Alice Waters is a chef, author, food activist, and the founder and owner of Chez Panisse Restaurant in Berkeley, California. She has been a champion of local sustainable agriculture for over four decades. In 1995 she founded the Edible Schoolyard Project, which advocates for a free school lunch for all children and a sustainable food curriculum in every public school. She has been Vice President of Slow Food International since 2002. She conceived and helped create the Yale Sustainable Food Project in 2003, and the Rome Sustainable Food Project at the American Academy in Rome in 2007. Her honors include election as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007; the Harvard Medical School’s Global Environmental Citizen Award, which she shared with Kofi Annan in 2008; induction into the French Legion of Honor in 2010; and induction into the National Woman’s hall of Fame in 2017. In 2015 she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama, proving that eating is a political act, and that the table is a powerful means to social justice and positive change. Alice was most recently awarded the honor of “Cavaliere dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana” in 2019. Alice is the author of fifteen books, including New York Times bestsellers The Art of Simple Food I & II, The Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea, and, a memoir, Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook.

Allison Hess is the Vice President of Health Innovations for Geisinger. She has been part of the Geisinger family for 12 years and is responsible for the oversight and implementation of health and wellness programs for Geisinger patients and insured members, employees and community members.  She started her career in community health education/corporate wellness and has continued to expand to include community-based population health initiatives driven by data analysis and clinical outcome measurements.

Ms. Hess earned her bachelor of science in Health Education with a concentration in Psychology from Bloomsburg University. She is currently pursuing her MBA and has been recognized for her leadership within the organization. She has been the recipient of several awards focused in various areas of health including health equity, worksite wellness and supply chain.  She has also been recognized nationally for her work with the Fresh Food Farmacy program.

Ms. Hess has 20 years of experience in the health and wellness field. Her most recent work involves community based strategies impacting food insecurity and other social determinants of health.  She is deeply committed to the health and wellbeing our patients, members and communities.

Chef Ann Cooper is an internationally recognized author, chef, educator, public speaker, and advocate of healthy food for all children. In a nation where kids are born with shorter estimated life expectancies than their parents due to diet-related disease, Chef Ann has been a constant champion of school food reform as an important avenue through which to improve childhood nutrition.

In 2009, Chef Ann founded the Chef Ann Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping schools take action so that every child has daily access to fresh, healthy food.

I envision a time, soon, when being a chef working to feed children fresh, delicious, and nourishing food will no longer be considered renegade.

– Chef Ann Cooper

Also known as the “Renegade Lunch Lady,“ Chef Ann serves as Director of Food Services for Boulder Valley School District in Boulder, Colorado, and is Partner of Lunch Lessons, LLC, a consultancy for school districts going through large-scale food change. Ann attends many national conferences and performs regular Speaking Engagements. Visit our Multimedia Center to view some of Ann’s notable lectures, including her four TED Talks.

A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, Ann has 40 years of experience as a chef, including 17 years in school food programs. Her books Bitter Harvest and Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children have made her a leading advocate for safe, sustainable food. To raise further awareness about the value of healthy food systems, Chef Ann has held several advisory positions:

• Executive committee member, Chefs Collaborative
• Fellow, W.K. Kellogg Foundation Food & Society Policy
• Board member, USDA’s National Organic Standards Board (by congressional appointment)
• Member, Google Innovation Lab for Food Experiences
• President and board member, Women’s Chefs and Restaurateurs
• President, American Culinary Federation of Central Vermont
• Advisory Board Member, Real Food for Kids

Chef Ann has also been honored by the National Resources Defense Council, awarded an honorary doctorate from SUNY Cobleskill for her work on sustainable agriculture, and received IACP’s 2012 Humanitarian of the Year award.  Named one of the “Influential 20” by Food Service Director Magazine and one of the top 15 Crusaders for Health in the Food Industry by Greatist.com, Ann has also received the Women Chefs and Restaurateurs’ Community Service Award and a Special Inspirational Award from the Susan B. Komen Foundation. In 2016, she was named “One of the Top 50 Food Activists” by the Academy of Culinary Nutrition.

