Michael Ascher, MD

Dr. Ascher is a graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard Medical Schools. He  trained in Internal Medicine, Infectious Disease and Immunology at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York City.  He has thirty years of experience in a variety of environments; basic and clinical research on biothreat diseases in the Army, research and practice in infectious disease/academic medicine at UC Irvine, laboratory and epidemiologic practice and research at the State of California public health laboratory.  From 2001 to 2003, he served as laboratory consultant to the Secretary, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Washington and subsequently at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.  From 2003-2007, he worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on host response biomarkers of infection.  In October 2007, he retired from LLNL and now works part-time at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine on the BioPortal information-sharing infrastructure focused on global foot and mouth disease surveillance.  He served on the NRC committee on Biological Threats to Agricultural Plants and Animals.  He also serves as the Senior Medical Advisor to the State of California Emergency Management Agency.  He is a member of numerous scientific societies and has over 100 publications.

Howard Backer, MD

Dr. Howard Backer is currently Chief of the Immunization Branch, California Department of Public Health (CDPH) and leads pandemic influenza planning for CDPH.  He has served in special assignments as interim State Public Health Officer, and Special Consultant on Emergency Preparedness to the Director.  Dr. Backer is board certified in both Emergency Medicine and Public Health/General Preventive Medicine. Other areas of interest and expertise include travel medicine, international health, and medicine in remote areas. He joined the Division of Communicable Diseases, Immunization Branch, at the California Department of Health Services in 2000, after practicing medicine for 25 years in a variety of settings, including urban county hospitals, small resort communities, and community hospitals.  Prior to working at the state Health Department, Dr Backer worked for 16 years with The Kaiser Permanente Medical Group.  He attended medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, followed by an internship at Highland, Alameda County Hospital, and an Emergency Medicine residency at San Francisco General Hospital, later returning to UCSF for a residency in Preventive Medicine, including at MPH at UC Berkeley.  He is a past-president of the Wilderness Medical Society and Medical Consultant for Mountain Travel Sobek.

Janet Berreman, MD

Biography Pending

Muntu Davis, MD, MPH

Dr. Muntu Davis is currently the Deputy Health Officer for Public Health Emergency Preparedness at the Alameda County Public Health Department (ACPHD). He is the lead physician on the pandemic influenza response planning. Prior to working at the ACPHD, he worked with the California Department of Health Services on pandemic influenza planning for California. His other areas of interest include ways to improve the use of television news, newspapers, and education-entertainment to promote health and health policy changes. He joined the ACPHD in October 2005. Prior to working for the Public Health Department, he practiced medicine in urban and rural primary care and urgent care clinics in Northern and Southern California.

Bruce Hope, PhD

Just completed special assignment to Water Quality Division developing: a priority persistent pollutant list for Oregon (per Senate Bill 737) and rulemaking for initiation levels for pollution reduction plans. Also assisted with fish consumption rate estimates and developed mercury targets (with a region-specific food web bioaccumulation model) and analyzed mercury source loads for Phase I of the Willamette River Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) project.

For the Air Quality Division, provide support to Oregon’s Air Toxics program; evaluate and communicate health and environmental risk and hazard associated with air toxics; undertake special projects related to air toxics (principally mercury); support headquarters and regional staff on implementation of the air toxics program and with other toxics issues; support the Air Toxics Science Advisory Committee (ATSAC) with regard Oregon’s ambient air toxics benchmarks. Served on the Ash Grove Mercury Reduction Advisory Committee.

Served as Land Quality Division's project manager for recently completed risk assessment for the Umatilla Army Depot Chemical Demilitarization Project.   Also performed stormwater modeling for the Portland Harbor Superfund project. Proposed state-wide sediment evaluation guidance for use by DEQ project managers and delivered in-house and outreach training in human health and ecological risk assessment practices and policies. Reviewed human health and ecological risk assessments prepared by contractors for specific cleanup sites, confirmed remedial action levels, and evaluated remedial alternatives for various media (soil, water, air, sediment).

Paul Jarris, MD

Paul E. Jarris, MD, MBA was appointed Executive Director of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) effective June 19, 2006. Prior to his appointment as executive director, Dr. Jarris served on the ASTHO Executive Committee from 2003 to 2006.

