Dr. Fichtenberg is one of the co-directors of the Social Interventions Research and Evaluation Network (SIREN) and Research Scientist in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. In these roles, she leads efforts to conduct, catalyze, and disseminate high quality research on health sector strategies to reduce health inequities by addressing social determinants of health. She brings to these positions more than a decade of experience working to improve health and economic outcomes for America’s most vulnerable families, including seven years working on national efforts in Washington, DC. While Director of Research at the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), she led the development of a report that identified nine federal policy changes that could reduce child poverty by 60 percent. As Director of Epidemiology and Planning at the Baltimore City Health Department, she oversaw the city’s first analysis of neighborhood health inequities that uncovered a 20-year gap in life expectancy between the richest and poorest neighborhoods of the city. Caroline also served as director of the Center for Public Health Policy at the American Public Health Association (APHA) and as Health Policy Advisor to Senator Harkin on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, where she promoted health in all policies approaches to improve health outcomes and reduce health inequities. She earned her Ph.D. in Epidemiology from Johns Hopkins University, an M.S. degree in Biology from Yale University and an A.B. in Molecular Biology from Princeton University.

Dr. Bechara Choucair, a board-certified family physician, serves as executive vice president and chief health officer for Kaiser Permanente, one of America’s leading integrated health systems with more than 12.5 million members. He leads the organization’s community health and social health portfolios. This includes creating the nation’s largest network designed to meet the social health needs of Kaiser Permanente’s members and managing over $3 billion to support medical financial assistance and charitable health coverage programs, as well as grants to community health programs throughout the organization’s footprint. Dr. Choucair oversees the organization’s Medicaid line of business covering 1.5 million members, and advances initiatives to increase access to care and improve health outcomes for those enrolled in both Medicaid and Medicare. In addition, his accountability includes leading enterprise clinical business development opportunities focusing on care delivery models, technologies, and products. He also leads Kaiser Permanente’s environmental stewardship work, which resulted in the organization becoming carbon neutral in 2020, and he oversees the organization’s goal to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. From January through November 2021, Dr. Choucair served as the White House national COVID-19 vaccinations coordinator. During his tenure, nearly 500 million doses of the vaccine were administered nationwide.

Lauren is an assistant professor in the Department of Population Health at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, where she is jointly appointed in the Division of Healthcare Delivery Science and the Division of Medical Ethics. Lauren studies US health care through an organizational lens, applying theoretical frameworks from business ethics and political philosophy to managerial and policy dilemmas. She earned a PhD from Harvard Business School (2020), a Masters from Harvard Divinity School (2015) and a Masters from Yale School of Public Health (2009).