With deep experience in management consulting, executive search and organizational development, Ms. Kourtney Whitehead helps clients drive their business strategy by building high functioning HR teams.

Before joining accelHRate, Ms. Whitehead served as a Principal in Korn Ferry’s HR Practice focused on CHRO and functional lead assignments for Fortune 500 companies in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. She was also a member of Korn Ferry’s Diversity Advisory Group.

Prior to joining Korn Ferry, Ms. Whitehead led the Critical Sourcing team for Booz Allen Hamilton. In this role she designed several of Booz Allen’s employee branding, social media and candidate intelligence methods and successfully deployed a team of highly skilled and specialized recruiters.

Prior to joining Booz Allen, Ms. Whitehead worked with Spencer Stuart in their global Human Resource practice where she partnered to drive their client management and human resource search strategies.

Earlier, Ms. Whitehead spent seven years with SRA International as the company transitioned from private to public. She was also involved in the integration of six acquisitions. Her last role was Director of Career Design and Development. This focused on resource planning, performance management and leadership development. She also served as the Chief of Staff to the CEO working on critical strategic projects in HR, Investor Relations, and Corporate Development. During this time, she worked with Wharton Executive Education to design and deliver development sessions for SRA’s high potential executive leaders.

Ms. Whitehead holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from Virginia Union University and a master’s degree in human resource development from George Washington University. She currently serves on the Board of the Children’s Environment Health Network and Chairs the Education Committee for Northern Virginia Community Foundation’s (NVCF) Future Fund. She resides in Prince William County, Virginia with her husband and two sons.

Joan Cranmer is a neurotoxicologist and Professor of Pediatrics and Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Arkansas School of Medicine.  She received a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.  Her research is in infant and child neurotoxicity studies, subtle and long-term effects; children’s environmental health; and developmental neurotoxicology. 

Dr. Cranmer is an international leader in the area of toxins and children. She has more than 74 publications in peer reviewed journals, proceedings, and edited books. She has served on a large number of study sections, national and international advisory boards, and expert panels and committees, including Council member of the National Institute of Environmental Health Advisory Council of the NIH, and the Scientific Advisory Board of the National Egyptian Center for Toxicological Research.

Dr. Cranmer has served as Editor in Chief of the Journal of Neurotoxicology since its inception in 1979.  She has served as Conference Chair of the annual International Conference on Neurotoxicology every year since 1982. She was an advisor to the White House Committee on the Environment and Children in 1996. She has received an array of special awards and recognitions, and has been an invited speaker to a large number of major international conferences.

Lynn R. Goldman served as chair of the CEHN board from 2002-2006.  A pediatrician and an epidemiologist, and most recently professor at Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Goldman is the dean of the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services.

Dr. Goldman most recently served as a professor of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, principal investigator for the Johns Hopkins National Children Study Center and dual principal investigator for the National Center of Excellence for the Study of Preparedness and Catastrophic Event Response (PACER).

In 1993, Dr. Goldman was appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate to serve as Assistant Administrator (AA) for Toxic Substances at the US Environmental Protection Agency, where she directed the Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances (OPPTS) from 1993 through 1998.  As AA for OPPTS she was responsible for the nation’s pesticide, toxic substances and pollution prevention laws.  Under her watch, EPA expanded right-to-know under the Toxics Release Inventory and overhauled the nation’s pesticides laws.  Dr. Goldman made significant progress on the issues of testing of high volume industrial chemicals and identification of chemicals that disrupt endocrine systems.  At EPA she was successful in promoting children’s health issues and furthering the international agenda for global chemical safety.

Prior to joining the EPA, Dr. Goldman served in several positions at the California Department of Health Services, most recently as head of the Division of Environmental and Occupational Disease Control.  She has conducted public health investigations on pesticides, childhood lead poisoning and other environmental hazards.  She has a BS in Conservation of Natural Resources from the University of California, Berkeley, an MPH from the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, and an MD from the University of California, San Francisco.  She completed pediatric training at Children’s Hospital, Oakland, California.  Dr. Goldman has served on numerous boards and expert committees, and has published in the areas of environmental health and environmental health policy.

