Meet the Speakers

Dr. Amelia Burke-Garcia is a seasoned health communications professional with 20 years of experience in health communication program planning, implementation, and evaluation. At NORC, she leads the organization's Digital Strategy and Outreach Program Area and is part of the leadership team for NORC’s health communication science practice. In these roles, she designs and implements strategies that leverage the science of communication (in particular, digital media) to influence behavior. Over the course of her career, Dr. Burke-Garcia has spearheaded some of the most innovative communication programs and studies on a variety of health topics. Since 2020, she has been overseeing the award-winning How Right Now/Que Hacer Ahora campaign, which aims to increase people’s ability to cope and be resilient. Other prior work has included acting as director for CDC’s National Influenza Vaccination Campaign. She also has worked with MeetUp groups and the Waze mobile application to move people to action around flu vaccination and HIV testing, respectively. Finally, she has been examining the role of influencers in health communication and research for more than a decade and has recently expanded this work to look at the role of AI in opinion leadership. Dr. Burke-Garcia is the author of the books, Influencing Health: A Comprehensive Guide to Working with Social Media Influencers, and Communicating Through a Pandemic: A Chronicle of Experiences, Lessons Learned, and a Vision for the Future. She has been highlighted by the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, for her work in honor of Women’s History Month and has been named to VeryWellHealth.com’s list of 10 Modern Female Innovators Shaking Up Health Care. She is a Founding Member of the Society for Health Communication, a member of the Council for Quality Health Communication, and sits on the Boards of Directors for the non-profits, Vaccinate Your Family and the Global Alliance for Behavioral Health and Social Justice. She earned her bachelor’s degree in International Development Studies and Humanistic Studies from McGill University, her master’s degree in Communication, Culture and Technology from Georgetown University, and her PhD in Communication from George Mason University.

Catalina (Cata) is the Global Director of Corporate Affairs at Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev) and Board Director of the AB InBev Foundation. Born and raised in Colombia, Cata graduated from the Javeriana University in Bogotá and has worked with several multinational companies across different industries. Cata currently leads the AB InBev Global Corporate Affairs team, with most of her work centered on expanding and improving AB InBev’s reputation and sustainability (ESG) strategy. This includes a special focus on social impact, community affairs, social norms marketing, and partnerships across five zones; she also manages AB InBev’s partnership with the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), aimed at improving road safety globally. She directs the company’s global responsible drinking strategy. Catalina was selected as one of the 100 international “Leaders of the Next Generation” as a member of the Stars not-for-profit organization. She co-authored the “How business can drive inclusive growth and development” report published by Harvard Kennedy School and 2017’s U.S. Top Women in PR winner. She has been a member of several global boards such as IBM Women’s Diversity Network Group, Women for Colombia Foundation, Inversor Impact Investing Fund, The Colombian Center for Social Responsibility (CCRE), Regional Latin America Center of the private sector to support the UN SDGs (CR/SP), Microverse, and currently serves as a board member of the Social Marketing Association of North America (SMANA) and member of the Board of Advisors of Business for Impact at Georgetown University.

Dr. Soskin Hicks is a Stanford-trained pediatrician who occupies a unique position at the nexus of clinical medicine and innovative technology. She has 15 years of clinical experience and is deeply committed to patient care as well as the advancement of digital strategies for health communication. In her practice, she has built a reputation for effectively communicating complex medical concepts to patients and families, enhancing both trust and health literacy. As an independent consultant, Dr. Soskin Hicks applies her medical and health communication expertise to aid in the development of digital health solutions that prioritize accuracy and public health impact. Her work focuses on bridging the gap between clinical medicine and digital health information, and she brings a unique blend of knowledge in digital and AI-focused health communication solutions. She has contributed to large-scale international health initiatives for Medcase at Google, steering aspects of content moderation to combat misinformation in the digital sphere. Recognized for her strategic approach to health communication, Dr. Soskin Hicks is currently consulting for prominent AI companies, offering fresh insights into policy and strategy that align ethical standards and public health objectives with the growing need for individualized, empathetic communication. Her professional ethos is grounded in a commitment to truth, which she believes evolves through continuous learning and adaptation in both medicine and technology. Dr. Soskin Hicks is a member of The Council for Quality Health Communication, supported by The O’Neill Institute for Global Health Law at Georgetown, and is an advisor for the Stanford Pediatrics Digital Health Consortium.

