Dr. Ashish K. Jha is a physician, scientist, and one of the nation’s most trusted voices on biosecurity and biological threats. He is Co-Founder and CEO of BioRadar, a biointelligence company building the early-warning infrastructure to detect biological threats before they spread, and a Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center, where he focuses on biosecurity and pandemic preparedness. He previously served as White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator under President Biden, where he expanded access to treatments and vaccines, strengthened national preparedness, and built durable defenses against future biological threats. Among themost highly cited health scholars in the country, with more than 300 scientific publications, he is widely recognized for translating complex science into clear guidance for policymakers and the public.

Dr. Melissa Gilliam is Boston University’s eleventh president. She is a physician and interdisciplinary researcher focused on adolescent health and well-being. She joined Boston University from The Ohio State University, where she served as executive vice president and provost from 2021 to 2023. Dr. Gilliam spent most of her career at the
University of Chicago, where she was the Ellen H. Block Distinguished Service Professor of Health Justice and vice provost. Throughout her career, she has been committed to academic excellence, access and affordability, student success, creating an inclusive culture, and external impact.

Brian Bergstein is a senior editor in Globe Opinion and the former editor of the Globe Ideas section.

He previously was executive editor of MIT Technology Review, where he helped lead the overall editorial coverage. The publication was twice nominated for the National Magazine Award in general excellence during his tenure. He also oversaw big editorial packages such as 10 Breakthrough Technologies, 35 Innovators Under 35, and 50 Smartest Companies. In 2017 he conceived and edited a special issue on artificial intelligence.

In 2017 and 2018 he served as the founding editor of neo.life, later called proto.life, a biotechnology publication begun by one of the founders of Wired. In 2019 he edited the anthology book “Neo.Life: 25 Visions for the Future of Our Species.”

Bergstein began his reporting career with internships at the Herald-Leader of Lexington, Ky., and the Jerusalem bureau of Reuters in 1994. After graduating from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, he became a reporter for The Associated Press in Chicago and Springfield, Ill. He went on to several other roles at the AP, including national news editor, Silicon Valley correspondent, telecom beat writer, national technology correspondent, and technology and media editor.

He was a 2004-05 Knight Fellow in Science and Technology Journalism at MIT.

Marin Wolf covers the business of health care for the Boston Globe. Before her move to Boston, she was a health care reporter at The Dallas Morning News, where she wrote about public health, biotechnology and Texas hospitals. She led the paper's COVID-19 and reproductive care coverage. Her work has also appeared in Bloomberg News and publications across North Carolina.

She is currently pursuing a master of public health degree from the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. A North Carolina native, she graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Shira Schoenberg is an editorial writer covering health care, higher education, housing, cannabis, and other topics.She spent nearly two decades as a news reporter, including around 10 years covering Massachusetts state government and elections, before becoming an opinion writer.

Shira has written extensively about health care, child welfare, the courts, cannabis, education, elections, and other policy topics. She has investigated topics including abuse in group homes for people with developmental disabilities, failures of the foster care system, and sexual harassment in state government. She participated in the Ravitch fiscal reporting program, learning how to cover state and local government finances.

Before coming to the Globe in January 2023, Shira covered state government for CommonWealth Magazine and the Springfield Republican/MassLive.com. She previously worked at the Concord Monitor, where she covered the New Hampshire State House. She wrote about the 2012 New Hampshire presidential primary for the Globe.

Several of Shira’s stories on health care, the arts, courts, and government have won awards from the New England Newspaper and Press Association. She won the Massachusetts Bar Association’s 2018 award for Excellence in Legal Journalism, and in 2015, Shira was named among the best state political reporters by The Washington Post’s The Fix. Shira wrote a Boston Globe editorial series on regulations that hinder housing construction, which won the Poynter Institute’s 2026 Burl Osborne Editorial Writing and Opinion award and the 2026 Scripps Howard Journalism Award for Excellence in Opinion Writing.

Anna Kusmer is Head of Opinion Audio at the Boston Globe. She produces and co-hosts the Say More podcast, a weekly show about news, arts, science and politics. Before the Globe, she worked as a radio producer and reporter for various NPR affiliates. She covered climate and environment for The World radio program at GBH.

