Allen Aksamit, MD

Dr. Allen J. Aksamit is a board-certified neurologist and consultant in the Department of Neurology at the Mayo Clinic and a member of the neurology education division. He received his M.D. from Loyola University, completed his neurology residency at Mayo Clinic, and completed a neurovirology fellowship at the National Institute of Health. He has been the recipient of the National Rubino Award for Excellence in Clinical Neurology from the American Academy of Neurology and multiple teaching awards from the Mayo Clinic including 5-time Neurology Teacher of the Year. His clinical interests include neuroinfectious diseases, prion disorders, and neurosarcoidosis.

Roland Brummer, RN

Roland Brummer grew up in Randall, MN. As a grade schooler, he decided he wanted to become a Catholic priest someday. He attended Crosier Seminary High School and Junior College in Onamia MN, followed by three years at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where he earned a Master of Arts Degree in Philosophy. Less than a year after graduating from college and leaving the seminary, he developed a severe case of ulcerative colitis at the age of 23. He became anemic and septic and was hospitalized for more than 2 months, during which time he felt like he was close to dying. This lengthy hospitalization was the start of an inner calling to be a nurse and to give to others what he had received as a patient. He graduated from Rochester Community College in Rochester, MN in 1985 with an Associate Degree in Nursing. His first job in nursing was on an adolescent-locked inpatient Mental Health Unit. Four years later, he started working on the Medical and Oncology Unit at St. Cloud Hospital in St. Cloud, MN. Because of his history as a patient and his experience with his father’s death from lung cancer, he immediately felt an attraction and a passion for caring for dying patients, as well as caring for cancer patients. He continued working on the Medical Oncology Unit until his retirement in 2017. During his work at St. Cloud Hospital, he was also a member of their Ethics Committee for many years. Since his retirement, he has continued to present on Caring For Dying Patients to nursing students at St. Cloud State University and to newly graduated registered nurses at St. Cloud Hospital. He has also been involved in “No One Dies Alone”, a program at St. Cloud Hospital where volunteers sit with dying patients who do not have family or friends to be with them as they are dying.

Lucia Castelli, MD

Graduated in Medicine and Surgery in 1981, specializing in pediatrics, nutrition sciences, and masters in health education. From 1984 to 1990, a family pediatrician in Milan. From 1986 to 2016, hospital pediatrician at the Melegnano Hospital. From 1994 to 2018, she worked in developing countries (Africa, Est Europe, Middle East) as coordinator of programs for children in especially difficult circumstances (war-traumatized children, child soldiers, HOV/AIDS affected children..) for the non-governmental organization AVSI. The programs were funded and worked out with UN agencies like UNICEF, USAID.

Olivier Cattin, MD

Dr. Olivier Cattin is a 59 years old French physician qualified in Tropical Medicine. He initially started his career as a GP in France and moved after a few years to Australia to complete his studies of a master’s degree in medical sciences. After he graduated he moved to Vietnam to manage the Hanoi French Hospital. When they received the index case of SARS from Hong Kong, he requested the support of Dr. Carlo Urbani who tragically passed away a few weeks later. He has since moved to Indonesia, and Laos and has now been working for the last 17 years in Myanmar where he manages a primary care clinic in Yangon.

Filippo Ciantia, MD

Dr. Filippo Ciantia graduated as Medical Doctor at the University of Milan in 1979, where he also specialized in Public Health (1982) and in Tropical Medicine (1988). Since 1980, with his wife Dr Luciana Bassani, and their 8 children, he lived in Uganda. From 1980 to 1989 he worked in several capacities in the northern district of Kitgum. For the first 4 years, he operated for the NGO CUAMM. Later he was UNICEF PHC Project Officer from 1993 to 1995. From 1996 to 2009 he was the regional representative of the NGO AVSI in the Great Lakes region, promoting and implementing emergency, rehabilitation, and development projects in several sectors, including agriculture, health, nutrition and HIV/AIDS, water and sanitation education. He has published scientific articles for specialized magazines on tropical medicine and HIV/AIDS. From July 2009 up to March 2016, he worked with the company Expo 2015 in the International Affairs Division. As Director, he managed the Cluster Thematic Spaces Project (involving 81 countries, 2 Intergovernmental Organisations, and 2 civil society participants) being responsible for the Programme of Assistance for the participation of 69 Developing Countries in Expo Milano 2015.

