Imanni Sheppard, PhD
Thursday, January 9, 2025 | 8:30 a.m. EST
Dr. Sheppard is the Co-Director of the Bioethics and Medical Humanities curricular thread at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, where she is also an Assistant Professor and Medical Education Facilitator. She is also the Director of Medical Education and Social Scientific Research at the Medical Humanities and Health Disparities Institute, where she works with community organizations to help build medical educational materials and develop health and wellness programming for sustainability.
In addition, Dr. Sheppard is a member of Xavier University of Louisiana's Community Advisory Board for the College of Pharmacy’s Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities Research and Education, and a former Ambassador for the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC)’s Collaborative for Health Equity: to Act, Research, and Generate Evidence (CHARGE).
Dr. Sheppard is an alumnus of the University of New Orleans and the University of Houston, where she received her Bachelor's degree in Biological Anthropology and her Master's degree in Medical Anthropology, respectively. She continued her education at the University of Texas Medical Branch, where, upon graduation, she became the first African American in the United States with a PhD in Medical Humanities.
Her scholarly works include authorship of Health, Healing, and Hurricane Katrina: A Critical Analysis of Psychosomatic Illness in Survivors; Embodied Trauma and the Dissociation of the Self in Dark Denials and Domestic Violence; and serving as researcher and narrator for the World Health Organization's (WHO) Health for All Short List film selection: Truth Be Told New Orleans: Righteous Eruption After the Storm. She has been a guest on NPR/Illinois Public Radio and a guest panelist on SiriusXM radio show on community medicine. Additionally, she presented Medical Inequity and Health Disparities as Thanatopolitics: The Socio-medical Impact of Intergenerational Racialization at the Sorbonne University in Paris, France, and Race and Ethnicity at the Intersection of Neoteric Medical Technologies and Technological Development at the United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB)’s Federal Interagency Technical Working Group on Race and Ethnicity Standards (ITWG), White House Proceedings in Washington, DC.
Dr. Sheppard is also an Op-Ed Fellow, a Harvard Macy Institute Fellow, and the author of several journal articles, health impact assessments, health equity reports, and published poems.
Siobhan Conaty, PhD
Friday, January 10, 2025 | 8:30 a.m. EST
Dr. Conaty specializes in applying art history skills to healthcare education. Her work appears in health humanities and medical education journals, including a chapter in Research Methods in Health Humanities (Oxford, 2019), the discipline’s foundational methodologies text. Recent publications in Academic Radiology (Feb. 2024) and the Journal of Health Communication (May 2024) feature collaborations with medical and health professional educators to enhance clinical diagnosis, improve communication skills, and address health disparities.
Dr. Conaty holds a number of Health Humanities leadership positions, including steering committees for the Health Humanities Consortium, the Section on Medicine and the Arts at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and she chairs a national committee on Arts and Health Equity. She is the editor of the Historical Perspectives in Art section of the Journal of Humanities in Rehabilitation (Emory University School of Medicine), was selected as a Medical Humanities Scholar in Residence at Pennsylvania State College of Medicine, and was recently awarded an NEH grant to design a health humanities curriculum at La Salle University.
Damon Centola, PhD
Saturday, January 11, 2025 | 8:00 a.m. EST
Damon Centola is the Elihu Katz Professor of Communication, Sociology and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Director of the Network Dynamics Group and Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.
Damon’s research centers on social networks and behavior change. His work has received numerous scientific awards, including the Goodman Prize for Outstanding Contributions to Sociological Methodology in 2011; the James Coleman Award for Outstanding Research in Rationality and Society in 2017; and the Harrison White Award for Outstanding Scholarly Book in 2019. He was a developer of the NetLogo agent-based modeling environment, and was awarded a U.S. Patent for inventing a method to promote diffusion in online networks. He is a member of the *Sci Foo* community and fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Popular accounts of Damon’s work have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, TIME, The Atlantic, Scientific American and CNN, among other outlets. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the Templeton Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation. Damon’s speaking and consulting clients include Amazon, Apple, Cigna, General Motors, Microsoft, Ben & Jerry’s, the U.S. Army, and the NBA, among others. He is a series editor for Princeton University Press and the author of How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions (PUP 2018), and Change: How to Make Big Things Happen (Little Brown/Spark 2021)