Anna Lappé is a national bestselling author, an advocate for sustainability and justice along the food chain, and an advisor to funders investing in food system transformation. A James Beard Leadership Award recipient, Anna is the co-author or author of three books and the contributing author to more than a dozen others. Her most recent book is about the connection between food and the climate: Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It (Bloomsbury). Named one of TIME’s “eco” Who’s-Who, Anna is the founder or co-founder of three national organizations, including the Small Planet Institute, which she launched with her mother Frances Moore Lappé, and Real Food Media, which partners with food movement allies to develop communications strategy and critical analysis for systems change. As a funder, she has led the grantmaking of the Small Planet Fund for more than a decade and created and runs the Food & Democracy program of the Panta Rhea Foundation. Anna is a founding Steering Committee member of the Castanea Fellowship and serves on the Advisory Boards of the Food Chain Workers Alliance and the Food and Farm Communications Fund along with board service at the Mesa Refuge and Rainforest Action Network. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and their two daughters

Cathryn Couch is the founder and CEO for Ceres Community Project, an innovative and award-winning non-profit organization working to foster health by connecting people to one another and to a healthier food system.  Ceres provides 100,000 organic meals annually to primarily low-income people struggling because of a health condition such as cancer or heart disease. Youth volunteers grow food and prepare the meals in Ceres’ two organic gardens and three kitchens as part of a youth development and culinary education program. The organization also provides ongoing nutrition and culinary education programming through community health centers and the Sonoma County library system.

She launched Ceres Community Project in 2007 as a one day a week volunteer project and has grown it to a $2.5 million budget with 3 program sites in the Bay Area and a global network with programs based on Ceres’ model operating in 12 US communities and Denmark. Cathryn is a founding member of the California Food is Medicine Coalition which is currently implementing a three-year statewide medical nutrition pilot for MediCal patients with congestive heart failure. In 2012 she received a Silver Jefferson Award for Public Service, one of only 5 awarded in the San Francisco Bay region, and was a national finalist for The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Community Health Leaders Award. In 2013 she received the Leader in Sustainability Award from the Leadership Institute for Ecology and the Economy. She was a finalist for the James Irvine Leadership Award in 2015 and was named the Red Cross Adult Humanitarian Hero for Northern California. She was named one of 25 CNN Heroes in 2016.

David M. Eisenberg, MD, is the director of culinary nutrition and adjunct associate professor of nutrition at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.  He is the founding Co-Director of the Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives conference, and founding Co-Director of The Culinary Institute of America -Harvard Chan Teaching Kitchen Collaborative, a group of 30+ organizations with teaching kitchens, intended to establish and evaluate best practices relating to nutrition, culinary and lifestyle education.

From 2000-2010, Dr. Eisenberg served as the Bernard Osher Distinguished Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and founding chief of the Division for Research and Education in Complementary and Integrative Medical Therapies at Harvard Medical School. He simultaneously served as the director of the Program in Integrative Medicine at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital.

David is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine.

In 1979, under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, David served as the first U.S. medical exchange student to the People’s Republic of China.

He has served as an advisor to the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Academy of Sciences and the Federation of State Medical Boards with regard to complementary, integrative and lifestyle medicine research, education and policy.

Dean Ornish, M.D., is founder/president of the non-profit Preventive Medicine Research Institute and Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCSF and UCSD.  He received his M.D. from Baylor College of Medicine, was a clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School, and his residency in internal medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital.  He earned a B.A. in Humanities summa cum laudefrom the University of Texas in Austin, where he gave the baccalaureate address.

He directed clinical research demonstrating, for the first time, that lifestyle medicine may reverse even severe heart disease and slow, stop or reverse early-stage prostate cancer, change gene expression and reverse aging by lengthening telomeres.  Medicare created a new benefit category to cover his program. He is currently directing the first study to determine if lifestyle changes can reverse early Alzheimer’s disease.

He is the author of 7 books, all national bestsellers, including UnDo It!  His three main-stage TED.com talks have been viewed by almost 6 million people.

His research was published in the leading medical journals and featured in all major media, including cover stories in Newsweek, TIME, and USNWR.  He has written a column for TIME, Newsweek and Reader’s Digest, is a LinkedIn Influencer, and was Medical Editor of The Huffington Post 2010-2016. He established a lifestyle medicine clinic at the St. Vincent de Paul Homeless Shelter in San Francisco where over 30,000 homeless people were treated.

He was appointed by President Clinton to the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy and by President Obama to the White House Advisory Group on Prevention, Health Promotion, and Integrative and Public Health.

