Speakers & Instructors

Michael VanRooyen, MD, MPH is the Director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) at Harvard University. He is also the Chairman of Emergency Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Dr. VanRooyen has worked as an emergency physician with numerous relief organizations in over thirty countries affected by war and disaster, including Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq, North Korea, Darfur-Sudan, Chad, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. He has worked in the field as a relief expert with several non-governmental organizations, including CARE, Save the Children, Oxfam, Physicians for Human Rights, and Samaritan's Purse International Relief. He has been a policy advisor to several organizations, including the World Health Organization and UN OCHA. He is a member of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee Health Cluster. He serves on the Board of Directors for the International Rescue Committee. He has testified before Congress and at numerous UN briefings on policy issues related to Iraq, Darfur, and the Democratic Republic of Congo and served on a National Academies/GAO review of mortality in Darfur.

Domestically, Dr. VanRooyen worked with the American Red Cross to provide relief assistance at the site of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11th, 2001. He also helped to coordinate the American Red Cross public health response to Hurricane Katrina, and oversaw the development of a 400-bed surgical field hospital in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. He worked as a physician with the US Secret Service, NASA and with the US Public Health Service with the Navajo and Apache tribes in Arizona and New Mexico, respectively.

Dr. VanRooyen is a Professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, where he teaches courses on humanitarian operations in war and disaster. In 2012, he founded the Humanitarian Academy at Harvard, an educational program to advance humanitarian professionalism. He has authored the textbook “Emergent Field Medicine” and written over 70 publications related to international emergency medicine development and humanitarian assistance. He has served on numerous academic advisory panels and boards and is on the Editorial Advisory Board of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Rear Admiral retired (RADM Ret) Boris D. Lushniak, MD, MPH, dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Health since January 2017. He served as professor and chair of the Department of Preventive Medicine and Biostatistics and Professor of Dermatology, F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) in Bethesda, Maryland before joining UMD.

Prior to working with TrafficDNA, Ryabokon worked as Chief Investment Officer at IDE Group. This period was highlighted by the acquisition of Price.ua. Before 2008, Mr. Ryabokon was serving honorably in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. He ended his military career with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. While serving, Mr. Ryabokon developed the Field Manual for tactical control of MLRS ‘Smerch’ and the Field Manual for tactical control of the Rocket Artillery Regiment reconnaissance groups.

In January 2004 Yaroslav joined the team of the OSCE Project Coordinator in Ukraine. Since 2016 he is in charge of the Economic-Environmental and Politico-Military Programme. Yaroslav manages projects on humanitarian demining, democratic control over the security sector, combatting illicit trafficking in weapons, ammunition and explosives, fight against money laundering and countering terrorism financing, introduction of digital technologies in public administration as well as improving chemical safety and security in Ukraine.

Graduated from Zhytomyr Military Institute named after S. P. Korolyov. Studied at the postgraduate school of the Department of Hybrid Control and Modeling Systems in the Energy Institute of the Problems of Modeling in the Power Engineering named after G. E. Pukhov in the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The scholarship winner of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine for young scientists for the results of research in the field of state information security (2016-2018). The sphere of scientific interests is connected with mathematical modeling and state information security.

He received his BA in English (creative writing) from Northwestern University where his short story “The Ice Cross” won first place in the Orgy of the Arts. He received his MD from the University of Illinois. His first novel, Caught in the Current, revisited the world of his youth - ethnic America and offbeat Europe during the psychedelic sixties. The Midwest Book Review described it as “one amazing read and decidedly establishes Daniel Hryhorczuk as a talented author of wit, imagination, and a fundamentally gifted storyteller.” His second novel, Myth and Madness, explores Ukraine’s “revolution of dignity” during the winter of 2013/14.

Dr. Hryhorczuk’s areas of research include children’s environmental health, toxic metals, and persistent organic pollutants. He has over 100 scientific publications in the areas of environmental and occupational health, medical toxicology, and public health. He has served as a member of the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health and is a current member of the Independent Scientific Monitoring and Oversight Committee for the National Children’s Study and a member of the USEPA Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee. He has served as a consultant on environmental health issues to international agencies including the Ukrainian Ministry of Health and the World Bank.

He has received commendations from the City of Chicago, the White House, and the Ukrainian government for his work on social and health issues in Ukraine.

RHCE is a strategic medical organization forward-deployed in Europe, providing sustained care to soldiers and family members stationed in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. The Business Operations section provides RHCE leadership with objective analysis and advises the command on ways to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the healthcare system. Mr. Cahill specializes in data quality, health system performance planning and productivity.