Elizabeth (Beth) Cameron, Ph.D., is a global leader in health security and biodefense. She has served more than two decades, within and outside of government, to facilitate change. She spent two tours on the White House National Security Council staff, twice helping establish and lead the Directorate on Global Health Security and Biodefense, and has held senior posts at the Departments of State and Defense, where she created and oversaw biological and chemical security efforts. She also served as a global health security adviser at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a nonresident senior advisor to the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Dhruv Khullar, MD, MPP, is a physician and associate professor of health policy and economics at Weill Cornell Medical College. He is also a writer at The New Yorker, where he covers medicine, health care, and politics. He serves as Director of The Physicians Foundation Center for the Study of Physician Practice and Leadership, and Associate Director of the Cornell Health Policy Center. Dr. Khullar earned his medical degree at the Yale School of Medicine and completed his medical training at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He also received a Masters in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, where he was a fellow at the Center for Public Leadership. He has been recognized by the National Academy of Medicine as an Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine, the National Minority Quality Forum as a 40 Under 40 Leader in Health, and FASPE with the 2019 Distinguished Fellow Award for Ethical Leadership. His writing was featured in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2025.

Anna Kuchment is The Boston Globe's health and medical editor. Prior to joining the Globe, she spent 14 years as a writer and editor at Newsweek magazine, a senior editor at Scientific American and a science enterprise reporter at The Dallas Morning News, where she covered COVID, climate change, health disparities, concussions in rodeo cowboys, paleontology, the rise of earthquakes triggered by oil and gas production and many other subjects. She holds a Master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and was a 2021-2022 KSJ Project Fellow at MIT. In 2011 she published her first book, The Forgotten Cure, about a group of biotech startups racing to turn an old-world medicine called phage therapy into a treatment for antibiotic-resistant infections. She is now finishing Shaky Ground, co-written with Boston College environmental historian Conevery Bolton Valencius, which traces the rise of human-induced earthquakes in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and other energy rich states. After many years away, she is thrilled to return to her hometown, where she grew up in Allston and Cambridge.

Shirley Leung is a business columnist and associate editor, and host of Globe Opinion podcast “Say More.” For more than a decade, Shirley has been writing on the intersection of business and politics, as well as gender and diversity issues in the workplace. She is also a weekly contributor to GBH’s “Boston Public Radio” and sits on the board of the New England First Amendment Coalition.

Shirley has won awards from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing, and has been featured on Boston Magazine’s list of “100 Most Influential People.” She has also been a four-time finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for Commentary.

Shirley was also the Globe’s business editor and interim editorial page editor, and president of the New England chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association. Prior to the Globe, Shirley was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal. A graduate of Princeton University, Shirley started her career at her hometown paper The Baltimore Sun. She can be reached on Threads @shirley02186.

John B Wong, MD, is the vice chair for Academic Affairs and chief of the Division of Clinical Decision Making, in the Department of Medicine at Tufts Medical Center and professor of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. He has consulted for the World Health Organization, National Academy of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and been a member and chair of the US Preventive Services Task Force. After graduating from Haverford College, he obtained an MD from the University of Chicago followed by internal medicine residency and medical informatics fellowship at Tufts Medical Center.

Dr. Bhadelia is the founding director of Boston University’s Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases. She is a board-certified infectious diseases physician and an Associate Professor at the BU School of Medicine. Under the Biden Administration, she served as Senior Policy Advisor for Global COVID-19 Response for the White House COVID-19 Response Team and interim Testing Coordinator for the White House MPOX Response Team. She is the Founding Director and is co-founder of Biothreats Emergence, Analysis and Communications Network (BEACON), an open-source outbreak surveillance program. Her research focuses on operational global health security and pandemic preparedness, including medical countermeasure evaluation and clinical care for emerging infections, infection control policy development, and healthcare worker training.

Ingrid McPhilliamy is General Manager, ADHD at Collegium Pharmaceutical, where she leads commercial strategy and execution for the company’s ADHD portfolio. A biopharmaceutical executive with experience in product strategy and commercialization, she is focused on advancing treatment options that better support patients, families and providers navigating ADHD. Prior to Collegium, she held leadership roles across the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors, including at Biogen, Fresenius Kabi, Baxter and Horizon Therapeutics.

Amina Bulman is Chief Revenue Officer at Boston Legacy FC, Boston’s professional women’s soccer team. She oversees sales and marketing as the club prepares to launch its inaugural NWSL season in 2026. A Boston native, Bulman brings experience in strategic growth, brand leadership and community engagement, previously serving as Chief Brand & Strategy Officer for the Washington Commanders and holding roles at the Obama Foundation and McKinsey & Company.