Dr. Jarris served as State Health Official of the Vermont Department of Health from March 2003 to May 2006. In that capacity he oversaw a department of 850 employees, 12 district offices, and a $250 million budget serving the public health, mental health and substance abuse needs of all Vermonters. During his tenure, Dr. Jarris implemented The Vermont Blueprint for Health: The Chronic Care Initiative. The Blueprint for Health is a public-private strategic framework launched by Governor Jim Douglas. The Blueprint is a public-private partnership of state government, health insurance plans, business and community leaders, health care providers, and consumers. The program is built on the premise that the prevention of chronic illness, coupled with improved care, will help Vermonters live healthier lives and reduce the overall demand for costly medical services.

Dr. Jarris was also instrumental in developing treatment options for vulnerable Vermonters dealing with addiction. He established Vermont’s first inpatient substance abuse treatment program dedicated to adolescent and women’s care. He successfully introduced mobile methadone clinics to serve rural Vermonters and increased statewide clinical capacity to deliver Burprenorphine treatment.

Dr. Jarris graduated from the University of Vermont and received his MD degree from the University of Pennsylvania, School of Medicine in 1984. He interned at Duke-Watts Family Medicine Residency Program in Durham, NC and completed his residency at the Swedish Family Practice Residency Program in Seattle, Washington in 1987. Following residency training, he completed a fellowship in Faculty Development and received a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Washington in 1989. Dr. Jarris served as Medical Director for Vermont’s largest nonprofit HMO, Community Health Plan, from 1992-1996. In this capacity he had responsibility for quality improvement, resource management, practice relations, and medical affairs. He was President and CEO of Vermont Permanente Medical Group from 1998-2000 as well as CEO of Primary Care Health Partners, Vermont’s largest statewide primary care medical group, from 1999-2000.

Throughout his career, Dr. Jarris has maintained an active clinical family practice, including work in federally qualified health centers and a shelter for homeless adolescent youth. He is certified by the American Board of Family Medicine and the American Board of Medical Management.

Âna-Marie Jones

Ana-Marie Jones is the Executive Director of CARD - Collaborating Agencies Responding to Disasters, a nonprofit located in Alameda County, California. Created by local community agencies after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, CARD trains and supports nonprofits and special needs communities in disaster preparedness, response and recovery activities. In her tenure, she has re-written and redefined CARD’s services and curriculum to be based on community capacity building, economic empowerment and leadership development.

Before joining CARD in April 2000, for three years Ms. Jones worked for the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services Coastal Region on projects supporting community organizations and people with special needs. She was also the acting Executive Director of the Northern California Disaster Preparedness Network, a 5-year funding initiative dedicated to creating emergency preparedness and response resources for vulnerable and underserved communities.

Ms. Jones works with numerous preparedness stakeholders to address preparedness, response, recovery, evacuation, funding, and the full sustainable inclusion of people with special needs. She is Chair of the Nonprofit Roundtable for the Oakland Chamber of Commerce and is a member of the Working Group on Citizen Engagement in Health Emergency Planning, an initiative of the UPMC Center for Biosecurity. She has been a panel member, guest lecturer and keynote presenter for many diverse entities including: Harvard School of Public Health, RAND Corporation, Yale University School of Public Health, Department of Homeland Security, Public Health – Seattle & King County Advanced Practice Center, Office of Minority Health and the CDC.

In November 2003 and in January 2005, at the request of the Japanese Central Government and Japanese research institutes, Ms. Jones toured Tokyo and Kobe sharing an alternative approach to disaster preparedness (use no fear – Prepare to Prosper!) with government, emergency management, university and nonprofit leaders. In March 2005, she joined the faculty of UC Berkeley Center for Infectious Disease Preparedness as a guest lecturer.

Ana-Marie Jones is committed to ending the use of fear, as a way to “motivate” preparedness actions. She a passionate advocate for ending America’s disaster victim cycle and for building disaster resilient communities, where even the most vulnerable members will survive, thrive and prosper!

Rick Kreutzer, MD

Rick Kreutzer, M.D. is chief of the Division of Environmental and Occupational Disease Control, which houses the Environmental Health Investigations Branch.

