She spent 20 years working at New York magazine as both Fashion Director and Editor at Large. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, Town & Country and the London Review of Books, among others.
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Brooke Cotter, MD
SPEAKER
Brooke Cotter, MD, is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine and a board-certified internist. She completed her medical degree at Stanford University School of Medicine and her internal medicine residency at Stanford University, followed by board certification from the American Board of Internal Medicine.
Dr. Cotter serves on several institutional and professional committees, including the Stanford Hospital Ethics Committee and the Stanford Hospital Committee for Professionalism, and is a Fellow of the CIGH Faculty. She previously served on the Professional Affairs Committee of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. In addition to her academic and clinical roles, Dr. Cotter is the Director of the UGHE–Stanford Education Initiative, reflecting her commitment to community engagement and global health education.
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Catherine Lau, MD
SPEAKER
Catherine Lau is a Professor of Clinical Medicine at UCSF and a member of the Division of Hospital Medicine since 2009. She currently serves as the Director of Caring Wisely at UCSF Health where she focuses her efforts in redesigning and innovating systems of care at UCSF Health to improve quality, safety, value, and the patient experience. Catherine is also the Co-Director for Health Systems Improvement in the Clinical Microsystems Clerkship in the UCSF School of Medicine where she co-leads an experiential curricula for pre-clinical medical students to gain meaningful experiences in health systems improvement and A3 problem solving. Catherine serves as a UCSF School of Medicine Bridges curriculum coach, where she closely works with medical students in teaching them systems improvement skills, clinical reasoning, the patient interview, and the hypothesis-driven physical exam, while assisting them with career exploration advice. Lastly, Catherine currently serves as the Director for Recruitment and Hiring for the Division of Hospital Medicine that now has over 100 academic and clinical faculty.
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Ehsan Adeli, PhD
SPEAKER
Ehsan Adeli holds a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and computer vision, with postgraduate training in biomedical imaging and computational neuroscience. His work addresses critical problems at the intersection of healthcare and neuroscience.
His research group focuses on developing Translational Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms for applications in medicine and mental health. His research involves the automatic analysis of human activities and behaviors from video data and the integration of these behavioral patterns with brain structure and function through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). By developing and applying explainable machine learning methods, he aims to identify the underlying factors of neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders and to understand their impact on everyday human behavior.
His research bridges two core domains: digital humans and human neuroscience. He studies 3D motion, actions, and behaviors using a range of human sensing technologies, including video and wearable sensor data. In parallel, he incorporates clinical and cognitive assessments alongside neuroimaging modalities such as MRI to investigate brain function and neural processes. By integrating these approaches, his group develops computational world models for neuroscience that advance clinical applications and deepen understanding of the complex relationship between human behavior and brain function.
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Elisabeth Rosenthal, MD
SPEAKER
Dr. Elisabeth L. Rosenthal, was appointed editor-in-chief of Kaiser Health News in 2016, after more than 2 decades with the New York Times. She received a B.S. degree in biology from Stanford University, an M.A. degree in English literature from Cambridge University, and an M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School.
Rosenthal began her Times career as a reporter in the science department, and went on to cover the health and hospitals beat on the metro desk. In 2008, after a stint in Beijing and another in Rome, she returned to the U.S. as a New York-based Times senior writer covering environmental issues.
Rosenthal went back to healthcare writing after being asked to cover the Affordable Care Act during the 2012 election campaign. Libby’s two-year-long New York Times series “Paying Till it Hurts” (2013-14) won many prizes for both health reporting and its creative use of digital tools. "An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take it Back," her first book, grew out of her desire to help patients understand and tackle the high cost of U.S. medicine.University and Harvard Medical School and briefly practiced medicine in a New York City emergency room before converting to journalism.
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Joe Nation, PhD, MSFS
SPEAKER
Joe Nation is a Professor of the Practice of Public Policy at Stanford University, where he co-directs the graduate student Practicum in public policy and teaches policy courses on climate change, health care, and California state issues.
His current research is focused on carbon markets and improving data-driven decisions by state governments. Nation is a Faculty Affiliate at Stanford’s Center on Longevity. He has consulted for RAND for more than 30 years since his graduation from the Pardee RAND Graduate School (PRGS) in 1989. Nation continues to direct State Statistics, a collection of socioeconomic statistical databases that was created at RAND in 1997.