Vinod Balachandran completed his undergraduate degree in Physics at Cornell University, medical degree at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, general surgery residency at Weill Cornell’s New York-Presbyterian Hospital, and complex surgical oncology fellowship at
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK). In 2015, he joined MSK as faculty, where he is a laboratory head in the Imuno-Oncology Program, an attending hepatopancreatobiliary surgeon, and Founding Director of The Olayan Center for Cancer Vaccines at MSK, an academic biohub
focused on catalyzing next-generation precision cancer vaccines.

In 2017, Vinod’s group made the striking observation that exceptional survivors of pancreatic cancer have immune-activated tumors infiltrated with T cells that recognize highly immunogenic mutation-derived neoantigens. As pancreatic cancer, and most solid tumors, were presumed to lack clinically relevant neoantigens, this unexpected discovery has spurred efforts to identify, validate, and deliver immunogenic neoantigens to “therapeutically phenocopy” the exceptional survivor state. His group has spearheaded these efforts, including the landmark first clinical trial of precision mRNA neoantigen vaccines for pancreatic cancer. The promising results of this trial
have galvanized his group’s efforts to uncover and apply the principles of successful vaccination to extend their use in pancreatic and other similarly high-need cancers.

Vinod has received several honors for his work, including the 2023 Trailblazer Prize for Clinician-Scientists from the Foundation for the NIH.

Dr. Ashish K. Jha is a physician, scientist, and one of the nation’s most trusted voices on biosecurity and biological threats. He is Co-Founder and CEO of BioRadar, a biointelligence company building the early-warning infrastructure to detect biological threats before they spread, and a Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center, where he focuses on biosecurity and pandemic preparedness. He previously served as White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator under President Biden, where he expanded access to treatments and vaccines, strengthened national preparedness, and built durable defenses against future biological threats. Among themost highly cited health scholars in the country, with more than 300 scientific publications, he is widely recognized for translating complex science into clear guidance for policymakers and the public.

Dr. Melissa Gilliam is Boston University’s eleventh president. She is a physician and interdisciplinary researcher focused on adolescent health and well-being. She joined Boston University from The Ohio State University, where she served as executive vice president and provost from 2021 to 2023. Dr. Gilliam spent most of her career at the
University of Chicago, where she was the Ellen H. Block Distinguished Service Professor of Health Justice and vice provost. Throughout her career, she has been committed to academic excellence, access and affordability, student success, creating an inclusive culture, and external impact.

Brian Bergstein is a senior editor in Globe Opinion and the former editor of the Globe Ideas section.

He previously was executive editor of MIT Technology Review, where he helped lead the overall editorial coverage. The publication was twice nominated for the National Magazine Award in general excellence during his tenure. He also oversaw big editorial packages such as 10 Breakthrough Technologies, 35 Innovators Under 35, and 50 Smartest Companies. In 2017 he conceived and edited a special issue on artificial intelligence.

In 2017 and 2018 he served as the founding editor of neo.life, later called proto.life, a biotechnology publication begun by one of the founders of Wired. In 2019 he edited the anthology book “Neo.Life: 25 Visions for the Future of Our Species.”

Bergstein began his reporting career with internships at the Herald-Leader of Lexington, Ky., and the Jerusalem bureau of Reuters in 1994. After graduating from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, he became a reporter for The Associated Press in Chicago and Springfield, Ill. He went on to several other roles at the AP, including national news editor, Silicon Valley correspondent, telecom beat writer, national technology correspondent, and technology and media editor.

He was a 2004-05 Knight Fellow in Science and Technology Journalism at MIT.

Marin Wolf covers the business of health care for the Boston Globe. Before her move to Boston, she was a health care reporter at The Dallas Morning News, where she wrote about public health, biotechnology and Texas hospitals. She led the paper's COVID-19 and reproductive care coverage. Her work has also appeared in Bloomberg News and publications across North Carolina.

She is currently pursuing a master of public health degree from the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. A North Carolina native, she graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Shira Schoenberg is an editorial writer covering health care, higher education, housing, cannabis, and other topics.She spent nearly two decades as a news reporter, including around 10 years covering Massachusetts state government and elections, before becoming an opinion writer.

