Speakers

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Jeffrey P. Gold, M.D., is a nationally recognized leader and tireless advocate for transforming academic medical education.

He became Chancellor of the University of Nebraska Medical Center on Feb. 1, 2014. He also chairs the Nebraska Medicine Advisory Board. Nebraska Medicine is UNMC’s primary clinical partner and includes The Nebraska Medical Center, Bellevue Medical Center and UNMC Physicians.

As UNMC’s chief executive officer, Dr. Gold is responsible for all aspects of campus administration, including its annual operating budget of more than $640 million, a staff of about 5,000 and its 3,600 students. Additionally, Nebraska Medicine has more than 6,500 employees and an operating budget of more than $1 billion.

Dr. Gold also holds a health professions appointment in the department of surgery.  He is a board certified thoracic surgeon and specializes in adult and pediatric surgery.

Prior to joining UNMC, Dr. Gold served as Chancellor of the University of Toledo’s health science campus, which includes the Colleges of Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, Health Science and Human Service, and Graduate Medical Study. In that role, Dr. Gold had full leadership responsibility of the clinical, education and research programs, the faculty practice plan and the clinical delivery system. As Dean of the University of Toledo’s College of Medicine and Life Sciences, Dr. Gold was responsible for the cultivation and recruitment of faculty, development and implementation of its curriculum and ensuring the highest level of education for its students, residents and faculty.

Prior to joining the University of Toledo, Dr. Gold served at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Weill Cornell Medical College.

Dr. Gold graduated from the Cornell University College of Engineering, where he majored in theoretical and applied mechanics. He earned his M.D. from the Weill Cornell College of Medicine and completed his general surgery residency at The New York Hospital and Memorial Hospital, where he served as the administrative chief resident; and his cardiothoracic residency training at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital of Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Gold serves on over 50 professional committees and over 100 national organizations, volunteer boards, government/public health councils, and industry. He was recently elected to the American Medical Association’s Council on Medical Education and the Liaison Committee on Medical Education and has served as president of the Thoracic Surgery Directors Association, a national organization devoted to improving the education of resident physicians. Dr. Gold has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed articles and 40 books and chapters, and he has given 250 presentations at scientific meetings and medical conferences nationally, as well as over 60 invited professorships.

Daniel Pollock is a medical epidemiologist and the Surveillance Branch Chief in CDC’s Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion (DHQP). Dr. Pollock joined CDC as an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer in 1984 and has worked in environmental health, injury prevention and control, informatics, and infectious diseases programs.

In 2004 he moved to his current position as chief of the branch in DHQP responsible for national surveillance of healthcare-associated infections and other adverse events in healthcare, risk and protective factors, and antimicrobial use and resistance.

Dr. Pollock is board certified in internal medicine and emergency medicine. He is a Captain (Ret.) in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and worked as an emergency physician in Emory University’s Department of Emergency Medicine and at Grady Memorial Hospital from 1986 through 2007.

SPEAKERS

Jon Crane is an architect with over thirty years experience planning facilities to safely handle highly pathogenic infectious diseases. During that time Jon has participated in the planning of over 200 biosafety level three or biosafety level four facilities including research facilities, clinical laboratories, patient isolation suites, and large-scale vaccine production facilities

Jon had been involved in the development of guidelines related to bio-containment and biosafety. Jon was a guest editor focusing on facilities for the 4th edition of the CDC/NIH “Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical laboratories”. Jon brings a perspective of the rationale behind the guidelines and international approaches having worked on high containment facilities in North America, South America, Africa, Asia, Europe and Australia. Jon has been the design team leader for over 75,000 SF of BSL-3 and BSL-4 facilities at CDC including their facilities handling Ebola. He has written and presented extensively on the subject.   

Carl Gaborik currently directs Sentara Healthcare’s Design and Construction team. Prior to leading the Design and Construction team, Carl worked for Sentara in many different clinical and non-clinical capacities. He has held positions in both planning and operations for hospitals and outpatient facilities.

In his current position, Carl is responsible for managing all phases of the design, procurement and construction process for construction projects across Sentara Healthcare. In addition, he is responsible for budgeting, bidding, purchasing and financial tracking for all projects, including equipment and furniture purchasing. He has overseen multiple hospital replacements, bed tower additions, medical office buildings, dedicated outpatient centers and campus master planning. His wide range of experience provides him with an understanding of building projects from the user, designer and architect perspectives.

He received his diploma in Respiratory Therapy from the University of Chicago, BS from Michigan Technological University and MBA from the College of William and Mary.

Natasha K. Griffith is the Director of High Containment Facilities in the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Alternate Responsible Official (ARO) for the UCLA Select Agent Program. Natasha has experience in the fields of project management; planning, reviewing and supervision of high-containment construction projects at the architectural, safety and biosafety level; review, evaluation and validation of Standard Operating Procedures (SOP); behavioral-based training; risk communication and emergency preparedness for diverse national and international research and public health organizations. Natasha is also an active member of American Biological Safety Association, American Society for Microbiology and other professional organizations for biosafety and infectious disease research.

