BOARD OF DIRECTORS
KAREN PAK OPPENHEIMER, MS, MPH
Strategy and operations adviser for philanthropic, social enterprise and nonprofit organizationsKaren is a strategy and operations adviser for philanthropic, social enterprise and nonprofit organizations, currently focusing on climate action and the COVID-19 pandemic response.
She has experience in private, public and non-profit sectors and is currently an angel investor in social enterprises in emerging markets and serves on multiple nonprofit organization boards. She spent most of the last decade leading organizations that bring health services to rural India and East Africa through technology innovations and market-based approaches. Karen holds a bachelor of science in chemical engineering from Johns Hopkins University, a master of science in biotechnology from Northwestern University, and a master of public health from the University of California, Berkeley.
GOPI GOPALAKRISHNAN
Founder & President - World Health PartnersGopi has over 25 years of experience in implementing large-scale service-delivery programs in low-resource settings. He founded Janani, a non-profit entity that accounts for more than 20% of family planning in the state of Bihar. Janani won national and international acclaim for its innovative and creative management, which enabled the program to serve some of the poorest communities in the world on a sustainable basis. Specializing in public–private partnerships, Gopi is an expert in leveraging private sector resources to complement public sector service provision. He has been a member of India’s Population Commission and has advised the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and numerous national and international organizations on large-scale cost-effective service delivery.
He has served on the global technical advisory board of the International Finance Corporation, and currently is on the Advisory Group on Community Action (AGCA) of India’s National Rural Health Mission and the Global Coalition against Tuberculosis. Gopi was the Director of International Programs of DKT International and received a prestigious civilian honour from the Government of Vietnam for his work as the Country Director of DKT International in Hanoi. In 2013, Gopi received two prestigious awards for Social Entrepreneurship from the Skoll Foundation and Schwab Foundation and is an Ashoka Fellow.
PETER SMALL
Chief Medical Officer – HYFE AIDr. Peter Small is a highly respected and well-known Global Health leader with a long track record of developing and delivering innovative solutions to improve health. He was a medical resident and chief medical resident at UCSF during the dawn of the HIV epidemic. He subsequently moved to Stanford where he completed an Infectious Disease fellowship and spent about a decade on the faculty of Stanford’s Infectious Disease Division. During these years, he published pioneering molecular epidemiological papers that helped to shape the public health response to the resurgence of tuberculosis and seminal papers on mycobacterial genomics.
In 2002 he was one of the early employees of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation where he developed their tuberculosis strategy, built the foundation’s core partnerships and country programs, hired and managed the Foundation’s TB team and oversaw a large portfolio of vaccine, drug and diagnostic product development and deployment activities. These efforts were critical in products such as Cepheid’s GeneXpert, GSK’s TB vaccine and the drug regimen recently approved by the FDA for drug resistant TB. In 2011, he relocated to India where he established the foundation’s tuberculosis program in India. In 2015 he joined Stony Brook University as the Founding Director of the University-wide Global Health Institute focused on the use of drones and other technology to deliver health care in remote Madagascar and Nepal. He served for two years as a Founding Fellow at the Rockefeller foundation focused on how technology can improve health in low-to-middle income countries and as the medical lead for Bill Gates’ design build firm, Global Good/Global Health Labs.