Dr. Dexter Shurney, MD, MBA, MPH is the Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President of Clinical Affairs for Zipongo, the San Francisco-based based digital health and wellness company that focuses on enabling healthy eating – Healthy Eating, Made Simple”.Dr. Shurney is the former Chief Medical Director / Executive Director for Global Health Benefits and Corporate Wellness for Cummins, Inc. He has an extensive background in health care management and policy. He has distinguished himself as a recognized leader in his profession in numerous ways. Prior to Cummins, Dr. Shurney was the Chief Medical Director of the

Employee Health Plan for Vanderbilt University and Medical Center. During his tenure at Vanderbilt he also held joint faculty appointments as Assistant Clinical Professor, Division of Internal Medicine and Public Health, and Adjunct Faculty, Owens Graduate School of Management. Other positions that Dr. Shurney has held include Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer for Healthways, Senior Health Policy Strategist in the Division of Government Affairs for the biotechnology company Amgen Inc., Chief Medical Officer and Vice President of medical affairs for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, and Editor of the Journal of Managed Care Physicians.

Dr. Shurney serves on numerous boards including: the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) where he is the current President, the American Board of Lifestyle Medicine (ABLM), and the Health Enhancement Research Organization (HERO), the National Association of Managed Care Physicians (NAMCP). From 2007-2009, he served as the Chair of the Tennessee Diabetes Prevention and Health Improvement Board, appointed by Governor Phil Bredesen. He was also the most recent Chair of the Business Strategies Committee for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)/National Diabetes Education Program (NDEP). For 12 years he served as the American College of Medical Quality’s (ACMQ) elected delegate to the American Medical Association (AMA).

Dr. Shurney is co-author of the book “Integrating Wellness into Your Disease Management Programs” which is a “how- to” strategic guide for employers that wish to innovate their approach to chronic condition management.

Dr. Shurney is board-certified in lifestyle medicine and general preventive medicine / public health. He is a fellow in the American College of Lifestyle Medicine.

Emily M. Broad Leib is Assistant Clinical Professor of Law, Director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, and Deputy Director of the Harvard Law School Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation. Broad Leib founded Harvard’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, the first law school clinic in the nation devoted to providing legal and policy guidance on food law and policy issues. Broad Leib focuses her scholarship, teaching, and practice on finding solutions to the biggest health, economic, and environmental issues facing our food system. She has published scholarly articles in the California Law Review, Wisconsin Law Review, the Harvard Law & Policy Review, the Food & Drug Law Journal, and the Journal of Food Law & Policy, among others.

Broad Leib is recognized as a national leader in Food Law and Policy. She was named by Fortune and Food & Wine to their list of 2016’s Most Innovative Women in Food and Drink. The list highlights women who had the most transformative impact on what the public eats and drinks. Her work also has been covered in such media outlets as The New York Times, CNN, CBS This Morning, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, The Guardian, TIME, Politico, and the Washington Post. Broad Leib received her B.A. from Columbia University and her J.D. from Harvard Law School, cum laude.

Eric is an agricultural economist, diplomat, and executive driven by the desire to end malnutrition, global poverty, and food insecurity in his lifetime. His achievements in the public and private sectors include international agriculture development, nutrition policy, regulatory and government affairs, strategic planning, agriculture, trade policy, export promotion, management, and evaluation.

Eric has more than 25 years’ experience working globally on food and agricultural issues, including service as a Foreign Service Officer at United States Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) both in Washington and abroad. Subsequent work included the USA Poultry & Egg Export Council, consulting at McLarty Associates, and with the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). He has lived and worked in China, Taiwan, Mongolia, and Russia, with additional later field experience in Africa, South America, and South Asia.

He received a Master’s of Public Administration (MPA) from the University of Southern California with a concentration in program evaluation and an Master’s of Science (MS) in Agricultural Economics from Michigan State University with a focus on international economic development and public policy.

Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, Emerita, and author of books about food politics, most recently, Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat. She blogs almost daily at www.foodpolitics.com, and tweets @marionnestle.