Recent Awards: CEHN Board Member, Dr. Lynn Goldman, to receive Heinz Award. Click here for more details.

“The ultimate answer to healing and redeeming the world will not come from any government policy change—it will only come from a personal heart change,” says Dr. Joel C. Hunter, senior pastor of Northland, A Church Distributed.

Dr. Hunter’s passion is for the distributed church, the philosophy of which is taken from the very nature of God who exists in perfect relationship as Father, Son and Holy Spirit … and came down to redeem us. This is summarized in scripture and demonstrated by the life of Christ, “I AM = Us for them, there.”

“The distributed church is a vision that calls us to form the church in the relationships we already have instead of confining our spiritual life to a building or a particular religious institution.” Dr. Hunter explains, “As believers, we are called to distribute the church into every realm and relationship of society as we follow Christ, who is Lord over all the earth and who promised, ‘I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.’”

During Dr. Hunter’s tenure, which began in 1985, Northland has grown from 200 faithful souls to a Florida-based congregation of 20,000 that worships worldwide via the Web. Before accepting the pastorate at Northland, he served as a United Methodist minister for 15 years in Indiana. He and his wife, Becky, have been partners in the ministry since their marriage in 1972. Becky is the former president of the Global Pastors Wives Network and is the author of Being Good to Your Husband On Purpose (Creation House) and Why Her? You, Your Daughter-in-Law and the Big Picture. The Hunters are parents to three sons: Joshua, CEO of Hunter Vision; Joel, an ophthalmic surgeon who specializes in 3D LASIK and cataract laser surgery; and Isaac, a former pastor (1977-2013). The Hunters have seven grandchildren: Noah, Jada, Ella, Lincoln, Luke, Lena and Ava (2004-2010).

Dr. Hunter was born and raised in the small Midwestern town of Shelby, Ohio, by a mother who “taught me to always love people who were different than I was.” As a result, he became heavily involved as a young adult in the civil rights movement at Ohio University.

He came to a crisis of faith after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and remembered the admonishment of his childhood pastor who said, “Nothing will ever come right in the world unless you take care of the sin in your own heart.” It was then, in the middle of the campus at Galbraith Chapel, that he knelt down and gave his life completely to Christ.

A short time later he felt called into ministry, mainly to address the sin of disconnected relationships, with God and one another. As a pastor, he is helping the church be active outside its walls in various kinds of “pro-life” issues—not only protection of the vulnerable within the womb but continuing the protection of the vulnerable outside the womb.

He has become an internationally known advocate for peace, for the poor, for victims of human trafficking, for protecting God’s creation for the sake of victims of pollution-caused climate change, for the inclusion in church and society of families/persons dealing with disabilities, and for racial equality and reconciliation. He has been featured in national publications including Time,Newsweek, The New York Times and The Washington Post. A three-time consecutive recipient of Central Florida’s “50 Most Powerful” citizens by Orlandomagazine, he has been interviewed on NPR and featured on programs such as “The Early Show,” CNN’s “American Morning,” PBS’ “Religion and Ethics,” and “Anderson Cooper 360.”

“All of the issues in which I advocate that we take a moral responsibility are biblical admonitions,” Dr. Hunter says. “As believers involved in compassion issues, we have our motivation from God via His holy scriptures.”

Dr. Hunter’s involvement in the public policy part of his ministry often takes the form of being a pastor relating to public officials. In one of those relationships, he has been a spiritual advisor to President Obama, writing devotions for him weekly and praying with him periodically. “I am not partisan, nor am I politically oriented,” Dr. Hunter explains. “But as God has ordained three institutions —the family, the church, and the government—I work as a pastor in all three of these arenas to promote love and caring and service, especially to those who need it most.”

A longtime bridge-builder who seeks common ground for the common good, Dr. Hunter approaches today’s issues in a biblical and balanced manner. Cooperation and partnership are hallmarks of his ministry. Together, he believes, we can accomplish more because of our differences than we would on our own—without giving up our unique identities. A respected leader in the Evangelical community, he serves on leadership boards of the World Evangelical Alliance (600 million constituents) and the National Association of Evangelicals (30 million members).

