Advisory Committee

He is an activist turned entrepreneur as co-founder & President of Hornet. At Hornet, he built a 25 million user gay social network and the largest LGBT newsroom in the world publishing daily in 7 languages on five continents. Prior to Hornet, he was a fellow of the World Affairs Council, trustee, and President of the Young Professional International Network. He helps hundreds of organizations leverage technology to expand their impact through his work at the MSM Global Forum; serves on various non profit boards and committees: UNAIDS, E-CDC, PFLAG and Center for Public Health and Human Rights at John Hopkins; is a founding member of the UN Global Coalition for HIV Prevention and technical advisor to UNDPs and the World Bank LGBTI Index. He leads the impact initiatives of the LGBT Foundation, which works to leverage the LGBT Token and the benefits of blockchain technology for the empowerment of the LGBT community.

Kathy Ludwig has been a teacher of English as a Second Language with a masters in Intercultural Communication. She earned her BA from Douglass College and an MA from the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. She currently sits on a chapter board of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and chairs its Major Donor committee. She is a founding member of Women United in Philanthropy, a women’s giving circle in New Jersey. She is also an active member of Amnesty International.

Ludwig was recently appointed to the Health Advisory Board at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and serves as co-chair of the advisory committee for the Center for Public Health and Human Rights at the Bloomberg School, headed by Dr. Chris Beyrer.

He is President of American Standard Development Company and Self Storage Management Company and Managing Director of Metropolitan Investments, LLC.

Abernethy received a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University, an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, certificates in Real Estate and Construction Management from UCLA and was formerly employed by Hughes Aircraft Company.

Abernethy is a trustee emeritus of Johns Hopkins University and a trustee of Loyola Marymount University and Davidson College. He is a member of the US Department of State Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy and a member of the Advisory Board of the Truman National Security Project. He is a member of the Harriman Society, Harvard Partners, Human Rights Watch, the UCLA Chancellor’s Cabinet and UCLA Arts Board of Visitors and on the Advisory Council of the School of Advanced International Studies Washington and Bologna. He serves on the executive committee of the Atlantic Council of the US and the Pacific Council on International Policy as well as a member of the chairman’s forum of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a board member of the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship, the Brookings Institution, the RAND Center for Global Risk & Security, the YMCA of Metropolitan Los Angeles, the Music Center of Los Angeles County, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Hollywood Bowl and the Peabody Conservatory.

She is a Humanitarian Aid consultant and university lecturer on global health and refugee resettlement issues with emphasis on women’s rights and child protection. She received her Bachelors of Science from the Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at Boston University and holds both a Master of Science and a Doctorate from the University of Southern California. Her area of concentration is in Public Policy and Global Health. Her postdoctoral training includes an International Diploma in Humanitarian Assistance from The Center of International Health and Cooperation in Geneva, Switzerland; a Certificate of Completion in Health and Human Rights from Harvard University; and a Certificate of Completion from the Refugee Studies Center located at Oxford University. She has also participated in refugee assistance training programs sponsored by the American Red Cross, the International Rescue Committee, and the United States Institute of Peace. She is a graduate of the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma’s Global Mental Health: Trauma and Recovery training program, as well as a participant in the Women and Power: Leadership in a New World executive education program at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard.

Capachietti is a member of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH), the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE), and the Global Health Council and serves on the Deans’ Advisory Board at Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Boston University, where she is an adjunct professor. She serves on the advisory boards of the Southeastern European Film Festival, and Community Partners of Los Angeles. She previously served on the boards for Direct Relief and the Dashew Center for International Students and Scholars at UCLA. In 2014, she was appointed to the advisory committee for the Center for Public Health and Human Rights at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

He is a Partner at Pacific BioDevelopment, San Bruno, CA, an international strategic consulting group, consulting with biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies in cell substrate safety, viral and microbial safety, quality, and strategic planning. He was Director of Corporate Cell Substrate Safety at Genentech for 12 years where he was responsible for company-wide cell substrate safety issues including production and characterization of cell banks, virus safety and viral clearance, genetic consistency/stability, and other cell and product quality areas. At Genentech, he also chaired the Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC) and the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC). Before joining Genentech, Dr. Dinowitz established and was Director of the Biotechnology Services Division at Microbiological Associates (currently, BioReliance, Rockville, MD). He then joined Genitope Corporation as Vice President of Manufacturing and Operations where he was responsible for manufacturing, quality, and strategic planning. He received his B.S. (Zoology) from the University of Maryland and his Master of Science and Doctor of Science from The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He was a National Cancer Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Virology, St. Louis University, where his research focused on the molecular control of viral gene expression. Following his postdoctoral research, he was on the faculty of the University Of Arizona Medical School where his research focused on molecular virology.