Dr. Mark Hyman is the Head of Strategy and Innovation for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, the Pritzker Chair in Functional Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic and the founder and director The UltraWellness Center. He is an eleven-time New York Times best-selling author, and Board President for Clinical Affairs for The Institute for Functional Medicine. He is the host of one of the leading health podcasts, The Doctor’s Farmacy.  Dr. Hyman is a regular medical contributor several television shows and networks, including CBS This Morning, Today, Good Morning America, The View, and CNN. He is also an advisor and guest co-host on The Dr. Oz Show.

Dr. Matthew Lange is a Food Scientist and Informatician at UC Davis with over 20 years experience building data, information, and knowledge systems for academia, industry, and government operations. As the Principle Investigator for International Center for Food Ontology Operability Data and Semantics (IC-FOODS) at UC Davis, Dr. Lange leads efforts to build the semantic and distributed ledger infrastructure for the Internet of Food. The Semantic Web of Food (SWoF) and Internet of Food (IoF) hold promise to fundamentally alter the way we produce, process, deliver and consume food: giving rise to ecosystems of next-generation knowledge tools that lower technical innovation barriers for creation of novel, traceable, ecologically-friendly foods, products, medicines, and lifestyle regimens: precisely personalized for health and delight, and aggregatable for population and market analyses. The IoF holds potential to provide infrastructure enabling companies to compete to deliver healthier, more sustainable, and more trustworthy foods.

Michel Nischan is a four-time James Beard Award winning chef with over 30 years of leadership advocating for a more healthful, sustainable food system. He is Founder and CEO of Wholesome Wave, Co-Founder of the James Beard Foundation’s Chefs Action Network, as well as Founder and Partner with the late actor Paul Newman of the former Dressing Room Restaurant. Nischan, whose parents were farmers, began his career at 19, cooking breakfast at a truck stop. He quickly realized that the ingredients coming in the back door fell far short of the farm-fresh harvests he’d grown up on, and began a life-long career championing the farm-to-table concept, decades before it had a name.

Nischan was instrumental in securing $100M for Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentive (FINI) grants for the food equity field in the 2014 Federal Farm Bill, which was recently expanded to $300M in the 2018 Farm Bill to become a permanent part of all future farm bills. The Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program permanently expands affordable access to fruits and vegetables for low-income Americans, while creating a legacy for Wholesome Wave’s late co-founder Gus Schumacher.

He’s also the author of three cookbooks on sustainable food systems and social equity through food. A lifetime Ashoka fellow, he serves as a director on the board of the Jacques Pepin Foundation and on the advisory boards of Chef’s Collaborative, Modern Farmer, Good Food Media Network and The Culinary Institute of America. The James Beard Foundation honored Nischan as the 2015 Humanitarian of The Year, and he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from Post University with the graduating Class of 2019.

To learn more about Chef Nischan, follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and visit  www.chefnischan.com

To learn more about Wholesome Wave visit, follow us on Twitter and Instagram or visit www.wholesomewave.org

Olivia Weinstein is a registered dietitian and the culinary nutrition manager at Boston Medical Center’s Teaching Kitchen. In addition, Olivia has a private practice where she offers one-on-one nutrition counseling and at-home cooking lessons. Olivia is a group fitness instructor and certified personal trainer at local gyms in the Boston area. Olivia’s passion for health and cooking nutritious foods was born at an early age. Growing up in a single parent household, Olivia was responsible for cooking dinner and packaging lunches for herself and her siblings at 10 years old. Olivia has turned her passion for cooking into a career where she connects daily about food and helping people find easy and affordable ways to stay healthy.

Sarah Downer is the Associate Director of the Center for Health Law & Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School. She directs the Whole Person Care initiative, which seeks to improve care for underserved individuals at every point of interaction with the health care system. She works with clients and partners to nurture innovations in health care delivery and financing, scale successful interventions, convene powerful coalitions, translate emerging research into comprehensive and compelling resources for policy-makers, and to explore the short and long-term implications of health care trends. Ms. Downer is an expert on the national movement to integrate food and nutrition into health care. Along with the Boston-based nonprofit Community Servings, she convenes and leads the Food is Medicine Massachusetts Coalition, and is a primary author of the Massachusetts Food is Medicine State Plan, a blueprint for increasing access to vital nutrition services for every community in the Commonwealth. Ms. Downer also leads the Center’s Social Determinants of Health Law Lab, a special project dedicated to analyzing novel legal issues that arise when the health care system interacts with patients in new ways. Ms. Downer has a BA from Harvard College and JD from Harvard Law School.

