Theme: Beyond Boundaries – Innovating for a Healthier Tomorrow

TEDxNYU Langone Health welcomes inspirational stories from its diverse community of patients, hospitalists, researchers, and others on how they have used innovation, collaboration, creativity, and resilience to improve the lives of others around them.

Murphy Auditorium
550 First Avenue
New York, New York, 10016
United States

Alan Schlechter, MD, MS

Associate Professor, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

There’s more to happiness than just feeling good: we actually become more creative, accurate, and work better with the people in our lives. High school students who played a video game designed to let them win did better on practice SAT questions than the students who were told to just get to work. When Alan D. Schlechter, MD, MS a child and adolescent psychiatrist at NYU Langone’s Child Study Center, starts therapy with a new patient, he tries to amp their positive emotions by asking them to describe not their problems but the good things in their lives. This approach enables them to later tackle challenges more effectively.

Bob Montgomery, MD, DPhil, FACS

H. Leon Pachter, MD Professor of Surgery, Department of Surgery

Many potential organ donors are young people who die from drug overdoses and have been infected through needles with hepatitis C. Robert Montgomery, MD, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, helped develop a protocol that makes it possible to safely transplant organs from hepatitis C-positive donors—organs that otherwise would have been discarded. This innovation took a personal turn for Montgomery in 2018, when he found that he himself was in need of a heart transplant—and received a heart from someone infected with hepatitis C.

Laura Gould, MSc, MA, PT

Research Assistant Professor, Department of Neurology

Many nervous parents know to put babies to sleep on their backs to avoid sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, but until 2005 there wasn’t a name for unexplained deaths of children after their 1st birthday. More than 20 years ago, Laura Gould, MSc, a research assistant professor in the department of neurology, put her happy, thriving 15-month-old daughter down for a morning nap from which she never awoke. Gould left her career as a physical therapist to become a scientific detective and advocate—identifying other such cases, creating a study registry and giving a name to the phenomenon: sudden unexplained death in childhood.

Leigh Johnson, MPH

NYU Clinical & Translational Science Institute

Only 15-20% percent of the people who participate in clinical trials for new medical treatments are Black—although Black people die from certain diseases at higher rates than others. Leigh Johnson, MPH, assistant research scientist at the Clinical & Translational Science Institute, is passionate about increasing Black participation in medical research, in part for a personal reason. She has lost too many family members to cancer. Historical atrocities like the Tuskegee study understandably make people of color wary, but Johnson sees volunteering for clinical trials as an act of community service—a way to help bring about medical breakthroughs that will help all people—maybe even someone you love or someone like you.

Mark Pochapin, MD

Sholtz-Leeds Professor of Medicine, Department of Medicine

Hope is essential for healing, even at the end of life. When Mark Pochapin, MD, a gastroenterologist and Sholtz-Leeds Professor of Medicine, and his mother who had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer were told by her doctor that “there’s nothing more we can do,” he learned the importance of hope and the impact of having it taken away. Through his experiences with his mother and over 30 years as a physician, Pochapin tells us why there is always hope—whether it’s for an effective treatment; for a scientific breakthrough; or for comfort, peace, and even joy at the end of life. Hope is a basic human need, and there is always something we can do to foster hope and healing.

Matthew Kasabian, MPA

IBD Patient, NYU Langone Health

Ulcerative colitis is an autoimmune disease in which the body attacks its own large intestine as if it were something foreign. Matthew Kasabian, MPA, was 22 when he went from working out and enjoying cheeseburgers and burritos to having constant diarrhea, stabbing pains, and uncontrollable weight loss. He dropped from 145 to 101 pounds, was confined to a bland diet, and became too sick to leave his apartment. At the time he was starting a master’s degree program in public policy with a government career in mind, but his medical ordeal inspired him to work in healthcare instead. He now works in the finance department at NYU Langone Health and has been excited to return to the hospital system he credits with giving him his life back.

Michael Pacold, MD, PhD

Assistant Professor, Department of Radiation Oncology

HPDL-related encephalopathy is a rare, progressive childhood disease that is marked by seizures and severe neurodevelopmental delay, and is often fatal. Michael Pacold, MD, PhD, an assistant professor in the department of radiation oncology, was doing basic research on how cancer cells take up oxygen when he and his team identified the reaction catalyzed by the HPDL enzyme. This work holds the potential to become the first treatment for children suffering from HPDL-related encephalopathy. It’s a good example of how scientists studying basic molecular pathways can make a discovery that has a direct impact on patients.

Omni Cassidy

Assistant Professor, Department of Population Health

Junk food advertising represented three-quarters of Spanish-language and Black-targeted TV ad spending in 2021, disproportionately targeting populations who also have the highest obesity levels. Omni Cassidy, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Population Health and director of the Food, Culture & Tech Lab at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, grew up in Mississippi, where people have a deep connection to the land—she spent summers on her grandparents’ farm making pies from wild berries and tea from backyard herbs—but also elevated rates of overweight and diabetes. Now she studies the intensive marketing campaigns that food and beverage brands unleash on people of color, establishing unhealthy eating habits that can lead to diabetes and heart disease. Cassidy is exploring novel policies and interventions to help Black people reclaim their relationship to healthful food environments.