From May 2016 to March 2017, he was the Chief Executive Officer of Kalongo Hospital (Dr. Ambrosoli Memorial Hospital) in northern Uganda. On the 1st of June 2017, he begins his services as Director General of the Banco Farmaceutico Foundation in Milan, Italy

Edward Creagan, MD

Dr. Edward Creagan is a cancer specialist who practiced at Mayo Clinic for more than forty Minnesota winters until he transitioned from active clinical practice in late 2018. He was the first Mayo Clinic consultant board certified in hospice and palliative medicine. He was named Outstanding Educator by the Mayo Clinic School of Continuing Medical Education and has received the Distinguished Mayo Clinician Award—Mayo Clinic’s highest honor. He completed an elected term as President of the Mayo Staff.

 Dr. Creagan received his medical training at New York Medical College and earned graduate degrees in internal medicine and oncology at the University of Michigan and the National Cancer Institute before joining the staff at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. 

 In 2015, he received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor for contributions of descendants of immigrants. He is the author of over 500 scientific papers and has given more than 1,000 presentations throughout the world, including his home state of New Jersey. 

He is the author of the triple award-winning book, now revised with information on COVID and telemedicine, called How Not to Be My Patient: A Physician’s Secrets for Staying Healthy and Surviving Any Diagnosis. His book about death and dying is titled Farewell and provides answers to the vital end-of-life questions patients and families ask.  This book has recently been translated into Mandarin.

Each of these books has been best Sellers on Amazon. Dr. Creagan blogs regularly on his website, www.AskDoctorEd.com, and posts daily on Instagram. Dr. Creagan in his wife, Peggy Menzel, understand the importance of fitness and have completed 26 marathons between them.

Yaroslav Diakunchak, MD

Yaroslav Diakunchak, MD. Family physician from Brovary, Ukraine, at the Brovary municipal Primary Health Care Centre, Kyiv region, Ukraine. He has been a speaker at International Forums on Quality and Safety in Healthcare, Gothenburg, Sweden: “Medicine in Ukraine at war: keeping resilience while delivering emergency disaster response.” He will recount the first-hand experience of utilizing AI as an aid to patient care during the time of war.

Jacob Goodwin, MD

Jacob Goodwin is a neurology resident at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, where he lives with his wife and 4 children. He earned his medical degree at the University of Minnesota in 2020. After residency, he will complete a fellowship in electromyography at the Mayo Clinic and plans to eventually practice general community neurology in Minnesota. 

Basem S. Goueli, MD

 Dr. Goueli has directed three independent cancer institutes, collectively representing 17 hospitals and 12 cancer centers. He is a hematologist and medical oncologist who has been the principal institutional investigator on nearly 100 clinical trials involving breast cancer, myeloma, prostate cancer, lung cancer, melanoma, ovarian cancer, head and neck cancer, myelodysplastic syndrome, CLL, DLBCL, esophageal cancer, etc. He was on three papers published in The New England Journal of Medicine (prostate cancer, chronic neutrophilic leukemia, lung cancer) and two in Lancet (Shingles vaccine and head and neck cancer). He is board certified in hematology, medical oncology, internal medicine, and artificial intelligence in medicine.

His training background includes:
MD: Mayo Clinic Medical College
Ph.D. in biochemistry: Mayo Clinic Medical College
MBA: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Internal Medicine Residency: George Washington University Hospital with four months at the NIH
Hematology/Oncology Clinical Fellowship: Stanford University Hospital
Biochemistry Post-Doctoral Fellowship: Stanford University Hospital
MIT Xpro Course Certificate: Designing Artificial Intelligence Products
MIT Xpro: Course Certificate: Robotics Essentials
MIT Xpro: Course Certificate: Drug and Medical Device Development
MIT Professional Education Course Certificate: Applied Data Science Bootcamp
Great Learning Course Certificate: Deep Learning in Natural Language Processing

Dr. Goueli is a true precision medicine expert and is world-class at treating essentially all types of cancer.  He is the CEO and Founder of several companies, including Cancer Clarity LLC, CancerLight LLC, and Buffalo Regional Cancer Medical Care PLLC (BRCMC), which are part of the Revolution Cancer LLC Ecosystem. The entire ecosystem, including BRCMC, is slated to launch in 2023 and aspires to disrupt the clinical trial, patient education, and clinical care forums. Aside from building his companies, Dr. Goueli is a national medical director for 3 phase 1 Xbiotech clinical trials (pancreatic cancer), consults for numerous other pharmaceutical companies, and sees patients full-time in the clinic as a hematologist/medical oncologist.

