Daniel Swartzman Public Health Ethics Lecture
COVID-19 vaccinations are beginning: how to make sure all vaccines are allocated equitably and ethically
About the event Heading link
Named in honor of Professor Emeritus Daniel Swartzman, JD, MPH, for his exceptional career promoting social justice, this endowed lecture ensures that the area of public health ethics will forever be a part of the UIC School of Public Health’s efforts to educate tomorrow’s best and brightest leaders. This year’s lecture features Dr. Helene Gayle and a panel of national experts on the current campaign to vaccinate all people in America during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Keynote speaker: Dr. Helene Gayle Heading link
Dr. Helene D. Gayle has been president and CEO of The Chicago Community Trust, one of the nation’s oldest and largest community foundations, since October 2017 and co-chair of the Framework for Equitable Allocation of COVID-19 Vaccine Committee for the National Academy of Medicine. Under her leadership, the Trust has adopted a new strategic focus on closing the racial and ethnic wealth gap in the Chicago region.
For almost a decade, she was president and CEO of CARE, a leading international humanitarian organization. An expert on global development, humanitarian and health issues, Dr. Gayle spent 20 years with the Centers for Disease Control, working primarily on HIV/AIDS. She worked at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, directing programs on HIV/AIDS and other global health issues. She also launched the McKinsey Social Initiative (now McKinsey.org), a nonprofit that builds partnerships for social impact.
Gayle was born and raised in Buffalo, NY. She earned a BA in psychology at Barnard College, an MD at the University of Pennsylvania and an MPH at Johns Hopkins University. She has received 18 honorary degrees and holds faculty appointments at the University of Washington and Emory University. She serves on public company and nonprofit boards, including The Coca-Cola Company, Colgate-Palmolive Company, Brookings Institution, Center for Strategic and International Studies, New America, ONE Campaign, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and Economic Club of Chicago. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Council on Foreign Relations, American Public Health Association, National Academy of Medicine, National Medical Association, and American Academy of Pediatrics. She has authored numerous articles on global and domestic public health issues, poverty alleviation, gender equality, and social justice.
“It really is about how do we move forward together as a region, as a city, and how do we do it equitably. Because unless we do it equitably, we’re not going to do it at all.”
Panelists Heading link
Dr. Ngozi Ezike was appointed by Governor JB Pritzker to serve as director of the Illinois Department of Public Health on January 31, 2019. Prior to joining IDPH,Ezike worked for more than 15 years with Cook County Health promoting the organization’s mission of “delivering integrated health services with dignity and respect regardless of a patient’s ability to pay.” Her clinical and public health leadership includes inpatient care at Stroger Hospital, primary and preventive care in community and school-based clinics and serving as medical director at the Austin Health Center and Cook County Juvenile Detention Center.
Dr. Lee Francis, MPH ’00, joined Erie Family Health Center in 1991 and has served as President and CEO since 2007. Dr. Francis is charged with enacting Erie’s strategic vision of serving as a national leader in the provision of community-based health care. Erie currently serves over 82,000 patients at 13 locations from North Lawndale, West Town and Humboldt Park, to Albany Park, Evanston-Skokie and Waukegan. Dr. Francis is a board-certified internist and cares for adult patients at Erie. He received his MPH and MD (’88) from UIC and is an associate professor of clinical medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, a fellow of the Leadership Greater Chicago Class of 2000 and is fluent in Spanish.
Panel moderator: Wayne H. Giles, MD, MS, is the dean of the UIC School of Public Health. Prior to joining UIC, he spent 25 years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) where he led the Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention, the Division of Population Health and the Division of Adult and Community Health. His portfolio at the CDC included running one of the organization’s most diverse divisions with programmatic and research activities in community health promotion, arthritis, aging, health care utilization, school health and racial and ethnic disparities in health. His past work experience has included studies examining the prevalence of hypertension in Africa, clinical trials evaluating the effectiveness of cholesterol-lowering agents, and studies examining racial differences in the incidence of stroke.
Dr. Julie Morita is the executive Vice President of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and a member of the Biden-Harris Team COVID-19 Advisory Board. At RWJF, she oversees all programming, policy, research and communications activities focused on improving the nation’s health. Morita served at the Chicago Department of Public Health for two decades, first as a medical director, then as chief medical officer, and in 2015 as the department’s appointed commissioner. She led the development of Healthy Chicago 2.0, a four-year health improvement plan focused on achieving health equity by addressing the conditions in which people live, learn, work and play.