Prior to his arrival in Ukraine Alexander Vinnikov established and headed NATO’s regional Liaison Office in Central Asia, resident in Tashkent (Uzbekistan) with a mandate covering the five countries of the region. He has previously worked at NATO Headquarters in Brussels in both the Political Affairs and Security Policy Division and the Defence Policy and Planning Division. Alexander Vinnikov has also served with the OSCE in a variety of positions and duty stations, most recently as Senior Adviser to the High Commissioner on National Minorities in The Hague. He started his career as a researcher in international relations at Oxford University, the Geneva Centre for Security Policy and Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. For his work in Ukraine Alexander Vinnikov has been named one of the “Top 10 most effective foreign Ambassadors” (ranking between the German and French Ambassadors) by Ukraine's Institute of World Policy, based on a survey of leading government officials, MPs, journalists, and civil society experts. He has also been designated a HeForShe Champion by UN Women Ukraine for his promotion of gender equality and the principles of the UNSC Resolution on “Women, Peace and Security”. A citizen of the Netherlands, Alexander Vinnikov holds degrees from Oxford University (First Class Honours), Sciences Po in Paris and the London School of Economics. He speaks six languages and is studying Ukrainian.

Dr. Dobiesz has combined her interest in simulation-based education with her passion for global women’s health to develop and test a novel device for autotransfusion of vaginal blood at the point of uncontrolled hemorrhage in low resource settings with applications in remote trauma settings. Her team consists of biomedical engineers and microbiologists who have designed and tested the device in the lab setting and are working on clinical trials to advance this technology to impact maternal, civilian and military mortality internationally. Dr. Dobiesz is also a co-investigator on the OSF-HESP (Open Society Foundations / Higher Education Support Program) grant for Maintaining Health Education in Conflict for Continued Health: education in countries with conflict (Syria, Myanmar, Rwanda).

Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defence Centre of Excellence (JCBRN Defence COE). Vyškov, Czech Republic.

Joanna van der Merwe holds an MA in International Relations and Global Conflict in the Modern Era from Leiden University.

She conducted her research in collaboration with the Land Warfare Centre of the Netherlands Ministry of Defence focussing on Artificial Intelligence and the future of combat. This research built on her previous experience at the Netherlands Army looking at Big Data and the future battlefield. Joanna has also worked on Early Warning Systems for Mass Atrocities at the Signal Program on Human Security and Technology at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. She is currently the Privacy and Protection Lead and Data Protection Officer at Leiden University’s Centre for Innovation. She also continues to advise and speak on matters regarding data and AI in contexts such as policy-making and the future of warfare and defense.

Works at the Office of Defense Cooperation, U.S. Embassy Kyiv. She has been involved in research and linguistic activity in the domain of military medicine since 2014. Co-author of several ATO Medical Assessment papers, she took part in the translation of key NATO military medical documents and supported numerous multinational medical engagements. Speaker at the UTIC Linguistic Conference. MA in Linguistics.

Tim Roberts is the founder and CEO of TipTags. An expert in transportation and technology, he began his career as an aviation consultant developing air service for major airlines, local and national governments, and in providing due diligence for leading investment banks. In technology, he has worked with startups Transmeta (NASDAQ IPO) and Network Alchemy (Nokia acquisition), as well as companies like Apple, Hewlett Packard, and IBM. TipTags has founded the insight that geographic context makes messages more verifiable, reliable and valuable. TipTags allows users to create, preserve and share any kind of information placed with down to the doorway on any map. In disaster planning this allows planners to get better data generated by those in the community, and develop plans in collaboration with all stakeholders right on a map. The same system is used to manage disasters when they occur, including interaction with drones and other autonomous systems, and to document and manage recovery efforts. Tim has an MBA from EDHEC, MFA from New York University and a BS from the University of San Francisco. TipTags made an application specifically for its presentation, which can be found here.

Jack Wu has 20+ years of user interface and product development experience in Silicon Valley and served as an advisor to companies like EventBrite, Geni, and Yammer. Early in his career, Jack was employee number three at eGroups, which was by acquired Yahoo! in 2000 and later became Yahoo! Groups. Jack left Yahoo to become the Creative Director for Tickle, an online ad network acquired by Monster in 2004. After Tickle, Jack embraced his entrepreneurial spirit and started a software company that went on to develop web-based software for Facebook, Yahoo!, AOL, Pepsi and other Fortune 500 companies. This experience served as a foundation for Jack to start 50Cubes, a gaming company that blended art and technology and generated 14 million monthly active users in less than a year. Jack's latest endeavor is Nightingale Security, the world's first Robotic Aerial Security company. Jack co-founded Nightingale with John Hsu, a childhood friend and former SpaceX engineer who shares Jack's lifelong passion for aviation and robotics.