Dr. Stoll is the co-founder of The Plantrician Project, The International Plant Based Nutrition Healthcare Conference, The International Journal of Disease Reversal and Prevention, and the Regenerative Health Institute; a unique collaborative project with The Rodale Institute that integrates a regenerative vision for human health, agriculture, and the environment. He serves on the advisory board at Whole Foods for their healthcare clinics and served as a member of the Whole Foods Scientific and Medical Advisory Board. Dr.Stoll is the Chairman of the Board for The Plantrician Project.Every year Dr. Stoll hosts the very popular one week health immersion, Dr. Stoll’s Total Health Immersion in Naples Florida and helps attendees restore and optimize their health, suspend and reverse common lifestyle diseases, and develop a sustainable regenerative lifestyle. In addition to authoring several books including Your Next Bite, Alive!, and numerous scientific articles, Dr. Stoll has appeared on national shows including the Dr. Oz show, hosted a 2018 PBS special Food As Medicine, and numerous documentaries including Eating You Alive, Wait till its Free, and The Game Changers. As well as being a published author and member of the 1994 Olympic Bobsled Team, he is a highly sought- after international speaker. Dr. Stoll and his family live in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Stephen Devries is a preventive cardiologist and the Executive Director of the Gaples Institute, an educational nonprofit with the mission of advancing the role of nutrition and lifestyle in healthcare. He is also an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Dr. Devries wrote “What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Cholesterol”and co-edited the book “IntegrativeCardiology”.  He has been voted by his peers many years over as one of the “Best Doctors in America.” Dr. Devries and his work in integrative cardiology have been featured on National Public Radio and PBS.

Sue joined MANNA in December 1999 as a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist (RDN). Sue was instrumental in MANNA’s shift from providing comfort and care to those dying from AIDS into an organization helping people with over 85 different illnesses through nutrition counseling and home-delivered medically appropriate meals.

At MANNA, Sue has held several positions prior to being appointed Chief Executive Officer in 2014, including Director of Nutrition and Client Services, Chief Operating Officer, and Executive Director. Sue garnered national recognition in June 2013 when she co-authored a key study, “Examining Health Care Costs Among MANNA Clients and a Comparison Group” published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Primary Care & Community Health. This research study examined the health care cost savings associated with MANNA’s model and has ongoing impact on nutrition policy nationwide.

Sue has presented MANNA’s work at conferences and meetings across the United States including the annual Food and Nutrition Conference and Expo, Harvard University’s Food as Medicine Symposium, Tulane University’s Culinary Medicine Conference, and the Root Cause Coalition’s National Summit on Social Determinants of Health. She has also testified in front of the United States Congress.

Sue served as a board member of Association of Nutrition Service Agencies (ANSA) from 2010-2012 and currently is co-chair of the national Food Is Medicine Coalition.  Other accolades include, the 2015 Jefferson College of Population Health Education Hero Award, Comcast’s Newsmakers selection, the Cancer Treatment Center’s America Caregiver Women of the Week Award, and Bank of America’s Neighborhood Builders Award.

Dr. Williams is a family physician, entrepreneur, former health system executive and consulting leader and he most recently was the founder and CEO of Clinovations which he sold to the Advisory Board Company (ABCO) in 2014. In 2017, Dr. Williams co-founded Socially Determined in order to create an analytics platform that integrates the social determinants of health with clinical and claims data in order to quantify and visualize social risk and the specific impacts on health and healthcare outcomes.  Socially Determined creates holistic models of people, the communities they live in, and their interactions with the healthcare system. Through that process, the company creates a SDOH risk score, a FICO score for healthcare, which will help health systems and health plans more comprehensively understand their patients and how to support them. With more than 20 years of healthcare experience, Dr. Williams’ unique perspective is formed at the intersection of healthcare and technology. He has an extensive understanding and knowledge in the implementation of healthcare technology, clinical process redesign, consumer market strategy development, and clinical adoption strategy development for leading healthcare stakeholders here in the United States and around the world. Before beginning his consulting career, Dr. Williams was the medical director of Family Practice at Mammoth Hospital in California. He also served as a Lieutenant Commander in the United States Naval Reserve. Dr. Williams completed his family practice residency at Kaiser Permanente in Los Angeles. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and received his Medical Doctorate from Marshall University.