Theme: HealthNext

Don’t miss HealthNext, an official TEDxNashvilleSalon focused on health and healthcare. Each talk at TEDxNashville’s HealthNext event will be delivered by an expert in only 18-minutes or less, giving you a fast-paced, deep dive into an important idea. At this unique, half-day event, all talks will be related to human health and healthcare. In addition, at HealthNext you will also experience creative performances by innovative artists.

Schermerhorn Symphony Center
1 Symphony Pl
Nashville, Tennessee, 37201
United States

Amy Richardson

Community Health Outreach Director at Siloam Health

Amy Richardson is an advocate for vulnerable populations and their well-being locally and globally. Though a proud Nashville native, Amy’s work and travel abroad led her to recognize the interconnectivity of the world. She entered the sphere of health care through a side door, becoming a public health advocate while simultaneously developing a passion for refugees and immigrants. She has served in numerous leadership roles with refugee and immigrant agencies in Nashville, and she currently works as Community Health Outreach Director at Siloam Health, where she is also known as the “Chief Disruption Officer” for the ways she pushes the organization to promote health outside the clinic walls.

Dr. Cheryl Whitaker

Chairman & CEO, NextLevel Health

How do you assess a patient’s neighborhood? None of the 81 measures health plans use to measure performance do, yet studies show that social determinants are up to 50% of what impacts health and the care patients receive. Cheryl Whitaker, MD, co-founded NextLevel Health (NLH) in 2014 because government-funded health care programs often fail to reach their intended beneficiaries. This innovative for-profit health insurance company helps the underserved access and manage Medicaid services by borrowing a page from the community organizer’s playbook. NLH provides extensive patient services with a geographically based Care Management Team model. Cheryl is a Washington University- and Stanford-trained physician with a Harvard MPH. After practicing medicine, consulting for the government and NGOs and founding NLH, she has a 360-degree view of the health care system as a patient, provider and now payor. This informs her conviction that payors need a new model of patient-centric engagement.

Dr. Jennifer Adair

Gene Therapist | Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

In her Seattle lab at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Dr. Jennifer Adair leads a team of scientists to find ways to correct genetic code to prevent diseases such as HIV and cancer. But the cutting-edge therapy has a problem: it can only be done in high-tech, sterile labs that exist in just a handful of clinics in elite, developed countries. To make it accessible and affordable worldwide, Adair developed a mobile “gene therapy in a box” technique by combining commercially available technologies with practical molecular and cell biology approaches and then proved the method can be delivered in resource-constrained clinics. Adair’s scrappy point of view comes from her everyday experience in leveraging available resources to meet a diverse set of needs. At age 19, she was newly married and a new mom. With the help of her family, a corporate scholarship and the U.S. welfare system, she earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and then a PhD in genetics and cell biology.

Dr. Kevin Johnson

Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor and Chair, Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University

An esteemed professor in pediatrics and biomedical informatics, member of the National Academy of Medicine and other professional societies, Dr. Johnson has expressed himself through classical bass, singing, and even breeding geckos as a child. He also developed a love for science, leading to a degree in biology with a minor in computer science, medical School and Pediatric residency at the Johns Hopkins University, and a degree in medical information sciences at Stanford. Dr. Johnson prides himself on his passion for education and creativity. His career has focused on how healthcare information can be created, documented, and shared to improve the quality of health care in our country. His overly-developed sense of the unconventional has led him down a number of creative rabbit holes—from being Executive Producer of a feature-length documentary (No Matter Where), to developing methods to improve health information technology education—all with a goal of improving health care.

Dr. Robert Webster III

Roboticist, Entrepreneur, and Professor

As robots invade the operating room, what does the future hold? Will they replace surgeons, or will how we think of them change until they aren’t even robots anymore? First generation surgical robots have recently been integrated into operating rooms all over the world, and help surgeons operate through smaller incisions. But we have only scratched the surface of the potential of robots in surgery. Tiny, intelligent robot tentacles the size of needles promise incisionless surgeries with rapid healing and no scars. They have the potential to help surgeons rewire the brain, destroy tumors with heat, and fire lasers to accurately cut tissue. These robots are poised to create “supersurgeons” who can transcend the size, dexterity, and sensory perception limits that constrain modern surgical approaches.

Dr. Steffanie Strathdee

Associate Dean of Global Health Sciences, Harold Simon Professor, Chief, Division of Global Public Health

Dr. Strathdee is an infectious disease epidemiologist who received her doctoral training at the University of Toronto. She is renowned for her research on the intersection of HIV and drug use, having generated >500 scholarly publications. She is Associate Dean of Global Health Sciences and Harold Simon Professor of Medicine at the University of California San Diego where she directs a campus-wide Global Health Institute. She is married to Thomas L. Patterson, Professor of Psychiatry at UC San Diego, where they co-direct a research and training program on the Mexico-US border. Strathdee was recently credited with saving her husband’s life from a deadly superbug infection using bacteriophages –viruses that attack bacteria. The case, which involved cooperation from three universities, the U.S. Navy and researchers across the globe, shows how phage therapy is a future weapon against multi-drug resistant bacterial infections which are expected to kill 10 million people per year by 2050.