Dr. Kreutzer has helped develop a framework for environmental health tracking (a.k.a. surveillance); built better asthma surveillance in the State; studied exposure to molds and mycotoxins from composting, biosolids, or indoor sites with moisture; and helped create a new Environmental Contaminant Biomonitoring Program for California. 

Dr. Kreutzer is principle investigator for California Breathing, the CDC sponsored program to address asthma from a public health perspective. In this capacity, he helped craft the Strategic Plan for Asthma in California and supervises Plan implementation projects. 

He is a reviewer for a number of environmental health journals. He is a lecturer at UC Berkeley and is on the clinical faculty at UCSF. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin, a MD from the University of Pennsylvania, and epidemiological training from UCLA. Prior to coming to the Health Department, he worked as a family physician and emergency room physician.

Nancy Lapolla, MPH

President Nancy Lapolla has over 20 years of experience in public health. She has a Bachelor of Science degree in Community Health and a Masters degree in Public Health. Ms. Lapolla has been with the Santa Barbara County EMS Agency since 1994, and served as the EMS Agency Director since May 1998. As a Director, Ms. Lapolla has overall responsibility for emergency medical services system; providing leadership for the EMS staff and the broader EMS system. As President of the Board of Directors of DWW-SBSM Ms. Lapolla provides oversight and guidance to the direction and programs of this organization.

Todd LaPorte, PhD

Todd. R. La Porte is Professor of Political Science at the Univ. of California, Berkeley (1965), where he was also Associate Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies (1973-88.) He received his B.A. from the University of Dubuque (IA) (1953); his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University (1962), and held faculty posts at the University of Southern California, and Stanford University as well as UCB. He teaches and publishes in the areas of organization theory, technology and politics and the organizational and decision making dynamics of large, complex, technologically intensive organizations, as well as public attitudes toward advanced technologies, and the challenges of governance in a technological society. He was a principal of the Berkeley High Reliability Organization Project, a multi-disciplinary team that studied the organizational aspects of safety-critical systems such as nuclear power, air traffic control, and nuclear aircraft carriers. His research concerns the evolution of large-scale organizations operating technologies demanding very high level of operating reliable (nearly failure free) performance across a number of management generations, and the relationship of large-scale technical systems to political legitimacy. This took him to Los Alamos National Laboratory (1998-2003) examining the institutional challenges of multi-generation nuclear missions. More recently, he has taken up questions of crisis management in the face of new types of threats emerging from our sustained engagement with Radical Islam. In a parallel effort, he has examined the institutional evolution of a critical element in the nation's meteorological monitoring capacity and Earth Observation system, the development of the National Polar-orbiter Operational Environmental Satellite System managed by NOAA and the DOD in cooperation with NASA.  Part of this activity was carried out as a member of a NAS panel on reviewing the impediments to interagency cooperation in US earth observing satellite progams.

He was a Fellow, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Smithsonian Institution, and Research Fellow, Wissenschaftszentrum (Sciences Center) Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for Social Research, Cologne. In 1985, he was elected to the National Academy of Public Administration. Service on editorial boards includes Policy Sciences, Public Administration Review, Technology Studies, Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, and the Steering Committee, Large Technical Systems International Study Group. He has been a member of the Board on Radioactive Waste Management, and served on panels of the Committee on Human Factors, and Transportation Research Board, National Academy of Sciences. He served on the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, Department of Energy, and chaired its Task Force on Radioactive Waste Management, examining questions of institutional trustworthiness, and was on the Technical Review Committee, Nuclear Materials Technology Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has also served as a member of: the Committee on Long Term Institutional Management of DOE Legacy Waste Sites: Phase Two; and the Committee on Principles and Operational Strategies for Staged Repository Systems, both of the Board on Radioactive Waste Management, The National Academies of Science (2001-2003). He has consulted with DOE's, Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, and currently is a Faculty Affiliate, Decision Sciences Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Bela Matyas, MD, MPH

Bela T. Matyas was the Chief of the Disease Investigations Section of the California Department of Public Health.  He previously served for thirteen years as the Medical Director of the Epidemiology Program in the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.  Prior to that, he served for four years as the Medical Director of Disease Control and also as State Epidemiologist for the Rhode Island Department of Health (RIDH). After serving for three years as the Chief of Environmental Health Risk Assessment for the RIDH, Dr. Matyas received his medical degree from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and completed a residency in Occupational Medicine/Preventive Medicine at the Harvard School of Public Health, where he also received a Master of Science Degree in Epidemiology and a Master of Public Health (MPH) Degree.

