Closing The Gap: Tackling Global Health Challenges
Speakers
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Chris is a global expert in the delivery of mental health and rehabilitation systems, a social entrepreneur, a mentor, a confidential organizational development advisor, trainer in community-based facilitation technique, and regularly speaker on leadership and social entrepreneurship.
A serial entrepreneur, Chris is currently co-founding the Elders Council for Social Entrepreneurs. He has co-founded citiesRISE, a multi-stakeholder initiative to catalyze, connect, and support cities committed to driving change in the field of mental health. Previously he started BasicNeeds, that’s impacted over 800,000 people across 12 countries. He’s also founded Action on Disability and Development and Thrive (Chris’s first charity in 1978 that uses gardening as rehabilitation for people living with disabilities). Chris is a board member of Ashoka UK Trust, a Global Director of Leaders’ Quest and the Chair of Carers Worldwide.
He is a Senior Fellow with the Ashoka Fellowship, a recipient of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship and was selected as a Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur for 2014. In 2000 Chris received an MBE from the Queen for his services to disability and development.
As a global mentor, he works with people in organisational management, models of change in childhood deprivation, human trafficking, the psychology of gangs, Fair Trade, prisons and prisoners, leadership and executive search.
You can find out more on Chris’s journey through his TEDx talk “Bridging the Mental Health Gap”.
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Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford
Dr Tapela is a physician, public health researcher and global health advocate passionate about reducing reducing premature and avoidable deaths of those most vulnerable in the world. She is a Senior Research Fellow at University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Population Health, focusing research on understanding burden of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) in sub-Saharan Africa, and developing innovative patient-centered solutions to healthcare service delivery. Her research is informed by multi-disciplinary, hands-on experience in the public, non-profit, and academic sectors. She has served as special advisor on NCDs to the Rwanda Ministry of Health, as Director of NCDs Program with Partners In Health-Rwanda, and most recently led the National NCDs Program in the Ministry of Health and Wellness of her home country Botswana. Dr Tapela trained at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health. She maintains appointments as Associate Physician in the Division of Global Health Equity, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Research Associate at Botswana Harvard Partnership. Her work as a global health innovator has been recognized in her selection as Aspen New Voices Fellow and an African Cancer Leaders Institute Awardee.
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Associate Director for Special Populations, National Institute of Mental Health
Dr. Pamela Y. Collins is Associate Director for Special Populations and director of the Office for Research on Disparities & Global Mental Health and the Office of Rural Mental Health Research at the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Prior to her arrival at NIMH, while a faculty member at Columbia University, Dr. Collins’s research focused on the intersections of HIV prevention, care, and treatment and the mental health needs of people in the US, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Dr. Collins currently oversees NIMH’s research efforts to increase mental health equity locally and globally. She was one of the editors of the 2011 Lancet series on Global Mental Health, she is a leader of the Grand Challenges in Global Mental Health initiative, and recently led the development of the 2013 PLoS Medicine Policy Forum series on global perspectives for integrating mental health. Dr. Collins is an Echoing Green Foundation alumna.
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Executive Director, Aspen Institute
Peggy Clark is Executive Director of Aspen Global Innovators Group and Vice President of the Aspen Institute where she leads a portfolio of initiatives to promote breakthrough strategies in global development. Current efforts include leadership initiatives to bring new voices into major global platforms and include Aspen New Voices Fellowship, Aspen Management Partnership for Health, Generation Equality Innovators, and Aspen Forum on Women and Girl SOAR fellows. Peggy founded and leads the Aspen Artisan Alliance to support high performing artisan businesses providing employment for women globally . An early leader in the microfinance field, Peggy received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Microenterprise from President Clinton, and also led efforts to establish the community development finance movement in the U.S. Peggy sits on the boards of leading development organizations including Last Mile Health, Root Capital, Ashesi University, African Leaders Malaria Alliance, and Calvert Impact Capital. Peggy is committed to making 2020 a powerful year for progress for women.
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A global health physician and social entrepreneur, Peter Drobac is the Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship. The Skoll Centre promotes social innovation by developing talent, promoting actionable insight through research, and catalysing deep exchanges with a global community of innovators.
Peter was a co-founder and first Executive Director of the University of Global Health Equity (UGHE) in Rwanda. Working at the intersection of health, education, and technology, UGHE aspires to train the next generation of global health leaders and to become a worldwide innovation hub for health care delivery science.
For over a decade Peter played a key role in the transformation of Rwanda’s health system, which has delivered unprecedented gains in population health and prosperity. As Executive Director of Partners In Health in Rwanda, Peter established community-based health system incubators that developed and scaled care delivery innovations from infectious diseases to cancer.
Peter’s academic interests include implementation science and the development of high-performing health systems. As an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, he taught global health, social medicine and clinical infectious disease. He holds a Master of Public Health from the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, and a Doctor of Medicine from the Medical College of Wisconsin.