 Dr. Goueli has a significant social media following and presence.  You can find free videos he does for patients and their loved ones at revolutioncancer.com.  The talks he gives for medical personnel can be seen at rcimtb.com.  Dr. Goueli’s Revolution Cancer youtube.com channel houses numerous videos for patients and their loved ones. The editorial series he writes, “The Insider’s Guide to Translational Medicine,” can be seen at biopharmatrend.com.

Leona Hernandez, RN

Leona Hernandez is a wife, mother, ICU nurse, and author of the book Travel Nurse. She was born and raised in St. Paul, MN, and earned her BSN from the University of Minnesota School of Nursing. For five years, she cared for children in the Pediatric ICU at the University of Minnesota Masonic Children's Hospital, where she was the first recipient of the patient-nominated Masonic Mission Award for providing exceptional care to children and families. She went on to work as an RN Care Coordinator with the University of Minnesota Physicians in a pediatric pulmonary specialty clinic. When the Covid-19 pandemic began, she was home full-time with her children. Answering the call for more ICU staff, she signed up to be a travel nurse and cared for adults battling Covid in New York City, Miami, and California. She wrote Travel Nurse with her husband, Tony, to give a voice to the voiceless and to share the lessons she learned in Covid ICUs. Leona, her husband, and four children currently reside in Florida. 

Christopher Ice, MD

Christopher P. Ice is the CEO & Founder of Ice Executive Coaching & Consulting based in Winter Park, FL. He has led numerous organizations in the for-profit and non-profit sectors with revenues as high as $100M and assets over $280M. He has owned his own healthcare company and was CEO of Catholic Charities of Kansas City-St. Joseph and, most recently, the President and CEO of Ave Maria University in Florida. In addition, Chris has consulted with private equity firms across the country with revenues in excess of $20B and now shares his vast experience of successfully helping organizations through Ice Executive Coaching & Consulting. Chris’ multitude of experiences in multiple industries—insurance, higher education, hospice, non-profit, and consultation—have helped him fine-tune a leadership style that gets results, empowers the people, and goes above and beyond the bottom line bringing record ROI’s to each organization he serves.

While Christopher was serving as the president of Ave Maria University in Florida, he successfully led the University through the global pandemic, even in the midst of his own major personal tragedy with the death of his wife with four children still at home. As president, he and his team established new University fundraising records with a 140% increase over the best year in school history. He also established a new record for enrollment while increasing retention to record highs and reducing the overall tuition discount rate. He received recognition as one of The Naples Top 100 Most Influential Business Leaders in 2021, along with a special commendation from the town of Ave Maria in recognition of outstanding service to the community and the university.

Chris shares his experiences in his newly published book, “Walking the Leadership Tightrope: How to Balance Career and Family through the Chaos of Crisis.” Chris currently serves as a volunteer on multiple boards, including as co-founder of the Franciscan University Business Department Advisory Board, a founding board member of Growth through Grief for Widowers and the Young Catholic Professionals of Orlando. On a personal note, Chris still holds the NAIA Baseball Career Batting Average record with a .480 career average while in college. He is also the proud father of 7 children and grandfather of 2.

David T. Jones, MD

David T. Jones, M.D., is a consultant and serves as director of artificial intelligence in the Department of Neurology at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Dr. Jones is a member of the Mayo Clinic Google Advisory Board. He joined the staff of Mayo Clinic in 2014, and holds the academic rank of assistant professor of neurology and radiology, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science.

Dr. Jones earned his B.S. in chemistry with a minor in physics and B.A. in psychology with a minor in theater arts, both magna cum laude, from Rockhurst University, Kansas City, Missouri. He completed an undergraduate research fellowship at Stowers Institute for Medical Research. He earned his M.D. at Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C., where he also completed a medical internship. He subsequently completed a residency in neurology, a research fellowship in neuroimaging, and a fellowship in behavioral neurology at Mayo Clinic School of Graduate Medical Education. Dr. Jones’ clinical interests are behavioral neurology and network-based neurodegeneration as well as multimodal neuroimaging. His research focus includes developing methods to derive robust metrics of brain connectivity and evaluate their potential as biomarkers in neurodegenerative diseases; formulating a theoretical framework and computational tools to interpret large-scale brain dynamics observed in functional MRI; and executive dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease. His research is funded by the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, among others. His clinical and research endeavors inform his leadership of the Neurology Artificial Intelligence Program, composed of cross-disciplinary teams of experts in clinical neurology, data science, and software engineering. This team is working to transform neurological care with equitable, high quality, affordable, and widely accessible care models through validated institutional and departmental technology platforms. Dr. Jones also has many active internal and external collaborations with investigators worldwide, including at the University of Minnesota to translate advances made by the Human Connectome Project to measure brain networks during aging and in Alzheimer’s disease. He has authored many journal articles, book chapters, abstracts and other written publications.