Dr. Hunter is partnering with diverse groups to accomplish common goals. He is working with respected members of the scientific community to call attention to human-caused threats to the environment. Grist magazine named him among the top 15 religious environmental leaders in the world, along with the Pope and the Dalai Lama. Additionally, he has been a delegate to the U.S.-Islamic World Forum held in Doha, Qatar, he continues to build a dialogue between Muslim and Christian communities. He is also co-convener of the annual Jewish-Evangelical Leader Dialogue in the U.S.  He also served in the inaugural year on the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, which advised President Obama on substantive policy issues.

Dr. Hunter is the author of several books, including A New Kind of Conservative(Regal Books), which outlines a non-partisan approach to political involvement, and Church Distributed, an explanation of how the church can thrive in an era of connection.

The church at large is missing a way to benefit from differences without compromising our beliefs, Dr. Hunter concludes. “Fear and suspicion of differences limit the church’s spiritual maturity. Both spiritual and intellectual maturity grow from differences. A distributed church uses contrasts to accomplish kingdom purposes.”

Richard Joseph Jackson is Professor and former Chair of Environmental Health Sciences at the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. Early in his career, this New Jersey-born former Jesuit seminarian became deeply engaged in the environmental and ethical issues of pollution impacts on children. During his pediatric residency at the University of California, San Francisco, and while working in the intensive care nursery there, he noted “clusters” of children who were transferred there from nearby agriculture areas known for large scale pesticide use. This led to his seeking further training at CDC and at UC Berkeley in epidemiology and his work for ten years on pesticides and human health. He trained as an epidemiologist at UC Berkeley and also learned in depth pesticide toxicology at the California Department of Public Health. Early in his work, he started the Environmental Hazards committee of the California Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) — eventually joining and then chairing the national committee. His work was instrumental in creating the California Birth Defects Monitoring Program, as well as instigating laws on “right to know” regarding where and how much toxic chemicals were contaminating air, water, food and the workplace—notably, there was precious little information on actual toxic chemical exposures. As children can be more sensitive to toxic chemicals, and are generally more exposed to them than are adults, he advocated that the “safe” limits of these chemicals be set more stringently, first for children, then for pregnant women, and finally for the entire populations. He actively served on a related National Research Council committee that in 1993 issued the report Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children, which became the policy structure for the national Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA) of 1996.

In 1994 Jackson was invited to the CDC to become Director of the National Center for Environmental Health. While in this position, one he held for nine years, he had broad responsibilities and started the Environmental Health Tracking Program, the Asthma Epidemiology Program, and the National Pharmaceutical Stockpile for pandemics. A keystone in his work was his developing the policy and financial support for CDC’s Biomonitoring Program. This grew out of his understanding that: “to get robust studies, to know what people are actually exposed to, to find new threats and to celebrate successes; society needs real measurements, usually blood and urine levels, in actual people: young and old, rich and poor, sick and well.” Without these data, knowledge of human exposures is limited by the fragility of human memory and by the stridency of legal adversaries. As an example, without the CDC biomonitoring data, the concerns about population exposures to phthalates, bisphenyl A, even of low levels of tobacco smoke or of the metal lead, would still be a matter of speculation and opinion. And, CDC’s data offers information on Americans’ exposures to many pesticides, including those used in industrial agriculture in the fields of California. For this and other work, he received the Breast Cancer Fund’s Hero Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Public Health Law Association. Jackson’s work has also includes infectious disease control: he worked on smallpox eradication in India, and in California was head of Communicable Disease Control. He has been a longstanding advocate for reductions in the widespread use of non-therapeutic antibiotics in agriculture. He ultimately served as the California State Health Officer. In October of 2011, he was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

