Keynote Speakers
Complete speaker list to be released in the coming weeks. Check back soon!
THURSDAY, MARCH 4: 7PM (time subject to change)
Raj Panjabi, MD. MPH.
Co-Founder, Tiyatien Health
Clinical Fellow in Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Raj Panjabi is a Clinical Fellow in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a Resident Physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he is also a founding director of Tiyatien Health, a non-profit organization working to rebuild a model world-class health system in his native, war-torn Liberia. Dr. Panjabi’s work focuses on community-based strategies for reducing health and social inequalities. With colleagues at Tiyatien Health (“Justice in Health”), he established the HIV Equity Initiative, a community-based program that has revolutionized access to HIV treatment in rural Liberia. Dr. Panjabi has conducted health systems research with Partners in Health and Physicians for Human Rights, served as national policy advisor for the Liberian Ministry of Health, and board member of Sociologists without Borders. He has written on health and human rights for the Lancet, JAMA and The Washington Post.
Dr. Panjabi was born and raised in Liberia, escaping the country’s civil war with his family in 1990. Returning to Liberia in 2005, he co-founded Tiyatien Health with his friend, Weafus Quitoe, a former Liberian refugee and the organization’s first community health worker. He received a medical degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was a Sommer Scholar in epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
FRIDAY, MARCH 5: 7:30PM (time subject to change)
Dr. Paul Farmer, MD. PhD.
Co-Founder, Partners In Health
Chair, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology, Harvard Medical School
Chief, Division of Global Health Equity, Brigham and Women's Hospital
Deputy UN Special Envoy for Haiti
Medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer has dedicated his life to improving health care for the world's poorest people. He is a founding director of Partners In Health (PIH, 1987), an international non-profit organization that provides direct health care services and undertakes research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. Dr. Farmer began his lifelong commitment to Haiti in 1983 when still a student, working with villages in Haiti’s Central Plateau. Starting with a one-building clinic in the village of Cange, Partners In Health’s project in Haiti has grown to a multi-service health complex that includes a primary school, an infirmary, a surgery wing, a training program for health outreach workers, a 104-bed hospital, a women’s clinic, and a pediatric care facility. Over the past twenty years, PIH has expanded operations to ten sites throughout Haiti, as well as nine other countries around the globe. The work has become a model for health care for poor communities worldwide: Dr. Farmer and his colleagues in the U.S. and abroad have pioneered novel community-based treatment strategies that successfully show that quality health care can be delivered in resource-poor settings. Dr Farmer holds an M.D. and Ph.D. from Harvard University where he is a professor of Social Medicine and the Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine and Chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Dr. Farmer was also recently appointed the United Nations Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti by former U.S. President Bill Clinton. He is a widely published author of numerous books and articles on health and human rights and social inequality. He is subject of Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Kidder's best sellerMountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, which chronicles the development of Dr. Farmer's work in Haiti and beyond. Dr. Farmer is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association,the Outstanding International Physician (Nathan Davis) Award from the American Medical Association and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation "genius award." He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and has recently been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.