In addition to his clinical and research activities, Dr. Jones is active in education and provides mentorship to neurology residents and fellows. He also serves on the board of the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative and holds professional memberships in the American Academy of Neurology, the American Neurological Academy, and the International Society to Advance Alzheimer’s Research and Treatment, among others.

Caroline Lamoutte, MS

Caroline Lamoutte is a fourth-year medical student at the University of Florida in Gainesville and is in the process of applying to OBGYN residencies. She is currently interested in general practice, maternal-fetal medicine, and urogynecology subspecialties and is excited to see what the next years of training have in store. Inspired by surgeon Enzo Piccinini, she hopes to never stop practicing medicine with the intensity and full-heartedness it deserves. 

David Loxterkamp, MD

David Loxterkamp lives on the coast of Maine, where he practiced family medicine for 35 years. He has authored two books, A Measure of My Days: The Journal of a Country Doctor (1997) and What Matters in Medicine: Lessons from a Life in Primary Care (2013), as well as journal articles that have appeared in JAMA, the BMJ, Annals of Family Medicine, and elsewhere. His work was featured in a 1998 LIFE Magazine photo essay, and a 2015 PBS documentary called “Rx: The Quiet Revolution” by award-winning director David Grubin. After three years on faculty at the Northern Light Family Medicine Residency Program in Bangor, Maine, he has returned to general practice. Dr. Loxterkamp’s outside interests include running, gardening, a cappella choral singing, and local architecture.

Frances McCarthy, RN

Fran McCarthy has been a nurse for over 30 years. She was a bedside NICU nurse for 28 years, manager of the NICU and Pediatrics at St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Manhattan for two years, and is currently the Clinical Coordinator of the Neonatal Comfort Care Program at New York Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, working under the direction of Dr. Elvira Parravicini. Fran received her BSN from Fairleigh Dickinson University and her Master of Science as a Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner from Columbia University in 1998. She has always been interested in the psychological, emotional, and spiritual perspective of nursing care in conjunction with clinical care. She has taught about bereavement care and support to new staff in the NICU core course and has lectured about Neonatal Comfort Care nationally and abroad. She is the clinical coordinator of the neonatal comfort care program at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.  

Dominique Monlezun, MD

Dominique J. Monlezun, MD, Ph.D., Ph.D., MPH is the world’s first triple doctorate-trained physician-data scientist and AI (artificial intelligence) ethicist. He earned his first AI-focused Ph.D. in Global Health Management & Policy and his second Ph.D. in Bioethics (recognized by Microsoft as producing the world’s top AI ethics doctoral dissertation). He serves as a Professor of Bioethics for two United Nations-affiliated universities, a Professor (Adjunct Asst.) of Cardiology for two American academic medical centers, and the Principal Investigator and Senior Data Scientist-Biostatistician for over 50 research studies associated with Harvard University, the National Institutes of Health, and the European Union, among others. He has authored over 400 peer-reviewed manuscripts, chapters, and conference presentations, in addition to the first four comprehensive AI textbooks on healthcare systems, global public health, bioethics, and multicultural metaphysics. He created BAM-PS and ML-PSr AI-statistics and Personalist Social Contract ethics after co-founding the preventive cardiology field of Culinary Medicine. He has provided medical care for thousands of immigrant, incarcerated, and underserved patients.

Tod Worner, MD

Tod Worner is a practicing physician with Abbott Northwestern General Medical Associates, where he serves as Director of Outpatient Education for Abbott Northwestern’s Internal Medicine Residency Program. He is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School, serving as head preceptor for the internal medicine rotation Primary Care & Beyond. He lectures on Medicine & Literature, is currently offering the medical school rotation “The Wisdom of Literature in a Time of Plague,” & is preparing a forthcoming seminar on Medicine & Literature for the University of Lisbon Medical School in Portugal. He is a past recipient of the Exceptional Primary Care Community Faculty Teaching Award & the Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine Award. Additionally, Tod is an adjunct professor at St. John’s University, where he offers his class “The Art of Healing” to pre-professional undergrads.

Tod serves as Fellow & Managing Editor of Bishop Robert Barron’s Evangelization & Culture, the Journal of the Word on Fire Institute, and the Host of The Evangelization & Culture Podcast. He is a writer published in the New York Post, National Review, Law & Liberty, Linacre Quarterly, Aleteia, the National Catholic Register, and numerous other publications. Mostly, Tod is a proud husband & father delighted to be constantly outsmarted by his two teenage daughters.