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National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Planning Committee and Speaker Bios
Corrie Brown, D.V.M, Ph.D., D.A.C.V.P., is the Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor of Veterinary Pathology at the University of Georgia. She holds a D.V.M. from the University of Guelph and a Ph.D. in comparative pathology from the University of California at Davis. Brown has worked internationally in building animal health infrastructure and diagnostics for most of her career, conducting workshops on basic field necropsy and diagnostic techniques in multiple countries. She has authored four books on transboundary animal diseases and field diagnostics in resource-limited settings. Brown has served on many national and international expert panels about animal health and has received numerous awards for her efforts.
May C. Chu has extensive experience in public health policy and practices. Her professional interests are to work toward ensuring trusted laboratory results based on quality management and to develop a full map of laboratories and their work around the world. She began her career at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) studying flavivirus molecular epidemiology and pathogenesis. She directed the CDC’s diagnostic reference laboratory for bacterial zoonotic diseases (plague, tularemia, and Lyme disease) from 1998 to 2004. For six years (2004-2010), Chu was assigned to the World Health Organization (WHO) joining the outbreak and response cluster and later led the Laboratory Alliances and Biosafety team in the International Health Regulations Department. She returned
to CDC (2010-2014) as the Director of the Laboratory Science Policy and Practice Program overseeing programs on quality laboratory management, Select Agent compliance, laboratory training, intellectual property patents, and maintaining the CDC specimen biorepository. During this period, Chu also served as the designated federal official of the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments Committee. Chu was seconded from CDC (2014-2015) to the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President (White House) as the Assistant Director for Public Health where she was an integral part of the President’s Ebola Task Force and led the national review of the Select Agent Program. Chu participated in a number of White House initiatives including the Ebola Grand Challenge in collaboration with the U.S. Agency for International Development, the framing of Scientific Collections policy, Big Data and privacy concerns, the Precision Medicine Initiative, and the study of the microbiome. Before leaving federal service in April 2016, Chu was designated the CDC liaison to the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL) leading a joint CDC/APHL Vision 2020 strategy plan for the future of the U.S. public health laboratory system. Chu chaired the American Society for Microbiology’s (ASM) International Board from 2010 to 2014, a period during which international ASM membership outreach touched more than 50 countries and carried out laboratory capacity strengthening programs in 23 countries. Chu received her Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii, Department of Tropical Medicine and Medical Microbiology and her B.S. in Microbiology and Public Health from Michigan State University. She has published more than 60 scientific articles, chapters, and invited commentaries.
David R. Franz holds an adjunct appointment as professor in the Department of Diagnostic Medicine and Pathobiology at the College of Veterinary Medicine, Kansas State University. His current focus and research relates to the role of international engagement in the life sciences as a component of national security policy. Franz holds a D.V.M. from Kansas State University and a Ph.D. in Physiology from Baylor College of Medicine. Franz served in the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command for 23 of 27 years on active duty and retired as Colonel having served as a Deputy Commander. He served as Commander at U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Franz was the Chief Inspector on three United Nations Special Commission biological warfare inspection missions to Iraq. He also served as a member of the first two U.S.-U.K. teams that
visited Russia in support of the Joint U.K./U.S./Russian Statement on Biological Weapons, and as a member of the Trilateral Experts’ Committee for biological weapons negotiations. Franz was Technical Editor for the Textbook of Military Medicine on Medical Aspects of Chemical and Biological Warfare released in 1997. Franz has co-chaired, chaired, or served as a member on more than 20 U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committees. He is currently a member of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control (CISAC) and leads many other biosecurity and bioengagement efforts around the world. Franz is the recipient of numerous honors and awards.
Diane E. Griffin, Vice President of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and Professor and Alfred and Jill Sommer Chair of the W. Harry Feinstone Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at Johns Hopkins University, has made and continues to make extremely valuable contributions to the scientific world, specifically within the study of virology. Griffin focuses her work on alphaviruses, acute encephalitis, measles, and malaria. She has identified determinants of virus virulence and mechanisms of noncytolytic clearance of virus from infected neurons. She is also working on the effect of measles virus infection and immune activation in response to infection on the immune system. In Zambia, she and her colleagues are examining the effect of HIV infection on measles and measles virus vaccination. She is a past president of the American Society for Virology, Association of Medical School Microbiology and Immunology Chairs, and ASM, and a member of the American Academy of Microbiology. She was elected to NAS and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and serves on the councils for both. Griffin earned a biology degree from Augustana College, followed by an M.D. and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. She completed her residency in Internal Medicine at Stanford University Hospital. She is currently a member of CISAC.
Margaret A. Hamburg earned her B.A. from Harvard College, and her M.D. from Harvard Medical School, and completed her residency at what is now New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center. She conducted neuroscience research at Rockefeller University in New York and at the National Institute of Mental Health, and later focused on HIV/AIDS research and policy as Assistant Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In 1991, after just a year in the New York City Department of Health, Hamburg was named its Commissioner. During
her six-year tenure, she implemented rigorous public health initiatives that tackled the city’s most pressing crises head-on—including improved services for women and children, a needle-exchange program to combat HIV transmission, and the nation’s first public health bio-terrorism defense program. The most celebrated achievement during her leadership was her aggressive approach to the city’s tuberculosis (TB) epidemic, which led to an 86 percent decline in drug-resistant TB in just five years.
In 1997, three years after she was elected one of the youngest-ever members of IOM, President Bill Clinton named Hamburg Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where she served until the end of the Clinton Administration. She then became founding Vice President for Biological Programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a foundation dedicated to reducing the threat to public safety from nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.
