College of Law > Academics > Centers, Institutes & Initiatives > Mary and Michael Jaharis Health Law Institute > Annual Symposium > Presenters

Presenters

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Panel 1: Changes to Laws and Regulations Governing Telemedicine

Goodwin

We are excited to welcome former DePaul Professor of Law Michele Goodwin back to the College of Law as this year’s featured speaker.

Professor Michele Goodwin is a chancellor’s professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, and the founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy. Professor Goodwin is an expert in the areas of bioethics, constitutional law, family law, health law, reproductive rights and torts. She directed the first ABA-accredited health law program in the nation and established the first law center focused on race and bioethics. Professor Goodwin has provided testimony to state and federal lawmakers and legislative committees and worked with state attorneys general or their staff on health-related matters in California, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, an elected Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and the Hastings Center (the organization central to the founding of bioethics), as well as an American Law Institute adviser for the Restatement Third of Torts: Remedies.

Valarie Blake

Professor Valarie K. Blake’s scholarly research focuses on the intersection between healthcare discrimination and ethics.  She is particularly interested in how increasing state and federal regulation of health care financing and delivery will impact chronic disease, health insurance and professionalism in medicine.  Prior to joining the University of West Virginia, Professor Blake was a visiting professor at Duquense University School of Law.  Before that, she served as an ethics senior research associate for the American Medical Association (AMA), where she engaged in research and policy-making efforts related to the AMA’s Code of Medical Ethics.  She also has worked at the Cleveland Clinic as an advanced bioethics fellow providing bedside ethics consultation, research training and service in the areas of law, ethics and professionalism.   

 
Ron Chako

Dr. Ron Chacko is a family physician at Heartland Health Centers, a federally qualified health center with 19,000 patients in Chicago’s north and northwest neighborhoods, where he serves as a clinical lead for digital services. During the COVID pandemic, his team has been responsible for transitioning clinicians and patients to phone and video services for health care. In that journey, he has seen firsthand how technology has opened new opportunities for transforming patient care, while also amplifying the effects of existing inequalities. Dr. Chacko most recently served as an assistant professor of Clinical Family Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and he earned both his BS (in Medical Engineering with a concentration in Computer Applications) and his MD at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.  

Craig Klugman

Dr. Craig Klugman  is a professor of bioethics and health humanities in the Department of Health Sciences at DePaul University where he co-directs the Bioethics & Society minor program. Dr. Klugman also serves on Northwestern University Hospital’s Ethics Committee, is co-coordinator of the DePaul Public Voices Op-ed Fellowship, and is a voting member of the U.S. National Biodefense Science Board. He is the author of over 650 articles, book chapters, op-eds and blog posts on such topics as digital medicine, public health ethics, bioethics, crisis and disaster ethics, professionalism, and end-of-life issues.  Dr. Klugman also is the editor of several books, including  RESEARCH METHODS IN THE HEALTH HUMANITIES (Oxford 2019),  MEDICAL ETHICS  (Gale Cengage 2016), and  ETHICAL ISSUES IN RURAL HEALTH  (Hopkins 2013; 2008). Dr. Klugman has been interviewed for  The New York Times,  LA Times,  ABC News,  HBO,  Vice,  New Republic,  National Geographic,  Men’s Health,  The Daily Beast, Sinclair Broadcasting, Scripps News Service and NPR. Besides numerous academic journals, his writing has appeared in  Pacific Standard Magazine,  Huffington Post,  LifeMattersMedia,  Chicago Tribune,  Medium,  Cato Unbound,  The Hill,  San Francisco Chronicle  and the  Houston Chronicle.

Max Helveston

Professor Max Helveston is an expert in issues related to insurance, consumer protection and data privacy.  Returning to the faculty full-time after serving as the associate dean of academic affairs and strategic initiative, he has started work on several projects related to the commercialization of consumer health data, innovations in health care delivery, and the regulation of the health insurance plans offered by large, self-insured employers.  Additionally, he has begun working with DePaul Law Professor Wendy Epstein and legal scholars at other institutions on pieces addressing health equity issues during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

​​Panel 2: Implementation of COVID-19 Treatments and Vaccines to Maximize Public Health Bene​fits and Equity

Julia Barnes-Weise

Julia Barnes-Weise is a lawyer, global health policy consultant, entrepreneur and Certified Licensing Professional. She currently serves as executive director of the Global Healthcare Innovation Alliance Accelerator (GHIAA ), a non-profit organization she co-founded based on her work as a visiting associate professor of practice at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. The GHIAA MAPGuide®, a guide to global health agreements, was launched in August 2020. Barnes-Weise also is a senior business development and legal consultant to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and was a consultant on partnering for the Pandemic Preparedness Framework Initiative at the World Health Organization (WHO). While at WHO, she also co-authored a paper on the success and failures of the Ebola Outbreak 2014 consortia and created a system for monitoring potential priority pathogen development partner matching. Previously, Barnes-Weise served as director of business development at Glaxo Wellcome (now GSK), as an attorney at SAS Institute, and founded and consulted for BioMatch, LLC. She has decades of experience negotiating IP licenses, alliance agreements and advising healthcare companies and institutions on partnering strategies. She has consulted with both U.S. and European start-up companies and initiatives, including developing business development plans for venture capitalist backed spin out companies. 