In recent years, Jackson has lectured and spoken on a variety of issues, with a particular focus on those related to the connections between the built environment and public health. He co-authored two Island Press Books: Urban Sprawl and Public Health published in 2004, and Making Healthy Places published in 2011. In 2012, he hosted a public television series, Designing Healthy Communities, and authored a book by the same name which focuses on the impact of the built environment on health, especially of children. He has served on numerous environmental and health boards, as well as the Board of Directors of the American Institute of Architects. In 2012 the AIA by election conferred on him an Honorary AIA, and also in that year he received the John Heinz Prize for Leadership in the Environment. Jackson has also received the highest honor of the American Public Health Association, the Sedgwick Memorial Medal. He and his wife Joan have 3 children: one a CDC physician, one a middle school teacher, and one a film-maker, and they have one grandchild.

Credits:

Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Health, Well-being and Sustainability. Dannenberg, Frumkin, Jackson; Island Press www.makinghealthyplaces.org Aug 2011

Designing Healthy Communities Richard Jackson with Stacy Sinclair.

www.josseybass.com/go/jackson Oct2011

Designing Healthy Communities 4hr public television series www.designinghealthycommunities.org Feb 2012

Philip J. Landrigan, M.D., M.Sc. is a pediatrician and the Ethel H. Wise Professor and Chair of the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. He holds a Professorship in Pediatrics at Mount Sinai. He directs the Mount Sinai Center for Children’s Health and the Environment.

In 1997 and 1998, Dr. Landrigan served as Senior Advisor on Children’s Health to the Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He was responsible at EPA for helping to establish a new Office of Children’s Health Protection. In 2006, Dr. Landrigan received EPA’s Children’s Environmental Health Champion Award.

Dr. Landrigan is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He is Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Industrial Medicine and previously was Editor of Environmental Research. He has chaired committees at the National Academy of Sciences on Environmental Neurotoxicology and on Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children. Dr. Landrigan’s report on pesticides and children’s health was instrumental in securing passage of the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996, the major federal pesticide law in the United States. From 1995 to 1997, Dr. Landrigan served on the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veteran’s Illnesses.

From 1970 to 1985, Dr. Landrigan served as a commissioned officer in the United States Public Health Service. He served as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer and then as a medical epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. While with CDC, Dr. Landrigan served for one year as a field epidemiologist in El Salvador and for another year in northern Nigeria. He participated in the Global Eradication of Smallpox. He was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal of the US Public Health Service.

Dr. Landrigan obtained his medical degree from the Harvard Medical School in 1967. He interned at Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital. He completed a residency in Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Boston. He obtained a Master of Science in occupational medicine and a Diploma of Industrial Health from the University of London.

John A. McLachlan, Ph.D., is currently the Celia Scott and Albert J. Weatherhead, III Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Professor of Pharmacology at Tulane University. He is Director of the Center for Bioenvironmental Research at Tulane and Xavier Universities. Professor McLachlan is a pioneer in the study of the effects of estrogens on fetal development and a long time leader in the field of endocrine disruption research. He recently has established a major interdisciplinary program and research center at Tulane in the Art, Science and Technology of the Mississippi River known as the RiverSphere.

Cynthia Bearer is the Mary Gray Cobey Professor of Neonatology with tenure, Chief of Neonatology and Associate Chair for Research, Department of Pediatrics, University of Maryland School of Medicine. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Pediatric Research.

Dr. Bearer completed a BA with honors in mathematics from Smith College; a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Case Western Reserve University; and an M.D. from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She became an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Case Western Reserve University in 1994 where she was promoted to Professor of Pediatrics with tenure. In 2008 she moved to University of Maryland School of Medicine to become the Mary Gray Cobey Professor of Neonatology. In 2009 she became Chief, Division of Neonatology and in 2012 Associate Chair for Research.

She has published extensively on fetal and pediatric environmental health. Her research has received funding from NIH, CDC and U.S. EPA. She has established fatty acid ethyl esters as a biomarker for both in utero exposure to ethanol, and impact on neurocognitive outcomes. She holds a patent on this technology. Her laboratory is studying the impact of common solvents including ethanol on the development of the cerebellum using both cellular and animal models. She is currently funded by the NIH/NICHD to study the impact of bilirubin and hypoxic ischemic injury on the ability of the brain to correctly wire itself. She is a frequently invited speaker nationally and internationally.

