Dr. Ezekiel (Zeke) Emanuel is the Vice Provost for Global Initiatives, the Diane v.S. Levy and Robert M. Levy University Professor and Co-Director of the Healthcare Transformation Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. From January 2009 to January 2011, Dr. Emanuel served as a Special Advisor on Health Policy to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and National Economic Council. From 1997 to 2011, he was the founding chair of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Emanuel received his MD from Harvard Medical School and his PhD in political philosophy from Harvard University. After completing his internship and residency in internal medicine at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital and his oncology fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, he joined the faculty at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He has since been a visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and UCLA, the Brin Professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School, the Kovitz Professor at Stanford Medical School and visiting professor at New York University Law School. Dr. Emanuel served on President Clinton’s Health Care Task Force, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission and on the bioethics panel of the Pan-American Health Organization. He has published over 300 articles mainly on health care reform, research ethics and end of life care. He has also authored or edited 15 books, including, most recently, Which Country Has the World’s Best Healthcare.

Dr. Ron Cohen, MD, is President and Chief Executive Officer of Acorda Therapeutics, Inc., which he founded in 1995. Prior to this, he was a principal in the startup and an officer of Advanced Tissue Sciences, Inc., a biotechnology company engaged in the growth of human organ tissues for transplantation. Dr. Cohen previously served as Chair of the Board of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), as Chair of the Emerging Companies Section of the BIO Board, and as Director and Chair of the New York Biotechnology Association (NYBA). He currently serves on the Board of Directors of VBL Therapeutics. Dr. Cohen was awarded Columbia University’s Alumni Medal for Distinguished Service. Dr. Cohen was named NeuroInvestment’s (now called NeuroPerspective) CEO of the Year 2010, and was recognized by PharmaVoice Magazine in 2009 as one of the 100 Most Inspirational People in the Biopharmaceutical Industry. He is a recipient of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the New York Metropolitan Region and is an inductee of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association’s “Spinal Cord Injury Hall of Fame.” In 2010, Dr. Cohen was recognized as the NYBA’s “The Cure Starts Here” Business Leader of the Year and was named by MM&M/PR Week as one of the top 50 health influencers of 2017. Dr. Cohen received his B.A. with honors in Psychology from Princeton University and his M.D. from the Columbia College of Physicians & Surgeons. He completed his residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Virginia Medical Center, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine.