Advisory Committee

Sean Howell
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
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 ÎÚŃ»´«Ă˝ 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.

Robert J. Abernethy
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.

Andrea Capachietti
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 ÎÚŃ»´«Ă˝.

Marshall Dinowitz
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 ÎÚŃ»´«Ă˝. 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 Cleghorn, MD, MPH
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.

Caroline Popper, MD, MPH
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 ÎÚŃ»´«Ă˝. 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.

Zaher Sahloul, MD
Zaher Sahloul, MD, is the current President of the SyrÂian 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, comÂplexity, 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 disasÂter management. He is regularly called on to speak about global pubÂlic 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 coaliÂtion of 22 member relief organizations that are providing relief in Syria.
Rose Styron
She is a poet, journalist, and human rights activist. She has published three volumes of poetry and collaborated in translations from Russian. Her articles on human rights and foreign policy have been published in periodicals such as The New York Review of Books, The Nation, and The New Republic. Her interviews, book reviews and essays in American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Ms. Magazine, Vogue, Holiday, Ramparts, The Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Chicago Sun Times, etc. “Voice of America” produced Writer’s World, her international series of conversations with publicly-engaged novelists and poets. Selections were subsequently syndicated in New Perspectives Quarterly.

Benjamin Young, M.D., Ph.D., FIDSA
Benjamin Young, M.D., Ph.D., FIDSA, is a highly regarded HIV physician-researcher who has spent decades at the forefront of efforts to deliver better medicines and health equity for people living with HIV throughout the world. He now works as a consultant to HIV and street medicine programs, and he serves an advisory role to public health and human rights programs, including Wellness Equity Alliance (a U.S. public health company) and the Center for Public Health and Human Rights at the Bloomberg School for Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.
With over 30 years of experience, from 2018-2024, Dr. Young was the Head of Global Medical Directors at ViiV Healthcare, a HIV-only pharmaceutical company, where he supported research and medical education programs around the world. From 2012 to 2018, he was the senior vice president and chief medical officer of the International Association of Providers of AIDS Care (IAPAC), one of the world's largest organizations of HIV health care providers. Among his responsibilities, he participated in evidence- and human-rights based policymaking at the United Nations and World Health Organization and coordinated capacity-strengthening projects for healthcare workers internationally.
Dr. Young provided clinical care for people living with HIV in Denver, Colorado for 25 years. He is a long-term resident of Colorado's Rocky Mountains but was raised in New York and San Diego and began his graduate studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he received a doctorate in molecular biology and biochemistry working in the laboratory of Nobel laureate Thomas Cech. He went on to earn his medical doctorate in 1992 from the University of Colorado School of Medicine and completed his post-graduate training in internal medicine and infectious diseases at the University of Colorado.
Dr. Young is the author of more than 100 journal articles, reviews, and book chapters relating to HIV and its treatment. He was previously a member of the World Health Organization's HIV Clinical Guideline Development Group and principal investigator with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's HIV Outpatient Study (HOPS), a massive longitudinal analysis of the health of people living with HIV throughout the U.S.

Conrad Fischer, MD, MA
Conrad Fischer, MD, MA is Professor of Medicine at Touro College of Medicine in New York. He is Program Director in Internal Medicine at Brookdale Hospital in Brooklyn and Vice Chair of Medicine. He completed a fellowship at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer center. Dr Fischer is the Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at One Brooklyn Health hospital system in Brooklyn. He is an internationally recognized expert in preparation for COMLEX, USMLE and Internal Medicine Boards and is the author of the “Master the Boards” series for Step 2 and Step 3
Reverend Dr. Fischer completed a Master’s Degree in theology at Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University. He is ordained at an Interfaith Minister as well as being ordained as Sub-Deacon in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR). He is also the President of the Institute for Studies in Eastern Christianities.
Dr. Fischer has also been the executive producer of the Academy Award nominated documentary “Stranger at the Gate” in 2023

Maureen White
Maureen White is a Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins SAIS.
She was the Senior Advisor on Humanitarian Issues in the Office of the Special Representation to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Department of State (2009-2013).
In the Clinton administration, she represented the US at the United Nations Children’s Fund (1997-2001). In addition, she was National Finance Co-chair of the Hillary Clinton for President Campaign 2008 and served as National Finance Chair of the Democratic National Committee 2001-2006. Prior to that, she had a career in international economic research in New York, London and Tokyo. She serves on the boards of numerous organizations involved in global issues including Refugees International (Chairman of the Board), the International Rescue Committee, National Democratic Institute, the American Academy in Berlin and the Women’s Foreign Policy Group.
She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and holds a BA form Mount Holyoke and an MSc (Econ) from the London School of Economics. @MaureenWhite