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NAM Climate Grand Challenge Steering Committee (2023-2025)

From 2023 to 2025, members of the Steering Committee will provide strategic guidance on and oversight of the programmatic pillars and activities across the NAM Climate Grand Challenge.

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Grand Challenge Chair | President Emerita, University of Pennsylvania and Past President, The Rockefeller Foundation

Judith Rodin is a pioneer, innovator, change-maker and global thought-leader. For over two decades, Rodin led and transformed two global institutions: The Rockefeller Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania. A ground-breaking executive throughout her career, Dr. Rodin was the first woman to permanently lead an Ivy League Institution and was the first woman to serve as The Rockefeller Foundation’s president. A research psychologist by training, she was one of the pioneers of the behavioral medicine and health psychology movements. Dr. Rodin’s leadership ushered The Rockefeller Foundation into a new era of strategic philanthropy that emphasized partnerships with business, government, and the philanthropic community to address and solve for the complex challenges of the 21st century. Dr. Rodin championed two new fields that are now pervasive: resilience and impact investing. At Penn, Dr. Rodin presided over an unprecedented decade of growth and progress that transformed the institution, its campus, and the community, taking the university from sixteenth to fourth in U.S. News and World Report national rankings. The University also engineered a comprehensive, internationally acclaimed neighborhood revitalization program in West Philadelphia. Dr. Rodin serves as a member of the board for several leading corporations and many non-profits. She has authored more than 200 academic articles and chapters, and has written or co-written 15 books, including her two most recent, The Power of Impact Investing: Putting Markets to Work for Profit and Global Good and The Resilience Dividend: Being Strong in a World Where Things Go Wrong. Her next book will be released by Wharton School Press in early 2021.

COI: None noted.

Director and Chief Vaccinologist, CDU-Kedren Mobile Street Medicine and President, Los Angeles County Medical Association
Former Chairman and CEO, Cardinal Health
Global Strategic Communications Council
Observer | World Health Organization and The Wellcome Trust

Jeremy Farrar is Director of the Wellcome Trust – a politically and financially independent global charitable foundation that exists to improve health by helping big ideas to thrive. Jeremy is a clinician scientist who before joining Wellcome was, for eighteen years, Director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Viet Nam, where his research interests were in infectious diseases and global health with a focus on emerging infections, he has published almost 600 articles. He was named 12th in the Fortune list of 50 World’s Greatest Leaders in 2015 and was awarded the Memorial Medal and Ho Chi Minh City Medal from the Government of Viet Nam. In 2018 he was awarded the President Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Humanitarian of the Year Award. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences UK, the National Academies USA, the European Molecular Biology Organisation and a Fellow of The Royal Society. Jeremy was knighted in the Queen’s 2018 New Year Honours for services to Global Health.

University of Southern California
Former U.S. Senate Majority Leader and Chair
The Nature Conservancy

Senator William Frist, M.D. is a nationally-acclaimed heart and lung transplant surgeon, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader, and chairman of the Executive Board of the health service private equity firm Cressey & Company. He is actively engaged in the business as well as the medical, humanitarian, and philanthropic communities. He is chairman of both Hope Through Healing Hands, which focuses on maternal and child health and global poverty, and SCORE, a statewide collaborative education reform organization that has helped propel Tennessee to prominence as a K12 education reform state. As a U.S. Senator representing Tennessee from 1994 -2006 (the first practicing physician elected to the Senate since 1928), Dr. Frist served on both the Health (HELP) and the Finance Committees responsible for writing all health legislation. He was elected Majority Leader of the Senate, having served fewer total years in Congress than any person chosen to lead that body in history. His leadership was instrumental in the passage of the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act and the historic PEPFAR legislation that provided life-saving treatment globally to over 12 million people and reversed the spread of HIV/AIDS worldwide. He also held seats on the Foreign Relations Committee where he chaired the Subcommittee on Africa, the Commerce Committee, and the Banking Committee. Currently Dr. Frist serves as an adjunct professor of Cardiac Surgery at Vanderbilt University and clinical professor of Surgery at Meharry Medical College. As a leading authority on healthcare, Senator Frist speaks nationally on health reform, government policy, global health, education reform, and volunteerism. His current board service includes the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, Kaiser Family Foundation, Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, Bipartisan Policy Center, and Nashville Health Care Council. In the private sector, he serves on the boards of Select Medical, Teladoc, AECOM, and others.

Spelman College
University of Chicago
Professor of Environmental Change and Public Health, Department of Public Health, Environments and Society and Department of Population Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Sir Andrew Haines was Director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine from 2001 – October 2010. He was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the 2nd and 3rd assessment exercises and was review editor for the health chapter in the 5th assessment. He chaired the Scientific Advisory Panel for the 2013 WHO World Health Report, the Rockefeller/Lancet Commission on Planetary Health (2014-2015 and the European Academies Science Advisory Council working group on climate change and health (2018-2019). He currently co-chairs the InterAcademy Partnership (140 science academies worldwide) working group on climate change and health and is also co-chairing the Lancet Pathfinder Commission on health in the zero-carbon economy. He has published many papers on topics such as the effects of environmental change on health and the health co-benefits of low carbon policies. His current research focuses on climate change mitigation, sustainable healthy food systems and complex urban systems for sustainability.

COI: None noted.

Yerby Fellow, Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Affiliated Faculty, Harvard Global Health Institute; and Department of Emergency Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School

Dr. Renee N. Salas has served as the lead author of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change U.S. Brief since 2018 and founded its Working Group of over 70 U.S. organizations, institutions, and centers working at the nexus of climate change and health. She was a Co-Director for the first Climate Crisis and Clinical Practice Symposium – in partnership with The New England Journal of Medicine – and spearheads the broader Initiative. Dr. Salas served on the initial planning committee for the National Academy of Medicine’s Grand Challenge on Health and Climate Change and has testified before Congress for the full House Committee on Oversight and Reform on how climate change is harming health. She engages in research on how climate change is impacting the healthcare system and developing evidence-based adaptation. She lectures and serves on committees at the nexus of climate and health nationally and internationally, advises and publishes in high impact journals, and her work and expertise are regularly featured in mainstream media outlets like the New York Times, NPR, Time, and the Associated Press.

Dr. Salas is Affiliated Faculty and previous Burke Fellow at the Harvard Global Health Institute (HGHI) and a Yerby Fellow at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment (C-CHANGE) at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is also a practicing emergency medicine physician in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Her Doctor of Medicine is from the innovative five-year medical school program to train physician-investigators at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine with a Master of Science in Clinical Research from the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. Her Master of Public Health is from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health with a concentration in environmental health.

COI: None noted.