Gary Gaston

Executive Director | Nashville Civic Design Center

Gary Gaston is the executive director of the nonprofit Nashville Civic Design Center, which works to envision the future of Nashville’s built environment and promote public participation in the design process. Gaston also serves as a lecturer at UTK College of Architecture + Design. He has a M.Ed. in Community Development and Action from Vanderbilt University. Gary has led numerous planning and design efforts for the organization, including NCDC’s visionary The Plan of Nashville and the National Endowment for the Arts funded documentary film Design Your Neighborhood. He was the project director and co-author of Shaping the Healthy Community: The Nashville Plan, published by Vanderbilt University Press in April 2016. Gary received the Tau Sigma Delta Honor Society Silver Medal “for extraordinary efforts to advance the field of design in the region” and recognized as a “Next American Vanguard” by Next City Magazine.

Giri and Uma Peters

Giri Peters (age 12) and Uma Peters (age 10) are a brother-and-sister duo from Nashville, Tennessee (www.giripetersmusic.com). These award-winning multi-instrumentalists astonish audiences with their refreshing, soulful blend of old-time and roots music. They may be young, but their musicianship and vocal harmonies showcase a creativity and originality beyond their years. The TEDxNashville audience is still talking about this exceptional performance by these talented young artists; watch their performance now.

Jens Titze

Vanderbilt, Associate Professor, Medicine, and Molecular Physiology and Biophysics

I am a clinician-scientist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and University of Erlangen, Germany. In 1991, as a medical student in Berlin, I took a class on human physiology in extreme environments. The professor who taught the course worked with the European space program and presented data from a simulated 28-day mission in which a crew lived in a small capsule. They had collected the astronauts’ urine and other physiological markers, and noticed something puzzling in the data: Their sodium excretion went up and down in a seven day cycle. That contradicted all I had been taught in medical school: there should be no such temporal cycle. I made a decision that I wanted to study that. 25 years later, we have learned that humans and animals store large amounts of sodium in their tissues as they age, and that this sodium storage is coupled with disease. Our work suggests that we really do not understand the effect of sodium chloride on the body, and that it is time to rethink salt.

Josh Robbins

HIV Activist

Josh Robbins is one of the coolest HIV-positive patient advocates in the history of the world. He uses the power of humor and encouragement through video to make others cool too! His blog was nominated for a 2017 GLAAD Award, and smells of rich mahogany. He’s an emerging media entrepreneur and consultant for sexual health-related nonprofits. He helped lead The White House’s social media plan for the update of the National HIV Stratedgy. He did miss his flight that morning, as well. But he made it! Currently he’s developing Emory University CFAR’s social media strategy, leading a Planned Parenthood condom distribution campaign: #GetYaSumGood, and continues as a spokesperson for Napo Pharmaceuticals’ Mytesi™ Campaign: #MyHIVThankYou™. He lives in Nashville, TN, and just completed two iOS apps: disclosur+ and Ask HIV. He continues to host his digital video web series and audio podcast, #HIVscoop.

Kelly McQueen, MD, MPH

Director, Vanderbilt Global Anesthesia Programs and Development

Kelly McQueen is a physician, professor and public health specialist who has spent her career working in the world’s most impoverished countries. Focusing on the absence of essential health resources, she has worked to illuminate health disparities and address inequity as it relates to surgical disease, anesthesia and pain management, and patient safety. She has applied her passion and energy to organizing institutions, organizations, and governments, as well as founding new entities to improve infrastructure, inform research and to advocate for universal access to surgical care.Dr. McQueen is an intrepid adventurer, creative thinker and has endless energy for serving others. No task is too small and no dream too large for her to take on.

Matthew Russell

Chief Technology Officer | Digital Reasoning Systems

Matthew Russell serves as Chief Technology Officer of Digital Reasoning. Matthew ensures the strategic technology vision and powers behind their cognitive computing platform, Synthesys. Under his leadership, Synthesys software emerged as the world leader in understanding human communication, deep learning and artificial intelligence at unprecedented scale. In 2015, the software shattered the world record for largest neural network at over 160 billion parameters – 14 times larger than the previous record held by Google. His most significant achievement in 2016 is the release of Digital Reasoning’s Cancer Patient ID. His team has been working with a large healthcare system to develop an application to automate the analysis of clinical reports to identify in near-real time patients who needed follow-up care. Cancer Patient ID does two things: it identifies whether or not a pathology report has cancer, and predicts the primary site of the cancer-positive documents.