She has published extensively in the scientific literature: 8 book chapters and 70 peer-reviewed articles. Dr. Bearer is Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Pediatric Research. She is a member of the American Pediatrics Society and the Society for Pediatric Research. She has served on the Committee to Evaluate Children’s Health of the National Academy of Science. She is past President of the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Study Group. She is former Chair of the Board for the Children’s Environmental Health Network. She has served on the Scientific Advisory Board for the U.S. EPA. She is a Smith College Medalist.

Peggy M. Shepard is executive director and co-founder of WE ACT for Environmental Justice. Founded in 1988, WE ACT was New York’s first environmental justice organization created to improve environmental health and quality of life in communities of color.

She is the recipient of numerous awards for her leadership and advocacy, including the 10th Annual Heinz Award for the Environment and the 2008 Jane Jacobs Medal for Lifetime Achievement.

She is a former Democratic District Leader, who represented West Harlem from 1985 to April 1993, and served as President of the National Women’s Political Caucus-Manhattan from 1993-1997. From January 2001-2003, Ms Shepard served as the first female chair of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and is co-chair of the Northeast Environmental Justice Network. She is a former member of the National Advisory Environmental Health Sciences Council of the National Institutes of Health and a member of the Environmental Justice Advisory Committee to the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation. She also serves as a member of the National Academies’ Committee on America’s Climate Choices.

Ms. Shepard is a former journalist, and was a reporter for The Indianapolis News, a copy editor for The San Juan Star, and a researcher for Time-Life Books. She has served as an editor at Redbook, Essence, and Black Enterprise magazines.

Ms. Shepard began a career in government as a speechwriter for the New York State Division of Housing & Community Renewal and Director of Public Information for Rent Administration. She served as the Women’s Outreach Coordinator for the New York City Comptroller’s Office.

Ms. Shepard is a board member of the national and NYS Leagues of Conservation Voters, Environmental Defense, NY Earth Day, Citizen Action of NY, and the Children’s Environmental Health Network. She is an advisory board member of the Bellevue Occupational and Environmental Medicine Clinic; the Harlem Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention; and Mt. Sinai’s Children’s Environmental Health Center. She is a graduate of Howard University and Solebury and Newtown Friends Schools.

Joy E. Carlson, MPH, is Principal of J. Carlson Consulting specializing in policy and organizational development in public and environmental health.

Ms. Carlson co-founded the Children’s Environmental Health Network, USA and served as its first Executive Director for 10 years (1989-1999). She and the Network were among the chief architects of the children’s environmental health movement that has resulted in changes in the policy, research, and health practice fields nationally. She has also helped expand the children’s environmental health movement internationally.  

Ms. Carlson has spoken extensively on children’s environmental health, worked with hundreds of national and local organizations, and published in peer reviewed journals. She lives with her family in Oakland, California.

J. Routt Reigart, Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Division of General Pediatrics, has conducted university affiliated clinical trials since 1971. His research interests include children’s environmental health issues, general pediatrics, and toxicology (lead poisoning prevention and education activities since 1972; state wide screening initiatives since 1975; CDC chair for the Childhood Lead Poisoning Advisory Committee, and the USEPA chair for the Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee; member of USEPA/USDA/Tolerance Reassessment Advisory Committee and the FIFRA Science Advisory Panel). He is an active participant in the Prioritization Committee for the Best Pharmaceuticals for Children program.

Elise Miller, MEd, is Director of the Collaborative on Health and the Environment (CHE), an international partnership of researchers, health professionals and environmental health and justice advocates working to mitigate environmental contributors to chronic disease and disability. CHE is a major program of Commonweal, a 30-year-old health and environment research and educational institute. As a co-founder of CHE in 2002, Ms. Miller also served as the coordinator for CHE’s Learning and Developmental Disabilities Initiative (LDDI) for seven years, which received the Autism Society of America’s “Champion Award” in 2010.