President Barack Obama nominated Hamburg for the post of U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner on March 14, 2009. As the Commissioner, Hamburg emphasized the critical role of innovation in meeting the nation’s rapidly growing public health needs. She provided leadership for the implementation of three groundbreaking measures: the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, a 2009 law that gives FDA the authority to regulate the manufacture, distribution, and marketing of tobacco products; the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011, which changed the focus of food safety measures from responding to food-borne outbreaks of illness to preventing them; and a thorough review of the system for the evaluation and approval of medical devices. Beyond these specific undertakings, Hamburg set the agency’s paramount course for fulfilling two central public health tasks. She has launched a nation-wide public-private effort to strengthen regulatory science as a means for advancing the development and evaluation of innovative, breakthrough medical products. She led the FDA’s transformation into a global regulatory agency capable of ensuring the safety and quality of imported food, drugs, and medical devices.
Ali S. Khan, M.D., M.P.H. is a retired Assistant Surgeon General and is Dean at the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Public Health. Previously, he served at the U.S. CDC for 23 years and immediately prior to retirement, he served as the director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response. During his time at CDC, Khan led and responded to numerous high-profile domestic and international public health emergencies, including outbreaks of hantavirus and Ebola. He par-
ticipated in the public health response to the Asian Tsunami (2004) and to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans (2005).
Khan served as one of the main architects of CDC’s public health bioterrorism preparedness program, which was crucial in limiting the scope of the first anthrax attack. He also founded CDC’s Public Health Matters blog and has been personally engaged in Guinea worm and polio eradication activities. While directing global infectious disease activities, he designed the laboratory component of CDC’s field epidemiology and training program. He also helped design and implement the CDC component of the $1.2 billion, five-year President’s Malaria Initiative. Khan is a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Physicians. Previously, Khan was an adjunct professor at Rollins College where he directed the emerging infections course.
Leslie Lobel was a member of the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Genetics in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Ben-Gurion University. He earned his B.A., Summa Cum Laude, from Columbia College of Columbia University in Chemistry and entered the Medical Scientist Training Program at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University earning the M.D.-Ph.D. degrees in 1988. His doctoral work was in retrovirology under Prof. Stephen Goff at Columbia University. During his tenure as a doctoral student he had extensive training in virology with viruses that included influenza, herpes, and adenovirus, and he was awarded a Helen Hay Whitney Fellowship for postdoctoral training. After postdoctoral work in the laboratory of H. Robert Horvitz at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he returned to the Department of Medicine at Columbia University before moving to the Department of Virology at Ben-Gurion University where he set up a laboratory of immunovirology and viral therapeutics in 2003.
Lobel’s work included studies on the profile of the immune response to various viral diseases including influenza, foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), Ebolavirus, and Marburgvirus. He also had expertise in the isolation of totally human monoclonal antibodies to a variety of viral diseases and has focused on those that currently lack effective treatment, such as Ebola virus disease and Marburg virus disease. Finally, he was also involved in developing viruses as antiviral agents.
Lobel was very well known for his non-standard way of solving scientific enigmas and for developing new methodologies, which have been adapted by the U.S. Army, start-up companies, and reference laboratories. He initiated several international programs in Central Africa in 2003 that
are currently funded for work on Ebolavirus, Marburgvirus, and FMD. His FMD and Filovirus programs, awarded grants by the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Department of Agriculture, European Research Council, and the National Institutes of Health, were multimillion-dollar grants for development of comprehensive control modalities for FMD and Filoviruses in Central Africa. For these large programs, he and his colleagues established an active laboratory in Uganda as a base of operations for obtaining samples and performing experiments in Africa.
Julie Pavlin is currently serving as a Board Director at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Prior to that, she was the Research Area Director for Emerging Infectious Diseases and Antimicrobial Resistance and Deputy Research Area Director for HIV at the Infectious Disease Clinical Research Program, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences through a cooperative agreement with the Henry M. Jackson Foundation. Prior to this role, she was the Deputy Director of the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center at the time of the workshop. She is a retired Colonel in the U.S. Army. She previously served as Chief of the Global Emerging Infections Department at the Armed Forces Research Institute of Medical Sciences in Bangkok, Thailand, where she developed surveillance programs for infectious diseases in Asia. She also served as the Chief of the Field Studies Department at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, where she played a pivotal role in developing the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics, the Department of Defense real-time surveillance system. Pavlin received her A.B. from Cornell University, her M.D. from Loyola University, her M.P.H. from Harvard University, and her Ph.D. in Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Uniformed Services University.
Affan Shaikh is a public health professional with interests in global health and disease prevention and treatment. He graduated in 2012 with an M.P.H. from Boston University, and at the time of the workshop, was working as a Senior Epidemiologist at Public Health Practice, LLC. His work engaged multilateral stakeholders including inter- and intra-governmental organizations, academic intuitions, nongovernmental organizations, and communities, to build local public health capacities. Before this, he graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with a B.A. in Economics. While an undergraduate, he also explored his fascination with neuroscience and social behavior. He has worked on the ground in Kenya, Pakistan,
and the Middle East with long-term engagements in Saudi Arabia. At the time of the workshop, he was collaborating with Scott McNabb of Emory University and a team of health professionals on a new and upcoming book titled Transforming Public Health Surveillance and has also published in Biosecurity: Understanding, Assessing, and Preventing the Threat.
His research interests include public health and technology, infectious disease prevention, control, and treatment, social costs of disease, health access, global health security, humanitarian biomedicine, health ethics, public health diplomacy and governance, and applying business processes to improve healthcare efficiency and effectiveness.
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