Kiran Joshi

Dr. Kiran Joshi currently serves as a senior medical officer and co-lead at the Cook County Department of Public Health (CCDPH), where he oversees the Department’s behavioral health, chronic disease, communications, community engagement, lead poisoning prevention and epidemiology units. He also is an attending physician with the Department of Family Medicine at Stroger Hospital and an assistant professor of clinical family medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Since joining CCDPH, Dr. Joshi has been responsible for overseeing the development of WePlan 2020, the community health assessment and improvement plan for suburban Cook County, advancing health equity as an agency and community health priority, and developing the agency’s response to the opioid overdose epidemic. He also co-leads the agency’s response to COVID-19. Dr. Joshi previously worked as a consultant to the World Health Organization, where he provided technical assistance in the development of trainings for health workers in sub-Saharan Africa. 

Seema Mohapatra

Seema Mohapatra is an associate professor of law and dean’s fellow at Indiana University Robert H. McKin­ney School of Law. This summer she will join St. John’s University School of Law as a full professor and the founding director of St. John’s new academic center devoted to health care law, bioethics and health justice. She is an expert in the areas of health care law, public health law, bioethics, torts, and international health and family law. Her research interests include health equity and justice, the intersection of biosciences and the law, and health care ethics. 

Jennifer L. Piatt

Jennifer L. Piatt is a research scholar with the Center for Public Health Law and Policy at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University (ASU), which explores emerging global and domestic issues in public health law, policy and ethics, including emergency legal preparedness, vaccinations, health care reform, injury prevention, and constitutional rights and protections.  Piatt also is a senior attorney with the Western Region Office of the Network for Public Health Law, which builds relationships, delivers technical assistance and provides training to lawyers, public health practitioners and policymakers on how to use law to improve the public's health. Before joining ASU and the Network, Piatt served as a law clerk to Vice Chief Justice Ann A. Scott Timmer of the Arizona Supreme Court and worked in private practice as a pharmacy regulatory attorney at Quarles & Brady LLP, in the firm’s Phoenix, Arizona office.

Ana Santos Rutchman

Ana Santos Rutschman is an assistant professor of law at Saint Louis University, where she focuses on topics related to innovation in the life sciences, health law, intellectual property, and law and technology. Her legal scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in UCLA Law Review, Emory Law Journal, Arizona Law Review, Yale Law Journal Forum, Michigan Law Review Online, Duke Law and Technology Review, Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, Northwestern University Law Review of Note and the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, among others. Her commentary pieces have been published by the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, Health Affairs Blog, the Huffington Post and The Conversation, and republished in Scientific American, Newsweek Japan and newspapers around the U.S., including the Chicago Tribune. Her ongoing book, VACCINES AS TECHNOLOGY: INNOVATION, BARRIERS AND THE PUBLIC INTEREST,  is under contract with Cambridge University Press and scheduled to be published in 2022. In 2018, Rutschman was named a Health Law Scholar by the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics and a Wiet Life Sciences Law Scholar by the Beazley Institute for Health Law and Policy at Loyola University Chicago. In 2017, she was named a Bio Intellectual Property Scholar by the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics. In 2015-2016, Rutschman worked as a consultant to the World Health Organization on issues related to vaccine development in the context of the Ebola and Zika outbreaks.

Joshua Sarnoff

Joshua Sarnoff is a professor of law and former director of the Center for Intellectual Property Law & Information Technology (CIPLIT®) at DePaul University College of Law.  In 2019, he testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Intellectual Property Subcommittee, on patent eligibility issues, and was an expert witness in an international patent law arbitration. From 2014 to 2015, he was a Thomas A. Edison Distinguished Scholar at the United States Patent & Trademark Office. Professor Sarnoff is a registered patent attorney and has been involved in a wide range of intellectual property legal and policy disputes, has been an expert witness and consultant in patent disputes and policy reforms, has submitted testimony and white papers on domestic patent law reform bills, has filed numerous amicus briefs in the United States Supreme Court and in the Federal Circuit on important patent law issues, and has been a consultant to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) on international intellectual property, trade and environment issues. He is a frequent lecturer on intellectual property law issues, has written numerous articles and book chapters on patent law and on climate change and innovation policy, and is the editor of and a contributing author to the RESEARCH HANDBOOK ON INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND CLIMATE CHANGE (Edward Elgar Publishing 2016). 