Shira has written extensively about health care, child welfare, the courts, cannabis, education, elections, and other policy topics. She has investigated topics including abuse in group homes for people with developmental disabilities, failures of the foster care system, and sexual harassment in state government. She participated in the Ravitch fiscal reporting program, learning how to cover state and local government finances.

Before coming to the Globe in January 2023, Shira covered state government for CommonWealth Magazine and the Springfield Republican/MassLive.com. She previously worked at the Concord Monitor, where she covered the New Hampshire State House. She wrote about the 2012 New Hampshire presidential primary for the Globe.

Several of Shira’s stories on health care, the arts, courts, and government have won awards from the New England Newspaper and Press Association. She won the Massachusetts Bar Association’s 2018 award for Excellence in Legal Journalism, and in 2015, Shira was named among the best state political reporters by The Washington Post’s The Fix. Shira wrote a Boston Globe editorial series on regulations that hinder housing construction, which won the Poynter Institute’s 2026 Burl Osborne Editorial Writing and Opinion award and the 2026 Scripps Howard Journalism Award for Excellence in Opinion Writing.

Anna Kusmer is Head of Opinion Audio at the Boston Globe. She produces and co-hosts the Say More podcast, a weekly show about news, arts, science and politics. Before the Globe, she worked as a radio producer and reporter for various NPR affiliates. She covered climate and environment for The World radio program at GBH.

Elizabeth (Beth) Cameron, Ph.D., is a global leader in health security and biodefense. She has served more than two decades, within and outside of government, to facilitate change. She spent two tours on the White House National Security Council staff, twice helping establish and lead the Directorate on Global Health Security and Biodefense, and has held senior posts at the Departments of State and Defense, where she created and oversaw biological and chemical security efforts. She also served as a global health security adviser at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a nonresident senior advisor to the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Dhruv Khullar, MD, MPP, is a physician and associate professor of health policy and economics at Weill Cornell Medical College. He is also a writer at The New Yorker, where he covers medicine, health care, and politics. He serves as Director of The Physicians Foundation Center for the Study of Physician Practice and Leadership, and Associate Director of the Cornell Health Policy Center. Dr. Khullar earned his medical degree at the Yale School of Medicine and completed his medical training at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He also received a Masters in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, where he was a fellow at the Center for Public Leadership. He has been recognized by the National Academy of Medicine as an Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine, the National Minority Quality Forum as a 40 Under 40 Leader in Health, and FASPE with the 2019 Distinguished Fellow Award for Ethical Leadership. His writing was featured in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2025.

Anna Kuchment is The Boston Globe's health and medical editor. Prior to joining the Globe, she spent 14 years as a writer and editor at Newsweek magazine, a senior editor at Scientific American and a science enterprise reporter at The Dallas Morning News, where she covered COVID, climate change, health disparities, concussions in rodeo cowboys, paleontology, the rise of earthquakes triggered by oil and gas production and many other subjects. She holds a Master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and was a 2021-2022 KSJ Project Fellow at MIT. In 2011 she published her first book, The Forgotten Cure, about a group of biotech startups racing to turn an old-world medicine called phage therapy into a treatment for antibiotic-resistant infections. She is now finishing Shaky Ground, co-written with Boston College environmental historian Conevery Bolton Valencius, which traces the rise of human-induced earthquakes in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and other energy rich states. After many years away, she is thrilled to return to her hometown, where she grew up in Allston and Cambridge.

Shirley Leung is a business columnist and associate editor, and host of Globe Opinion podcast “Say More.” For more than a decade, Shirley has been writing on the intersection of business and politics, as well as gender and diversity issues in the workplace. She is also a weekly contributor to GBH’s “Boston Public Radio” and sits on the board of the New England First Amendment Coalition.

Shirley has won awards from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing, and has been featured on Boston Magazine’s list of “100 Most Influential People.” She has also been a four-time finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for Commentary.

Shirley was also the Globe’s business editor and interim editorial page editor, and president of the New England chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association. Prior to the Globe, Shirley was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal. A graduate of Princeton University, Shirley started her career at her hometown paper The Baltimore Sun. She can be reached on Threads @shirley02186.

John B Wong, MD, is the vice chair for Academic Affairs and chief of the Division of Clinical Decision Making, in the Department of Medicine at Tufts Medical Center and professor of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. He has consulted for the World Health Organization, National Academy of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and been a member and chair of the US Preventive Services Task Force. After graduating from Haverford College, he obtained an MD from the University of Chicago followed by internal medicine residency and medical informatics fellowship at Tufts Medical Center.

Dr. Bhadelia is the founding director of Boston University’s Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases. She is a board-certified infectious diseases physician and an Associate Professor at the BU School of Medicine. Under the Biden Administration, she served as Senior Policy Advisor for Global COVID-19 Response for the White House COVID-19 Response Team and interim Testing Coordinator for the White House MPOX Response Team. She is the Founding Director and is co-founder of Biothreats Emergence, Analysis and Communications Network (BEACON), an open-source outbreak surveillance program. Her research focuses on operational global health security and pandemic preparedness, including medical countermeasure evaluation and clinical care for emerging infections, infection control policy development, and healthcare worker training.

Ingrid McPhilliamy is General Manager, ADHD at Collegium Pharmaceutical, where she leads commercial strategy and execution for the company’s ADHD portfolio. A biopharmaceutical executive with experience in product strategy and commercialization, she is focused on advancing treatment options that better support patients, families and providers navigating ADHD. Prior to Collegium, she held leadership roles across the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors, including at Biogen, Fresenius Kabi, Baxter and Horizon Therapeutics.

Amina Bulman is Chief Revenue Officer at Boston Legacy FC, Boston’s professional women’s soccer team. She oversees sales and marketing as the club prepares to launch its inaugural NWSL season in 2026. A Boston native, Bulman brings experience in strategic growth, brand leadership and community engagement, previously serving as Chief Brand & Strategy Officer for the Washington Commanders and holding roles at the Obama Foundation and McKinsey & Company.

Vinod Balachandran completed his undergraduate degree in Physics at Cornell University, medical degree at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, general surgery residency at Weill Cornell’s New York-Presbyterian Hospital, and complex surgical oncology fellowship at
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK). In 2015, he joined MSK as faculty, where he is a laboratory head in the Imuno-Oncology Program, an attending hepatopancreatobiliary surgeon, and Founding Director of The Olayan Center for Cancer Vaccines at MSK, an academic biohub
focused on catalyzing next-generation precision cancer vaccines.

In 2017, Vinod’s group made the striking observation that exceptional survivors of pancreatic cancer have immune-activated tumors infiltrated with T cells that recognize highly immunogenic mutation-derived neoantigens. As pancreatic cancer, and most solid tumors, were presumed to lack clinically relevant neoantigens, this unexpected discovery has spurred efforts to identify, validate, and deliver immunogenic neoantigens to “therapeutically phenocopy” the exceptional survivor state. His group has spearheaded these efforts, including the landmark first clinical trial of precision mRNA neoantigen vaccines for pancreatic cancer. The promising results of this trial
have galvanized his group’s efforts to uncover and apply the principles of successful vaccination to extend their use in pancreatic and other similarly high-need cancers.

Vinod has received several honors for his work, including the 2023 Trailblazer Prize for Clinician-Scientists from the Foundation for the NIH.

Dr. Tina Tianning Yu is the Chief Executive Officer and President of Mevion Medical Systems, the leader in compact proton therapy. With over 20 years of experience in life sciences, healthcare, and finance, Dr. Yu brings a unique blend of scientific expertise and business acumen to advancing cancer care.

Prior to Mevion, she was a Co-Founding Partner of YuanMing Capital, leading investments in successful biotech companies, including BeiGene and Ascentage Pharmaceuticals. Her career includes financial experience at institutions such as Vision Capital, Fidelity Asia Ventures, Morgan Stanley and Genzyme Biopharma, as well as scientific positions at Wyeth BioPharma.

Under Dr. Yu’s leadership, Mevion has achieved significant global growth and strong financial performance, becoming the preferred proton therapy provider for more NCI-Designated Comprehensive Cancer Centers. She led the development of the groundbreaking MEVION S250-FIT, the first proton therapy system designed for existing LINAC vaults. This system significantly reduces proton therapy’s size and complexity, enabling any health systems to bring proton therapy and benefit more patients.

Dr. Yu is a member of the CEOs Against Cancer - New England Chapter and was named to the Worcester Business Journal’s “Power 50” list. She is also a Regional Director with the Harvard Business School Healthcare Alumni Association. She holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Princeton, an MBA from Harvard, and a B.S. in Biology from the University of Science
and Technology of China.