Anne Blaes, MD, MS
Blaes is a professor in hematology/oncology at the University of Minnesota, where she also serves as the co-director of the screening, prevention, etiology and cancer survivorship program within the Masonic Cancer Center. She is an active hematologist/medical oncologist with a special interest in breast cancer, cardio-oncology and cancer survivorship. She is a past chair of the American Society of Clinical Oncology Cancer Survivorship Committee. She serves on CDC’s Advisory Board for Young Women with Breast Cancer, the Global Cardio-oncology Society leadership teams, and the American Heart Association Cardio-oncology Council.
Josh Dégallier, MD
I'm Dr. Josh Dégallier, a dedicated hospitalist physician based in Minneapolis. During my medical school training at the University of Minnesota, and residency at Hennepin Healthcare, I witnessed the transformative impact of technology on how the public engages with data and information.
It struck me that, despite the dynamic and rapid changes in technology in our everyday lives, the tools available to physicians for digesting and acquiring information had not evolved at a comparable pace. This contrast fueled my vision to bridge the gap by creating an application that mirrors the sleek functionality and user-friendly interfaces we encounter daily in our tech-driven lives for doctors rounding on patients in the hospital.
Yingling Fan, PhD
Fan has built a research career looking at numerous aspects of how the built environment affects health, happiness, utility, and wellbeing. She is co-founder of the technology start-up Daynamica, which has developed smartphone apps to collect human behavior and well-being data for academic institutions and government agencies. Fan will contribute innovative ideas for building datasets and developing measures on aspects of the human experience previously deemed unmeasurable. She is the principal investigator of a National Institutes of Health Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grant titled “App-Assisted Day Reconstruction to Reduce Treatment Burden and Logistic Toxicity in Cancer Patients.”
Dr. Glaucomflecken (a.k.a. William E. Flanary, MD)
The physician/performer practices in the Portland, Oregon-area. Since 2016, he has become known for his satiric medical videos on X/Twitter, TikTok and YouTube. According to his website, his alter ego "began as a creative outlet to tell painfully specific ophthalmology jokes and to cope with my own health challenges. Since then, it has evolved to incorporate satire of the U.S. healthcare system, academic publishing, and the interpersonal conflicts that are pervasive in the medical system."
Danielle Hansen
Hansen is vice president of global sourcing - direct materials for JBT Corporation, a global FoodTech company. She is part of the Carlson Educator Network and has taught supply chain & operations management as a senior lecturer at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management.
She has an extensive background in international supplier relationship management, contract manufacturing, negotiation, project management, and continuous improvement. In addition, Hansen is the president of Strategic Training Endeavors, a training, consulting, and coaching company helping companies and individuals evolve and embrace their leadership potential. She is a published author of the book Upward: Leadership Lessons for Women on the Rise and continues her work with women and girls by serving as the board chair of Girls Are Powerful.
Hansen graduated Cum Laude with a triple major in legal studies in business, Spanish, and operations management from the University of St. Thomas. She went on to complete her MBA, also from the University of St. Thomas, with a focus in international marketing.
She has participated in three executive education courses from Harvard Law School including international business negotiations, leadership & negotiation, and the Advanced Negotiation Master Class. Hansen has earned numerous awards through her tenure, including the 2018 Mentor of the Year Award, 6 Star Financial Results Award, Employee of the Month, People’s Choice Award, and a Collaborative Inquiry Research Grant. She is passionate about improving people’s lives and has had the opportunity to do so daily by ensuring continuity of quality supply of medical devices, bio-pharmaceutical, and consumer industry products while at Tonal, Coloplast, CPC, Stryker, St. Jude Medical, Honeywell, and Medtronic. Hansen continues to train on topics of negotiation, contract management, continuous improvement, supplier communication, conflict management, emotional intelligence, and strategy.
L. Pearce McCarty, III MD, MBA
McCarty is an experienced orthopedic surgeon, entrepreneur and healthcare leader driven by the desire to make healthcare more efficient, affordable and accessible. In addition to maintaining a subspecialty practice focused on complex shoulder and elbow issues, he co-founded a healthcare IT company in 2020, DOCSI, devoted to developing digital tools that lower cost and improve operations in surgical procedural environments at scale. DOCSI has grown to seven full-time employees and is enjoying significant market traction with a multimillion-dollar pipeline and triple-digit, trailing twelve-month revenue growth. McCarty also maintains leadership positions in supply chain and clinical operations for a large, regional healthcare system in the Upper Midwest.
McCarty received his orthopedic residency training at Harvard, sports medicine fellowship at Rush, and MBA at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. He served as orthopedic team physician for the Minnesota Twins from 2005 to 2018. He has been recognized as a “Top Doc” by Minneapolis-St. Paul Magazine for 10 consecutive years. He has more than 30 peer-reviewed research publications, has authored a dozen book chapters on shoulder and sports medicine topics, and has lectured extensively regarding topics related to shoulder and elbow surgery.
Kim Tjaden, MD, MPH, FAAFP
Tjaden is a family physician practicing in central Minnesota since 1999. She earned a masters in public health at the University of Minnesota in 2018. Since then, she has been working with the community health improvement team at CentraCare, in addition to practicing family medicine. She provides care from the cradle to the grave and cares for several families of multiple generations. She also serves as the medical consultant for Stearns, Benton, and Wright County Public Health. Public health and family medicine are the perfect combination to address prevention, true health, and equity in our diverse communities and healthcare systems. She currently serves as chair of the MMA’s Board of Trustees, is a member of Celebration Lutheran Church, and serves on the board of the Youth Chorale of Central Minnesota.
Mike Pitt, MD, FAAP
Pitt is a professor of pediatrics at the University of Minnesota, where he is an associate residency program director, associate chair of faculty development and strategic planning, and the fellowship director for hospital medicine. A winner of multiple teaching awards, Pitt speaks across the country with a primary focus of improving the way medical providers communicate with each other and their patients. He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed manuscripts and textbook chapters in leading medical journals and has developed curricula used at hundreds of universities in more than 20 countries.
As an award-winning professional magician, he has performed for Fortune 500 companies all over the world and has taught more than 3,500 pediatricians how to think like a magician at the bedside to improve rapport and increase diagnostic yield. Pitt is the co-founder and CEO of Q-rounds, a virtual rounding queue software that sends real-time updates to nurses, patients, and their families, on when to expect the doctor for rounds, and gives families the opportunity to RSVP to join remotely if they can't be there in person.
Julian Wolfson, PhD
Dr. Wolfson is co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Daynamica, Inc., a University of Minnesota-backed startup company that offers a mobile app-based data collection platform to researchers studying human activity patterns and their connections to health and well-being. He is also a Professor in the Division of Biostatistics & Health Data Science at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, where he develops innovative data analytics and pattern discovery methods tailored to biomedical and clinical data. His research fuses traditional statistical techniques with advanced machine learning approaches to tackle complex problems such as predicting disease risk from electronic health records and identifying human activity patterns using smartphone sensor data.
Guang Yang, PhD
Yang is co-founder of Daynamica, Inc. He holds a bachelor of science in physics from Peking University (China) and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of North Carolina. Prior to joining Daynamica, he worked as senior project engineer at Thermo Fisher Scientific for seven years. He has managed multiple research and development projects across all stages ranging from business proposal to product release and maintenance. These projects include next generation X-ray inspection platforms, high-speed online weighing systems, and high accuracy multi-frequency contaminant detection systems.