Robert Melton MD, MPH, FACPM

Robert J. Melton M.D., MPH, FACPM has experience in management and leadership in local, state, federal and international public health programs of all types over a period of 30 years. Participated in pioneering initiatives in communicable disease control, reproductive health services, chronic disease prevention, heart disease prevention, cancer surveillance, tobacco control, injury control, community health assessment, community health improvement, environmental health investigation and protection, emergency medical services system design, disaster preparedness and response, mental health service program design, primary care clinic system design, and Medicaid managed care system design. Served on policy groups as diverse as those addressing HIV/AIDS, tobacco tax initiatives, access to emergency contraception, planning for pandemic preparedness, and the reorganization and recodification of California's public health statutes.

Peter Ohtaki, MBA

Peter grew up in Menlo Park, and graduated from La Entrada Middle School and Woodside High School.  He received his BA degree in Economics, magna cum laude, from Harvard University and his MBA from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.

He is the Bay Area Partnership Director for Business Executives for National Security (BENS), a non-partisan, nationwide organization that builds public-private partnerships between businesses and emergency management agencies to improve disaster response, community resiliency, and homeland security.

He was previously the Chief Financial Officer of a high-tech company, and worked in corporate finance for Morgan Stanley and other investment firms in New York and San Francisco.  He previously served on the Board of Directors for the Mid-Peninsula Water District.

 He is a proud graduate of the Fire District’s Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) training program in 2005.  He lives in Menlo Park with his wife and two children.

Peter Ohtaki serves as the Board’s liaison to the City of Menlo Park, and is on the Finance Committee for the Fire District. He has served on the Board since 2007.

Herminia Palacio, MD

Dr. Herminia Palacio is an Internal Medicine physician with significant public health and public policy experience. She currently serves as the Executive Director of Harris County Public Health and Environmental Services. She holds faculty appointments at Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Texas School of Public Health. During Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, she directed medical operations at the Astrodome/Reliant Park mega-shelter. She is a Past President of the Texas Association of Local Health Officials and is active in the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

Sarah Park, MD, FAAP

Sarah Y. Park, M.D. is the state epidemiologist and chief of the DOH Disease Outbreak Control Division. Her primary role is to oversee all activities related to emerging infections, disease surveillance and investigations, immunizations, and public health preparedness.

Dr. Park previously worked as the deputy chief of the DOH Disease Outbreak Control Division for four years under former State Epidemiologist Paul Effler, M.D. Prior to that, she was an epidemic intelligence service officer assigned to the Respiratory Diseases Branch in the National Center for Infectious Diseases at the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Dr. Park is the recipient of many honors, two of which in 2005 were as part of CDC teams receiving the Outstanding Unit Commendation, the first for work performed on the West Nile Surveillance and Response Team during the 2002 West Nile virus outbreak in the United States, and the second for work performed during the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic in Asia.

Juan Ruiz, MD, MPH, DrPH

Biography Pending

Tim Siemsen

I have worked for emergency and disaster preparedness and response for more than 15 years, primarily with local governmental and voluntary agencies and organizations. Most recently, I served as the Volunteer Resources Coordinator with the Pima County Health Department in Tucson, Arizona where I was assigned to the Public Health Preparedness Program and the Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security. My responsibilities included recruiting and training both medical professionals and non-medical volunteers for support of public health programs. I have served as state chairman of the Arizona Citizen Corps Council and the Arizona Medical Reserve Corps and was the coordinator and interim executive director of the Medical Reserve Corps of Southern Arizona. Additionally, I served as co-chair of the Southern Arizona Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (VOAD) and chaired committees for the Metropolitan Medical Response System (MMRS) and the Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI). My current position with NACCHO is as Senior Analyst with the Public Health Preparedness Program, with special emphasis on Medical Reserve Corps.

Karen Smith, MPH

Biography Pending

Michael Stacey, MD

Board Certified in Family Medicine with experience working for the United States Air Force as Medical Director of Emergency Services and for Solano County as Deputy Public Health Officer with oversight of the Communicable Disease (including STD and TB) Program, Emergency Services Bureau (including EPR and EMS), and the Public Health Laboratory