Dinowitz has contributed to the license approval process of more than a dozen clinical and marketed products and has worked extensively with worldwide regulatory agencies in these areas. He was a member of the Biologics and Biotechnology Section Steering Committee, and the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) Task Force of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). He was a member of the Expert Working Group (EWG) of the International Conference on Harmonization (Rch) that developed the Virus Safety Guidance Document (Q5A) and other ICH guidance documents including the guidance for Derivation and Characterization of Cell Substrates (Q5D), and the document for guidance on Genetic Consistency (Genetic Stability) (Q5B). He has published numerous articles in cell substrate safety issues, virology and strategic planning.

Farley is an international expert who has over 30 years' experience in international health development, research and program implementation as an infectious disease thought leader, systems thinker and epidemiologist, with particular focus on HIV/AIDS. At Palladium, Farley leads our global Health Practice, an interdisciplinary team in four markets (US, Europe, Middle East & Australia/Pacific) focused on holistic responses to global health priorities based on sustainable health systems, implementation science, health promotion and prevention. He had a distinguished career at the US National Institutes of Health before serving as a senior scientist and faculty member at the University of Maryland Medical Center. He holds an MD and MPH from Johns Hopkins University and is trained in internal medicine and infectious diseases.

She is the founder and president of Popper and Company, a boutique life sciences consulting firm with clients across North America, Europe and Asia. She has 20 years of hands-on biotech/life sciences operating experience. An internist and pathologist, she combines this perspective with that gained from managing a wide spectrum of life sciences businesses in diagnostics, devices and drug discovery. Her business management experience spans Fortune 500 companies and venture-backed start-ups. Popper and Company, the firm she co-founded in 2003, provides strategic consulting, advisory services and technology assessment to a wide variety of venture-backed as well as public healthcare and life sciences firms, all striving to make healthcare “smarter” by making it more cost-effective. She has been involved in the start-up of three companies in the last twelve months, is an independent director of five private companies, and interacts regularly with a national network of private equity and venture firms.

Popper received her MD degree from the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) and her MPH from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She was a Robert Wood Johnson Fellow in Health Care Finance. She completed her residencies in Internal Medicine and at Pathology and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

He is the current President of the Syr­ian American Medical Society (SAMS) one of the leading and cutting-edge medical relief organizations serving health care needs in Syria during the ongoing humanitarian crisis. Since the beginning of the crisis in Syria more than 3 years ago, SAMS has been supporting doctors, nurses and hospitals inside Syria, providing medical and psychological care to Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey using innovative methods in communication, training and delivery to overcome the extreme challenges related to the scale, com­plexity, poor access, insecurity and ever-changing face of the crisis. SAMS has delivered over $20 million in medical relief to conflict-affected areas inside Syria and neighboring countries.

Sahloul has helped train medical relief workers in topics like medical practice in war zones, dealing with limited resources and disas­ter management. He is regularly called on to speak about global pub­lic health issues related to the Syrian crisis in national news media, on Capitol Hill, and at the White House. His articles have appeared in The Lancet, Avicenna, Foreign Policy, New Republic, Policy Review and Syria Deeply. He helped to found American Relief Coalition for Syria, a coali­tion of 22 member relief organizations that are providing relief in Syria.

Brooke Story joined BD, a global medical technology company, in April 2021 as the Worldwide President, Integrated Diagnostic Solutions (IDS), and is responsible for driving global strategic, operational, commercial performance and customer experience across the BD IDS portfolio of diagnostic solutions. The IDS business includes Specimen Management, Molecular Diagnostics, Microbiology and Women’s Health & Cancer.

Prior to joining BD, Brooke served as President, Pelvic Health and Gastric Therapies at Medtronic. She held a variety of leadership roles at Medtronic over her 15-year tenure with the company.

Brooke serves on the Board of Directors for Sigilon Therapeutics, Inc., a cell therapy company focused on the treatment of chronic diseases, is a member of the Advisory Committee for the Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health and Human Rights and is a board observer for Day Zero Diagnostics, an infectious disease diagnostic company focused on genomic sequencing and machine learning to solve antibiotic resistance.

In addition to her engagement within business and research communities, Brooke has held several non-profit board positions, including with the Girl Scouts River Valleys and with the Penumbra Theatre, which creates productions through the prism of the African American experience. Brooke earned a bachelor’s degree in Engineering from the University of Tennessee and an MBA from the University of Michigan, Ross School of Business.