From 1992-2000, he served on the Marin Water Board, including two terms as President. From 2000-2006, he represented Marin and Southern Sonoma Counties in the California State Assembly. He was the principal co-author of AB 32, California’s Global Warmings Solutions Act and was selected as Legislator of the Year by a number of organizations. -

Maria Sophocles, MD, FACOG, MSCP, IF
SPEAKER
From 2001 to 2007, Dr. Sophocles was a visiting professor and member of an NIH research team at the Frauenspital in Basel, Switzerland. When she moved back to the U.S. in 2007, she founded Women’s Healthcare of Princeton, a progressive gynecology practice that now draws patients from all over the U.S.
A board-certified ob/gyn, she is also a Menopause Society Certified Practitioner. She has been recognized for her contributions to gynecology and, as such, has been named a fellow of both the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health (ISSWSH) and the International Society for the Study of Vulvovaginal Diseases (ISSVD).
In 2015, she was one of the first U.S. clinicians to recognize the need for a non-estrogen option to treat vaginal atrophy in breast cancer survivors and pioneered the use of CO2 laser both intravaginally and on the vulva. She has taught clinicians this technology on five continents and advocated for women’s health, reproductive, and sexual rights in the U.S. and abroad.
Working with New Jersey Senator Shirley Turner in 2023, she played a crucial role in the passage of a bill in New Jersey allowing women to obtain contraception without serial visits to a clinician.
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Michael Rabow, MD, FAAHPM
SPEAKER
Michael W. Rabow, MD, FAAHPM, the Helen Diller Family Chair in Palliative Care, is a Professor of Clinical Medicine and Urology and Associate Chief of Education & Mentoring in the Division of Palliative Medicine, Department of Medicine, at the University of California, San Francisco. He completed medical school, residency in general internal medicine, and fellowships in general medicine and medical education research at UCSF, and is board-certified in internal medicine and hospice and palliative care.
Previously, Dr. Rabow spent 25 years in the Division of General Medicine, maintaining an active primary care practice alongside his work in palliative care. He is the founding director of the MERI Center for Education in Palliative Care at UCSF/Mount Zion, which serves as the central hub for palliative care education across UCSF, and is a member of the UCSF Academy of Medical Educators.
Dr. Rabow served as Assistant Editor for the Journal of the American Medical Association section “Perspectives on Care at the Close of Life,” now published as the textbook Care at the Close of Life. He also served for 15 years as Director of the Center for the Study of the Healer’s Art at Commonweal in California. He is Co-Editor of Current Medical Diagnosis and Treatment, the world’s best-selling annually updated general medicine textbook, and was executive producer of The Caregivers documentary film and its accompanying family caregiver handbook.
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Mildred Cho, PhD
SPEAKER
Mildred Cho, PhD is a Professor (Research) in Pediatrics at the Center for Biomedical Ethics and in Medicine in the Division of Primary Care and Population Health at Stanford University. She also serves as Associate Director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, a role she has held since 2003. Dr. Cho’s work sits at the intersection of biomedical ethics, genomics, and emerging technologies, with a particular focus on the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of genomics, precision medicine, and machine learning in healthcare.
Dr. Cho has led and co-led numerous nationally funded research initiatives, including NIH NHGRI grants on integrating ethics into machine learning for precision medicine, fairness and representation in AI datasets, and the development of national ELSI resources. Her contributions have been recognized with the Bernard Lo, MD Award for Mentorship from the Greenwall Foundation and election as a Fellow of The Hastings Center. She plays a significant advisory role at the national and international levels, serving on multiple NIH boards and committees, including the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Human Genome Research Institute, and as Co-Director of the Center for ELSI Resources and Analysis.
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Stephen Nix, MD
SPEAKER
Dr. Nix received his bachelor’s in English literature from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and is interested in the integration of health humanities principles into pathology education and practice. He received his MD from UAMS, Little Rock, and participated in the Medical Research Scholars Program at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He completed a combined Anatomic and Neuropathology fellowship through Johns Hopkins Hospital and continues to practice as a board-certified neuropathologist with special interests in head, neck, and eye pathology.
Dr. Nix has presented internationally, nationally, and regionally in pathology, published over fifteen peer-reviewed articles and multiple book chapters, and received awards in surgical pathology research, resident education, and creative writing. He currently serves as a subspecialty editor for PathologyOutlines.com and is a member of the American Association of Neuropathologists, North American Society of Head and Neck Pathology, and the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology.
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Warris Bokhari, MD
SPEAKER
Dr. Warris Bokhari is the CEO and co-founder of Claimable. Warris has led healthcare strategy and innovation for over 15 years at companies like GE, Apple Health, Anthem, and Amazon. A former NHS physician and startup founder, Warris drives Claimable’s mission to transform healthcare through technology.