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Desmar Walkes M.D. is a public health expert, family physician, and medical director for the City of Austin, TX–one of the largest and fastest-growing metro areas in the U.S. Before serving in her current role as Austin’s health authority, Dr. Walkes was instrumental in creating a pandemic task force, in collaboration with elected officials and community leaders, to bring equitable vaccine access to the medically underserved areas of central Texas.
As a family physician working in a rural environment since 1994, Dr. Walkes has decades of experience addressing tenacious obstacles to community health, including digital literacy, language barriers, and social inequity. She has also contributed her service to numerous medical missions in Asia, Africa, and Central and South America, bringing care to some of the world's most remote areas. Dr. Walkes received a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology with honors from Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada, her Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas, and is board certified in Family Medicine.
Dr. Walkes has observed and worked to correct inequity throughout her career and is committed to working towards system-wide training to mitigate the effects of racism, and microaggressions and foster recovery as we move on from this pandemic. Dr. Walkes looks forward to maintaining existing APH relationships and collaborations while ensuring that healthcare delivery and wellness services are available to all residents in the Austin/Travis County communities.
Hugh Forrest serves as Co-President and Chief Programming Officer for South by Southwest (SXSW). For his role of Chief Programming Officer, he oversees content for the SXSW Conference, as well as the SXSW Music Festival, the SXSW Film Festival and SXSW EDU.
Forrest was named "Austinite of the Year" in 2012 by the Austin Chamber of Commerce (along with fellow SXSW Directors Roland Swenson, Louis Black and Nick Barbaro). In 2014, Forrest and these other SXSW Directors were named Austin Entrepreneurs of the Year by Ernst & Young. He received an honorary doctorate of humane letters in 2018 from Kenyon College, his alma matter. In 2021, he was awarded Diversity Champion of the Year by the Austin Black Business Journal.
In addition to his work at SXSW, he has previously served on of the National Advisory Board for the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. He has also served on the Board of Directors for Austin Habitat for Humanity. He currently sits on the Board of Directors for the Austin-based accessibility company Knowbility. Via his decades of work with the Austin Reggae Festival, he has helped to raise more than $1 million in funding for the Central Texas Food Bank.
Before joining the SXSW team in the dark ages of 1989, he founded a small monthly alternative publication called The Austin Challenger. He also wrote for several other newspapers and publications, including the Austin Chronicle, the Texas Sports Chronicle, the West Austin News, Willamette Week and the Seattle Weekly.
For 2023, SXSW is scheduled March 10-19.
Fred Turner is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Curative. A British scientist from West Yorkshire, Turner attended the University of Oxford. Mr. Turner was named one of the top 100 practicing scientists in the UK by the Science Council in 2013. He was also included in Forbes’ ‘30 Under 30’ list and ranked first in the European Union Contest for Young Scientists.
Curative has been a critical national leader in bringing COVID-19 testing and vaccine administration resources to people in response to the pandemic, having provided more than 35 million tests and two million vaccines across thousands of locations in 40+ states. Under Turner’s leadership, Curative has set out to remake our nation’s healthcare system with the creation and launch of a first-of-its-kind health insurance plan that offers unmatched transparency into healthcare costs. Inspired by his vision to create a healthcare system that works for and supports patients’ whole health through every step of their personal health journey, Turner and the Curative team developed a path-breaking health plan with no copays, no deductibles, and no cost-sharing for its members.
Turner previously founded and led a 16z and YC-backed diagnostics (Dx) startup that built a CLIA lab for validating and launching an STD testing
Mike Geeslin, motivated by his commitment to community and servant-leadership, began his appointment as the President and CEO of Central Health, the Travis County Healthcare District, in May 2017. Prior to his appointment at Central Health, Mike has served in leadership and consulting positions for government, business, and non-profit organizations, including terms as Executive Director of the Texas Dental Association, Commissioner of Insurance for the State of Texas, and several boards and advisory committees along the way.
Mike’s current focus is on creating access to health care and working to make health equity a reality through steady and thoughtful progress.
Mike holds a Bachelor of Arts in Speech Communications from Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.
Kacie Kelly has 20 years of experience with leading innovation in mental health care and translating it into policy and practice. In her role as Chief Innovation Officer at the Meadows Institute, she focuses on opportunities to integrate scalable, data driven innovation into healthcare, schools, justice, and community systems to detect mental health risk earlier and increase access to quality care for more youth and adults. Additionally, she works to harness the power of public and private partnerships to reform payment models that advance best practices in mental health care delivery and seeks opportunities to integrate technology into the systems of care to optimize workforce demands.
Prior to joining the Institute, Kacie served as the Director for Health & Wellbeing at the George W. Bush Institute’s Military Service Initiative where she advanced innovative outcome-based solutions for mental and brain health challenges through partnerships, collaboration, and alignment among national and international stakeholders including the Bush Institute’s Veteran Wellness Alliance and the Stand To Health & Wellbeing Task Force. Kacie spent 15 years leading ground-breaking mental health and suicide prevention initiatives at the Department of Veterans Affairs. During that time, she established public-private partnership programs, led national systems transformation initiatives on innovative care models and directed outreach efforts to reduce stigma associated with mental health. Kacie earned her bachelor’s degree and her Master of Health Sciences from Louisiana State University and has a Graduate Certificate in Women in Public Policy and Politics from the University of Massachusetts.
S. Claiborne “Clay” Johnston, MD, PhD is the Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer of Harbor Health, a vertically integrated health delivery system that launched 2022 in Austin, Texas. Harbor is working with employers and Medicare to redesign benefits and care to focus on achieving the best health possible while reducing cost.
From 2014 to 2021, Clay was the inaugural Dean of the Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin. Clay specializes in stroke care and research with a focus on identifying risk factors and secondary prevention treatments after TIA and ischemic stroke. He was formerly at the University of California, San Francisco, where he served as Director of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, Associate Vice Chancellor of Research, and founding director of the Center for Healthcare Value. Clay is a graduate of Amherst College, completed medical school at Harvard University and received a PhD in epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley.