Thought Leaders and Innovators
came Together To Share Their
Knowledge, Experience, Research, and Insights
About The Future Of health.
THE AGENDA
7:45 am Networking & Breakfast
Opening Remarks
Hugh Forrest
Co-President/Chief Programming Officer
SXSW
Special Remarks
Claire England
Investment Partner
GPG Ventures
FEATURED SPEAKERS
Benjamin Isgur
Vice President
Health Care Thought Leader
Fidelity Health
Craig Watkins, PhD
Executive Director
IC2 Institute
UT-Austin
Chris Finberg
Innovation Director
PATHS-UP
Texas A&M University
Kirsten Ostherr, PhD
Professor/Founder
Medical Future Labs
Rice University
Charles Silver, JD
Professor/
Endowed Chair
UT-Austin
12:00 pm Networking & Departure
FEATURED SPEAKERS
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 2024, SXSW is scheduled March 8-16.
A seasoned investor with executive experience, Claire England is Investment Partner with GPG Ventures, a healthcare venture capital firm with more than 100 portfolio companies nationally. GPG opens venture-ready investing opportunities in the $4.3 trillion U.S. healthcare market to family offices and individuals, who invest in companies directly alongside the firm's partners.
The firm is built on more than 60 years of healthcare, operational, and financial experience with an extensive syndicate investor network and offices in Dallas, Houston, and Austin.
In addition to GPG, she's a partner in two Portfolia funds, Food & AgTech and FemTech I, where she made 22 investments, and a partner in an impact investing advisory firm, LOHAS.
She’s also a Kauffman Fellow (a global innovation program and network of 882 VCs and LPs) and a member of Private Equity Women Investor Network, or PEWIN. She serves on St. Edward’s University’s Business School Advisory Board, and she received the 2018 Kauffman Fellows Leadership Award.
S. Craig Watkins, PhD is the Ernest A. Sharpe Centennial Professor and the Executive Director of the IC2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on the equity implications of computer-mediated technologies. Craig is one of the Principal Investigators for UT-Austin’s Good Systems Grand Challenge, a University funded initiative that supports multi-disciplinary explorations of the technical, social, and ethical implications of artificial intelligence. Craig’s team explores the racial equity implications of artificial intelligence, focusing on how implicit biases, for example, in datasets, model formulation, and deployment can lead to disparate impacts, especially in high stakes contexts such as healthcare and policing.
His collaborative research with Design and the School of Information examines how Black and Latinx children interact with AI-consumer devices like digital assistants. Craig was also part of multidisciplinary team of social scientists, psychologists, and computer scientists who prototyped a chatbot to support parents dealing with postpartum depression. Craig leads a team that is adopting a data-oriented approach to understanding the social determinants of health. This current research has led to the design of an AI-based solutions to mitigate the mental healthcare crisis in the U.S
Craig is an internationally recognized expert in media and technology systems and the author of six books and numerous articles and book chapters. His work has been profiled in places as varied as the Washington Post, Atlantic, Newsweek,TIME, ESPN, NPR, and featured at venues like SXSW, The Aspen Institute, The Boston Federal Reserve, New York Hall of Science, MIT’s Media Lab, and The New York Times Dialogue on Race.
Kirsten Ostherr, PhD, MPH is the Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English and Director of the Medical Humanities Research Institute at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Kirsten is the author of Medical Visions: Producing the Patient through Film, Television and Imaging Technologies (Oxford, 2013) and Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health (Duke, 2005), and editor of Applied Media Studies (Routledge, 2017). She is founder of the Medical Humanities program (2016-present) and the Medical Futures Lab (2012-present), and she has extensive experience using human centered design for patient collaboration in health technology development.
Her research on trust and privacy in digital health ecosystems has been featured in Marketplace Tech on NPR, The Atlantic, STAT, Slate, and The Washington Post. Her writing about the COVID-19 pandemic has been featured in The Washington Post, STAT, and Inside Higher Ed. She is currently writing two books: Virtual Health, and The Visual History of Computational Health. Kirsten leads a digital health humanities project called “Translational Humanities for Public Health,” and her work was recently profiled in The Lancet.
Kirsten’s research is supported by the the National Institutes of Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Library of Medicine, the National Humanities Center, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Mr. Chris Finberg is the Innovation Director for the National Science Foundation sponsored Engineering Research Center called PATHS-UP (Precise Advanced Technologies and Health Systems for Underserved Populations) The Center is a collaborative effort with Texas A & M, UCLA, Rice, and Florida International Universities. The goal is to create new & innovative technologies and health systems for point-of-care use to address Diabetes and Cardiovascular Disease in the underserved populations.
The Center is taking a development approach quite unconventional to academia by engaging with stakeholders from all sectors - investors, healthcare providers, physicians, patients, communities, and industry- throughout the R&D process. Mr. Finberg is originally from the Minneapolis area where he received his Mechanical Engineering degree from the University of Minnesota. He spent his entire career in industry with the last decade working in the medical device industry with contract manufacturing companies. Specifically with Class III long term implantable devices for Cardiac Rhythm Management (CRM’s) and Neuromodulation. Working with companies like Medtronic, Boston Scientific, Abbott/St. Jude, Biotronik, LivaNova and others.
Today Mr. Finberg’s role is to create an Innovation Ecosystem to insure the technologies created and develop at the Center continue on to scalability and commercialization. That is being done by fostering entrepreneurship with students and faculty, working with start-up companies, building an Industry Consortium where large, medium, and small companies across the entire value chain, and build on those relationships to further innovation - with the ultimate goal of helping those underserved populations have a healthier life.
Charles Silver holds the Roy W. and Eugenia C. McDonald Endowed Chair in Civil Procedure at the School of Law, University of Texas at Austin, and an Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute.
His recent writings on health care law and policy include Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much For Health Care (Cato Inst. 2018), coauthored with David A. Hyman, and Medical Malpractice Litigation: How It Works—Why Tort Reform Hasn’t Helped (Cato Inst. 2021), coauthored with Bernard S. Black, David A. Hyman, Myungho Paik, and William M. Sage.
He is currently working on a proposal to the use Medicaid expansion as an opportunity to conduct a pilot project in which, instead of paying providers to treat beneficiaries, the program would deposit funds into health savings accounts that beneficiaries would use to purchase medical treatments directly. The project is described in “Leveraging The Medicaid Expansion,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Public Affairs (forthcoming 2024) (with David A. Hyman).
He earned his JD Yale University, Master of Arts from the University of Chicago, and Bachelor of Arts from the University of Florida.
Ben Isgur has spent more than 25 years guiding US and global health benefit leaders and decision makers with industry intelligence and research-based perspectives. His work informs business leaders on the interdependencies between the health industry, benefit trends and the employee experience.
An author, Ben has written numerous reports, which have been cited by leaders across the health industry. He is frequently interviewed and quoted by journalists from media organizations such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Economist, and Modern Healthcare. He is an accomplished speaker, and has given keynote addresses on diverse topics, from the drivers of US medical cost trend to the rise of the healthcare consumer’s voice.
Prior to joining Fidelity Investments, Ben founded a health research institute for a global consulting firm, where he led a team of industry experts, policy analysts and economists dedicated to developing original and independent thought leadership. Ben also developed health policy as a legislative director in the Texas House of Representatives and as a government relations officer for the City of Austin.
Ben received a master's degree from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin where he was a US Department of Defense fellow. Ben is a fellow with the American College of Healthcare Executives and serves as a board member for multiple health-related not-for-profits.