Chief of Staff, Clinical Affairs
University of Utah Health
Executive Director
University of Utah Medical Group

Chair of Medicine
Boston University School of Medicine

President & CEO
Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

Principal
Physician Workforce Solutions and Strategic Growth Leader
SullivanCotter

Dr. Rana Awdish is the author of In Shock, a critically-acclaimed, bestselling memoir based on her own critical illness. She is a sought-after public speaker, delivering inspirational keynote addresses to groups ranging from professional medical societies, to members of Congress, to organizations combatting homelessness.

A pulmonary and critical care physician, she serves as the current Director of the Pulmonary Hypertension Program at Henry Ford Hospital. She also serves as Medical Director of Care Experience for the System, where she has integrated compassionate communication strategies and Narrative Medicine practice into the curriculum. 

Dr. Awdish received the Schwartz Center’s National Compassionate Caregiver of the Year Award in 2017. She was named Physician of the Year by Press Ganey in 2017 for her work on improving communication and received the Critical Care Teaching Award in 2016. She has been inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society and the Gold Humanism Honor Society. 

Her narrative non-fiction essays have been published in The Examined Life Journal, Intima, CHEST and The New England Journal of Medicine. She has written editorials for The Harvard Business Review, Annals of Internal Medicine, The Washington Post and The Detroit Free Press. Her essay The Shape of the Shore was awarded a Sydney by the New York Times and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  
 
Prior to coming to Henry Ford, Dr. Awdish completed her training at Mount Sinai Beth Israel in Manhattan. She attended Wayne State University Medical School and completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She is board-certified in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine.

Dr. Nadine Burke Harris is an award-winning physician, researcher and advocate dedicated to changing the way our society responds to one of the most serious, expensive and widespread public health crises of our time: childhood trauma. She was appointed as California’s first-ever Surgeon General by Governor Gavin Newsom in January 2019.

Dr. Burke Harris’ career has been dedicated to serving vulnerable communities and combating the root causes of health disparities. After completing her residency at Stanford, she founded a clinic in one of San Francisco’s most underserved communities, Bayview Hunters Point. It was there that Burke Harris observed that, despite the implementation of national best-practices for immunizations, asthma, obesity treatment and other preventive health measures, her patients still faced outsized risks for poor health, development and behavioral outcomes.

Drawing in research from the CDC and Kaiser Permanente, Dr. Burke Harris identified Adverse Childhood Experiences as a major risk factor affecting the health of her patients. In 2011, she founded the Center for Youth Wellness and subsequently grew the organization to be a national leader in the effort to advance pediatric medicine, raise public awareness, and transform the way society responds to children exposed to Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and toxic stress. She also founded and led the Bay Area Research Consortium on Toxic Stress and Health, to advance scientific screening and treatment of toxic stress.

She currently serves as a government liaison for the American Academy of Pediatrics’ National Advisory Board for Screening and sat on the board of the Committee on Applying Neurobiological and Socio-behavioral Sciences From Prenatal Through Early Childhood Development: A Health Equity Approach for the National Academy of Medicine.

Her work has been profiled in best-selling books including “How Children Succeed” by Paul Tough and “Hillbilly Elegy” by J.D. Vance as well as in Jamie Redford’s feature film, “Resilience”. It has also been featured on NPR, CNN and Fox News as well as in USA Today and the New York Times. Dr. Burke Harris’ TED Talk, “How Childhood Trauma Affects Health Across the Lifetime” has been viewed more than 6 million times. Her book “The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity” was called “indispensable” by The New York Times.

Dr. Burke Harris is the recipient of the Arnold P. Gold Foundation Humanism in Medicine Award presented by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Heinz Award for the Human Condition. She was named one of 2018’s Most Influential Women in Business by the San Francisco Business Times.

As the medical center’s chief executive since 2009, Dr. Balser has guided extensive clinical service and facilities growth, expanding patient visits to nearly 3 million per year and annual revenues to over $5 billion (fiscal 2021). VUMC now supports the world’s highest volume cardiac transplantation program, the Mid-South’s largest NCI-designated comprehensive cancer center, and the Southeast’s largest provider-led health affiliated network with over 60 hospitals and 6000 clinicians. Over two decades he has spearheaded an agenda to bring personalized medicine from research concepts to bedside care, integrating advances in informatics, personalized medicine, clinical trials, and precision genomics. The NIH Data and Research Support Center for the US Precision Medicine “All of Us” Program now resides at VUMC.

In 2016 Dr. Balser guided an historic restructuring process with Vanderbilt University (VU), legally and financially separating VUMC through a $1.2B public debt issuance, forming an independent, not-for profit corporation that continues its historic academic affiliation with the university. He has guided acquisitions growing VUMC from two to five regional campuses, including seven hospitals with over 1700 inpatient beds and 170 outpatient facilities, while also expanding the employed medical practice to over 3000 clinicians, the largest in the Mid-South. VUMC houses one of the nation’s distinguished medical education programs with over 1100 residents and fellows training in over 150 different specialties. The School of Medicine ranks among the nation’s top ten NIH grant recipients, with over $700M in annual research costs supported by government, foundation, and industry sponsors.

In 2008 Dr. Balser was elected to the National Academy of Medicine; under the 1863 Congressional charter, the academies advise the nation on science, technology, and health. Since 2018 he has been a member of the organization’s governing council.  He served as chair for the 2020, 50-year anniversary scientific sessions, and recently co-authored the academy’s sector review on healthcare delivery organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. He serves on the boards of VUMC, Tulane University, the Center for Medical Interoperability, and the Nashville Healthcare Council, and was a director of the public company Varian Medical Systems until its recent acquisition by Siemens.

Dr. Balser undertook internship on the Osler Medical Service, residency training in anesthesiology, and fellowship training in cardiac anesthesiology and in critical care medicine at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, MD. He joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1995, where he practiced cardiac anesthesiology, ICU medicine, and led an NIH-funded research program aimed at the genomic underpinnings of cardiac rhythm disorders. He returned to Vanderbilt in 1998, was appointed chair of the Department of Anesthesiology in 2001 and became VUMC’s chief research officer in 2004. In 2008/09, he was named Dean of the school of medicine and Vice Chancellor for health affairs with executive responsibility for all medicine-related educational, research, and clinical service programs, responsibilities that continue since 2016 in his role as President and CEO of VUMC and dean of the school of medicine at VU. 

A senior leader in health care since 1975, Dr. Will Ferniany is Chief Executive Officer of the UAB Health System and the new UAB-St. Vincent’s Alliance. In this role, Dr. Ferniany oversees a $5+ billion, 11-hospital health system that includes a wholly-owned insurance plan.

Dr. Ferniany holds a PhD in Administration - Health Services and a Master of Science in Hospital and Health Administration from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His undergraduate degree is from the University of Alabama. 

Ferniany has been a senior fellow in the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, an adjunct faculty member of the Wharton School, the School of Health Related Professions at the University of Mississippi as well as an instructor in the University of Pennsylvania and University of Alabama’s Schools of Medicine. 

Dr. Ferniany has served on many regional national health administration boards including the Alabama Hospital Association (past chair), Association of American Medical Colleges, University Health Consortium, Council of Teaching Hospitals (past chair), Vizient, and the University of Miami Health System.

As chief health care officer, Janis M. Orlowski, MD, MACP, focuses on the interface between the health care delivery system and academic medicine, especially how academic medical centers can leverage their expertise in research and innovation to support emerging reforms. She leads several AAMC groups, including the Council of Teaching Hospitals and Health Systems (COTH), which represents the interests of approximately 400 major teaching hospitals and health systems, including 64 Department of Veterans Affairs medical centers. Dr. Orlowski joined the AAMC after serving as the chief operating officer and chief medical officer of MedStar Washington Hospital Center, in Washington, D.C. From 2004-2013, Dr. Orlowski oversaw the medical staff, clinical care, quality, patient safety, medical risk, perioperative services, ambulatory care, and medical education programs. Prior to MedStar Washington, she served as associate vice president and executive dean of the Rush University Medical School in Chicago. Dr. Orlowski earned her bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from Marquette University and her medical degree from the Medical College of Wisconsin.

PGY-1, Department of Emergency Medicine
Boston Medical Center
Co-Founder, Pre-Health Dreamers

MD Student
University of Miami Miller School of Medicine

PhD Candidate
Morehouse School of Medicine
MD Student
Mercer University School of Medicine

MD-ScM Student
Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University