In addition, Ms. Miller serves on the Board of Directors of the Science and Environmental Health Network (SEHN) and The Endocrine Disruptor Exchange (TEDX). She was recently named to the National Advisory Board of the Children’s Environmental Health Network (CEHN), after 12 years of service on the Network’s Board of Directors. In addition, she is a member of the professional advisory boards of four other nonprofits in the environmental health field. She also is a member of the US EPA’s Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee.

In 1999, Ms. Miller founded the national Institute for Children’s Environmental Health (ICEH) and served as its executive director for 10 years. She merged ICEH with Commonweal in 2009. At that time, the Institute became a working group of CHE and renamed the Initiative on Children’s Environmental Health. In this new form, the Initiative continues to offer science-based resources to guide actions to reduce environmental exposures and other factors that can undermine children’s healthy development. CHE’s ICEH recently co-hosted a national pediatric integrative health symposium in San Francisco, along with the University of California San Francisco’s Osher Center for Integrative Health and the Whole Child Center, prior to the 2010 annual meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

From 1993-1998, Ms. Miller served as the founding Executive Director of the Jenifer Altman Foundation, a private foundation in northern California, which at the time held interests in sustainable development, environmental health, mind-body health, and issues affecting disadvantaged children. In 2001, she completed a three-year Fetzer Fellowship for her work with emerging leaders on sustainable development and environmental health issues.

Ms. Miller has also been an editor, teacher, researcher, mental health counselor, journalist and community-based advocate. She has worked, studied and traveled extensively in Europe and Asia, and spent two years living in India first as a journalist, stringing for the Economist and the Christian Science Monitor, and later as a researcher for her graduate degree. She received her Masters in Education from Harvard University in 1992 and her Bachelor’s degree in History with high honors from Dartmouth College in 1985.

On a personal note, Ms. Miller lives with her husband and five-year-old son, adopted from Nepal, on an island north of Seattle. They built their home based on ecologically sustainable principles. They enjoy maintaining an organic vegetable garden, climbing two 18-foot ropes in their living room (along with other kids and adults in the neighborhood), and reveling in the many wonders of the natural world.

Brenda M. Afzal, MS, RN is engaged with several initiatives including environmental health education, advocacy and leadership development.   Ms. Afzal has worked at the local, state, and federal level to developing nurses’ capacity to effectively engage in environmental health education and advocacy.  She has helped to develop an effective network of state and national environmental and nursing organizations that have been engaging on common ground issues related to health and the environment.  Most recently she has led an initiative to develop a national environmental health nursing alliance, known as the Alliance of Nurses for Health Environments. 

Ms. Afzal has had extensive advocacy and leadership training.  In 2007, she completed the League of Conservation Voter’s Leadership (LCV) ELI training and had previously completed LCV’s 2002 National Advocacy Academy in Washington, D.C.  In December of 2006, Afzal completed a year long fellowship in Maryland Non-Profit Advocacy Leadership Training program, and she also completed the Rockwood Leadership Training “The Art of Leadership” in September 2002.   

Ms. Afzal has a special interest in climate change and recently served as Health Care Without Harm’s Climate Change Policy Coordinator. She has a special interest in children’s environmental health, water issues and chemical policy. She has effectively employed her environmental health expertise concerning drinking water issues while participating on national advisory committees to the National Safe Drinking Water Advisory Council to the U.S. EPA and as an alternate on the Children’s Environmental Advisory Council.  She has served on the National Conversation on Public Health and Chemical Exposures Policies and Practices Work Group, co-leading the committee on secondary prevention.  In addition, she is a member of the Executive Board of the Children’s Environmental Health Network and the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments. Professionally, Ms Afzal is active in both the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments and the American Public Health Association.  Ms Afzal is a Registered Nurse with a Master’s Degree in Community/Public Health Nursing.