Natasha graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with Bachelor of Science degree in Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics and a Master of Science degree in Microbial Pathogenesis. She is currently working on her Doctoral Degree (PhD) in Environmental Health Sciences at the UCLA School of Public Health. Natasha began her career at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, France working as a Project Manager for the Legal Study of Geopolitics and Law in war affected countries. She served as a counselor for individuals affected by war crimes from the civil war in the Former Yugoslavia. During her stay in Paris, Natasha also worked as translator and interpreter for the United Nations (UN), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and other government and private organizations in French, English, Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian. In recent years, she has served as a member of World Health Organization (WHO) instructional team for Biorisk Management for Dangerous Pathogens CDS/EPR/BDP.

Currently, Natasha directs all High Containment Facilities (Select Agent and Non-Select Agent BSL3 facilities) at UCLA and serves as a biocontainment, biosafety and biosecurity subject-matter expert for various national and international organizations. Since 2007, she has assisted in the organization and delivery of numerous high-containment trainings throughout the United States and in several international locations lecturing in both English and French.

Jerry Jaax (Gerald P Jaax), DVM, is Kansas State’s associate vice president for research compliance and the university veterinarian. In this role he is responsible for universitywide compliance with applicable regulatory laws and guidelines for animal care and use programs, human subjects research, recombinant DNA/biological agent oversight, and other compliance-based research programs and initiatives.

Previously, Jaax served 26 years with the U.S. Army Veterinary Corps. His assignments included chief of the veterinary medicine and laboratory support at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Chemical Defense at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., and chief of the veterinary medicine division at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md. He also served as director of the Army’s postgraduate training program in laboratory animal medicine and was appointed consultant to the surgeon general of the Army. As the director of the Biological Arms Control Treaty Office at Fort Detrick, he was responsible for the Army’s overall compliance with all international biological warfare laws, treaties and agreements.

Jaax was a key participant in dealing with the 1989 Reston Ebola outbreak as a Army veterinarian. The outbreak was detailed in Richard Preston’s best-selling book, “The Hot Zone.”

Jaax received his bachelor’s and doctor of veterinary medicine degrees from Kansas State.

Dr. Mehta received his M.D. from the University of Oklahoma in 2003. He completed his Internal Medicine internship and residency in the J. Willis Hurst Program at the Emory University School of Medicine.  He went on to complete his fellowship in Infectious Diseases, Clinical Investigator track, also at the Emory University School of Medicine. During these training programs, he was awarded the Resident Achievement award, twice, and the J. Willis Hurst Fellow Teaching Award.

In July 2009, Dr. Mehta joined the faculty of Emory University as an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases, and as the Assistant Director of the Transplant Infectious Diseases Section. In 2013, he was made Associate Chief of ID Services for Emory University Hospital, Wesley Wood Hospital, and Emory University Orthopedic and Spine Hospital

Dr. Mehta’s research and clinical paths have focused on treatment of and protection against infections in immunocompromised hosts, including patients with organ transplants, limb transplants, stem cell transplants, leukemia/lymphoma, cystic fibrosis, and HIV/AIDS.

Dr. Mehta’s research area is broadly within clinical and translational Transplant Infectious Diseases, with a primary research aim to develop predictive immunologic and virologic signatures of risk for viral diseases in patients receiving immunosuppressive agents.  He primarily employs polychromatic flow cytometry to phenotypically and functionally describe subsets of the protective immune system.

He is currently the co-investigator and primary clinical investigator on the Protective Immunity Project (PIP), a collaborative research projected between the Emory Transplant Center (Christian Larsen, MD, DPhil), the Emory Vaccine Center (Rafi Ahmed, PhD) and the NIH.  Dr. Mehta also serves as a co-investigator and clinical investigator of Project 4 (Rafi Ahmed) of the Emory University Influenza Pathogenesis & Immunology Research Center (IPIRC), is one of five national Influenza Centers of Excellence funded by NIH/NIAID.  In this project, the group hopes to discern the differences in immunologic memory elicited by different influenza vaccines. Dr. Mehta also serves at the co-investigator and PI of the Viralogic Monitoring Cores of Emory’s Clinical Trials in Organ Transplantation (CTOT) and Clinical Trials in Organ Transplantation in Clinical (CTOT-C) trials, including CTOT-C02, CTOT-10, CTOT-15, and CTOT-16. Recently, Dr. Mehta has replaced Dr, Allan Kirk as the PI of the Emory Transplant Center’s Immune Monitoring and Assay Development in Organ Transplant Recipients (IMP) and as the Directory of Emory Transplant Biorepository.

Dr. Mehta attends on the Emory University Hospital Transplant Infectious Diseases, Emory University Hospital General Infectious Diseases, and the Emory University Orthopedic and Spine Hospital Infectious Diseases consultation services.

As Assistant Director of the Transplant Infectious Diseases, Dr. Mehta aids G. Marshall Lyon III, Director of Transplant Infectious Diseases, in developing programatic improvements in care of transplant recipients at the Emory Transplant Center and Emory University Hospital.

Dr. Mehta also serves as the Consultant for Occupational Exposure at Emory University’s Yerkes National Primate Center.  In this role, he supervises the care of employees at Yerkes who have incurred a work related exposure or injury, including Herpes-B exposures.