​​Panel 3: High-Cost Treatment Disparities: Who Gets Access, Who Pays?

Katherine Drabiak

Katherine Drabiak, JD, is an associate professor at the University of South Florida (USF) College of Public Health and College of Medicine. She co-directs the Law and Medicine Scholarly Concentration at the College of Medicine, and her teaching and research is focused on health law, public health law and medical ethics. Professor Drabiak has authored numerous law review articles; written for peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, Bioethics, and AMA Journal of Ethics; and she has contributed to popular media outlets. She is an active member of Advent Health’s Medical Ethics Committee and has worked with the Florida State Bar Association, the Hillsborough County Bar Association, the 13th Judicial Circuit and the Florida Department of Health.

Alex Pearlman

Alex Pearlman is a science and technology journalist and a bioethicist. Her reporting and commentary on emerging issues in research, health policy and biotechnology have appeared in numerous leading national and international media outlets, including Stat, New Scientist, MIT Technology Review, The Boston Globe, and Vice, among others, and she was featured in the recent Showtime documentary "Citizen Bio." Pearlman works as a digital ethnographer and researcher in the Wexler Lab at the University of Pennsylvania Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy, where she is studying ethical issues in the Community Biology movement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Pearlman also is a research affiliate with the Community Biotechnology Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, where she studies the intersection of the Community Biology movement with issues in ethics and policy, and she is working on the creation of a research ethics framework for use by independent community labs. 

Govind Persad

Govind Persad is an assistant professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and a Greenwall Foundation Faculty Scholar in Bioethics.  Professor Persad teaches health law, and his research interests include the ethical and legal dimensions of health insurance, health care financing and markets in health care services, as well as the allocation of scarce medical interventions. Some recent publications include: Choosing Affordable Health Insurance (George Washington Law Review); Expensive Patients, Reinsurance, and the Future of Health Reform (Emory Law Journal); Pricing Drugs Fairly (William & Mary Law Review); and Allocating Medicine Fairly in an Unfair Pandemic (University of Illinois Law Review).

Theodosia Stavroulaki

Dr. Theodosia Stavroulaki is a Jaharis Faculty Fellow at DePaul College of law, and her teaching and research interests include antitrust law, health care antitrust and public health law. Dr. Stavroulaki’s scholarship has been published in World Competition, Law & Economics Review, Loyola Consumer Law Review, CPI Antitrust Chronicle and the American Journal of Law & Medicine. Her forthcoming manuscript, HEALTHCARE, QUALITY CONCERNS AND COMPETITION LAW: A SyYSTEMIC APPROACH (Hart Publishing), explores how health care quality concerns are considered by competition authorities on both sides of the Atlantic. It also unveils the main antitrust and health equity concerns that may emerge in the age of big data revolution in health care. Her research has been funded by numerous prestigious institutions including the American Bar Association Section of Antitrust Law, the Fulbright Commission, NYU School of Law, Michigan Law School, European University Institute, Tel Aviv University, the European Commission, the Greek Scholarships’ Foundation and the Greek Association of Law and Economics. Over the past six years, Dr. Stavroulaki has been invited to deliver guest lecturers and present her research findings at the FTC, NYU School of Law, Boston University, Michigan Law School, Yale Law School, European University Institute, Wayne State University, Tel Aviv University and Haifa University. Before commencing her academic career, she worked as an antitrust associate in a leading law firm in Greece, where she advised multinational firms in a broad range of competition law issues in the pharmaceutical, automotive and IT sector, and as a blue book trainee lawyer at the Policy Unit of DG Competition of European Commission. 

Wendy Netter Epstein

Wendy Netter Epstein is a professor of law and faculty director of the Jaharis Health Law Institute at DePaul University. Her teaching and research focus on health care law and policy, with an emphasis on the financing and delivery of health care, the creative application of behavioral economic principles to entrenched problems and matters of health equity. Professor Epstein’s scholarship draws on her personal experience representing health industry clients as a partner at a large law firm, and her work has most recently appeared in the Southern California Law Review; Minnesota Law Review; Emory Law Journal; Washington Law Review; Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law & Ethics; and Cardozo Law Review. She also is a frequent contributor to media, blogs, and op-eds and is a Public Voices Fellow of DePaul University’s Op-Ed Project. Professor Epstein was the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics (Recent Developments), executive editor of the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, and she co-authored an Internet privacy course for Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Prior to joining DePaul, she clerked for the Honorable Michael Daly Hawkins, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, and was a commercial litigation partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP. 

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