Richard H. Finnell is a Professor in the Department  of Nutritional Sciences and in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Texas at Austin, and serves as the Director of Genomic Research at Dell Children’s Medical Center. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Shanghai Institute of Medical Genetics and Serves as the head of the CICbioGUNE research institute’s scientific advisory board in Bilbao, Spain, where he also holds a research appointment.  A pediatric geneticist, he has a distinguished career researching environmentally induced birth defects.  Dr. Finnell’s group applies stem cell technology to the detection of potential teratogenic compounds in efforts to prevent these birth defects, develops mouse models to understand the pathogenesis of the defects, and uses stem cells to approach novel means of treating these disabilities.

Dr. Gail Christopher, is the founder of Ntianu Garden Center for Healing & Nature and former, Senior Advisor and Vice President to the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.  

Dr. Christopher is the visionary for and architect of the WKKF led Truth Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) effort for America. TRHT is an adaptation of the globally recognized Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) model. TRHT evolved from the decade long WKKF America Healing, racial equity and racial healing initiative, designed and led by Dr. Christopher. Over the last ten years she has had responsibility for several other areas of foundation programming. These include, Food, Health and Well-Being, Leadership, Public Policy, Community Engagement and place-based funding in New Orleans and New Mexico.

In August of 2017, Dr. Christopher left her leadership position with WKKF to launch the Maryland based Ntianu Center for Healing and Nature; and to devote more time to writing and speaking on issues of health, racial healing and human capacity for caring. She is currently Chair of the Board of the Trust for America’s Health and a Fellow of The National Academy of Public Administration.

Gail is a nationally recognized leader in health policy, with particular expertise and
experience in integrative health and medicine, social determinants of health, health
inequities and public policy issues of concern to our nation’s future. Her distinguished
career and contributions to public service were honored in 1996 when she was elected as a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. In 2007 she received the Leadership Award from the Health Brain Trust of the Congressional Black Caucus for her work in reducing racial and ethnic health disparities; in 2009 she was named a Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE) Honorary Fellow – the highest recognition given to a non-SOPHE member, who has made significant contributions to health education and to public health; in 2011 she was awarded the “Change Agent Award” by the Schott Foundation for Public Education; in 2012 she was the recipient of the Association of Maternal & Child Health Programs (AMCHP) John C. MacQueen Lecture Award for her innovation and leadership in the field of maternal and child health.

Linda A. McCauley, is the sixth dean of Emory University’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing. Under her leadership, the School of Nursing has grown its reputation as a nationally-recognized center of academic and scientific excellence, innovation, and achievement. The school’s ranking in U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Graduate Schools” guide has steadily risen in the last five years from its No. 26 ranking in 2011 to its current position as the No. 4 ranking nursing school. During her tenure, the school’s research program has grown into a more than $17 million enterprise, earning distinction as the nation’s top-ranking nursing school for National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding.

She is leading an aggressive growth campaign, which has resulted in the hiring of a record number of faculty from the world’s top research institutions, more than 500 clinical partnerships in the United States and internationally, and the launch of new initiatives to attract and retain diverse students.

McCauley holds a secondary appointment in the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University and is internationally recognized for her scholarship in environmental and occupational health. She has devoted much of her distinguished career to identifying culturally-appropriate interventions to decrease the impact of environmental and occupational health hazards for farmworkers and young children. In 2016, she secured the largest National Institutes of Health grant in the School of Nursing’s history – a $5 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to create the Children’s Environmental Health Center at Emory. The center, a first of its kind in the Southeast, brings together the expertise of the four Emory University units and aims to explore how environmental exposures prior to conception, during prenatal development, and postnatally may affect infant health and development.

McCauley is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine), where she was recently appointed as a member of the Membership Committee. She also is a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and the American Academy of Occupational Health Nurses. She serves on numerous national advisory groups and subcommittees that review and/or evaluate current environmental and occupational health issues. She is widely published in the fields of nursing and environmental health and has provided expert testimony on the health risks of environmental exposures and on policy implications for scientific research. Her work has been published in hundreds of peer review journals and featured in national publications and broadcasts including Time, Business Week, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, National Public Radio, and the Weather Channel.