As rector of the Institute for Transgenerational Studies (IET) Raquel has  worked to understand the expression of the past in the present, and translate it into teaching programs, didactics, methodology, and the search for transgenerationality theorists.

In1997, she began studying the Family Constellations method; In 1999 traveled internationally to learn more across three hundred days of training with the most important professionals.

Raquel founded the Bert Hellinger Institute of Mexico (1999-2008), today IBH; as well   as the National Center for Family and Trans-systemic Constellations AC, CONFamilias, and the Institute of Transgenerational Studies. They have been recognized by the Ministry of Public Education (SEP) in higher education since 2005.

Her passion for knowledge fostered over twenty years of psychology, psychoanalysis, systemic family and couple therapy has enriched her understanding of the field's impact and challenges it faces. 

Ilze Melngailis’ career has focused on applying business approaches to international development – accelerating gains in health, gender equality and sustainability. She leads the Business Council for the UN (BCUN) and Private Sector Engagement at the United Nations Foundation, where she connects the business sector with UN priorities at both policy and programmatic levels, and promotes companies’ participation in the UN’s historic Sustainable Development Goals.  She also develops innovative corporate partnerships with the UN and other partners that help elevate the impact of each sector’s ability to drive progress, in issues such as maternal health and anti-microbial resistance.  Previously, Ilze developed and managed behavior change communications programs, conducted market analyses to seed new private label social marketing brands, and spearheaded public-private partnerships in over 30 developing and emerging-market countries through leadership positions at GBCHealth where she was Vice President, Partnerships and Impact Initiatives, and prior roles at the USAID-funded ACQUIRE Project at EngenderHealth, International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), and consulting roles for the UN and other clients.  Her most transformative and proud professional achievement came early, when following the collapse of the Soviet Union she relocated to her father’s homeland and founded and ran Latvia’s Association for Family Planning and Sexual Health.  There she wrote the first-ever brochure on contraception in the Latvian language, founded the region’s first youth organization (replicated throughout the region) and worked with social marketing experts at IPPF and two German multinational companies to create new brands of youth-focused condoms and oral contraceptives.  The condoms became the #1 selling brand in several Eastern European countries, surpassing the global commercial giants’ brands.  Since then she’s been hooked on the power of connecting corporate capabilities and reach with non-profit goals.  She is an experienced speaker and moderator, is dual native speaker of English and Latvian and speaks conversational French and Spanish.  Ilze is also a founding board member of Operation Fistula.  She earned her Bachelor’s degree at McGill University and a Master’s degree in Business Administration with academic distinction from Yale University School of Management. 

Kelsey McManus is a Director on the Health Communication team at HRiA. She supports a wide portfolio of projects, focusing on digital media, branding, marketing, and communications. Before joining HRiA, she worked as the Program Director for the #GoodIsWining social media campaign for the Pope’s visit to the U.S. Previously, Ms. McManus was a middle school and high school math teacher in the Chicago. Ms. McManus is passionate about politics and education.

Professor Sharyn Rundle-Thiele is the Founding Director, Social Marketing @ Griffith and Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Social Marketing. Drawing on her commercial marketing background Sharyn’s research focuses on applying marketing to benefit people and the planet.

Sharyn wants to see marketing applied more often. Marketing is the only voluntary approach that can be applied to change people’s behaviour.

Bringing people with you is the ONLY way to go!

Sharyn is committed to:

1. Building social marketing capacity through training
2. Advancing scientific understanding so that we know what works, when, where and why
3. Delivering changes to benefit people and the planet

Dr. Robert (Rob) Hammond is a practitioner-scholar and go-to-market expert with over 30 years of global leadership experience in enterprise strategy, product management, sales, and engineering. He has been at the epicenter of innovation throughout his career, working with both start-ups and mature companies. He has worked at some of the world’s most iconic global companies including Microsoft, Motorola, Sprint, and General Dynamics. Dr. Hammond is the author of “Avoiding the Carnage: A Guidebook through Sales Transformation” and academic publications in sales, sales education, corporate strategy, emotional artificial intelligence, and affective computing.

Today, Dr. Hammond is the Director of the Center for Marketing and Sales Innovation at the University of South Florida. In addition to his role as the center’s director, he oversees the sales program, two research laboratories, and teaches strategy in the doctorate program. Dr. Hammond is also the managing partner of RH Insights LLC, a business strategy and personal development firm, a corporate board member, guest lecturer, member of the National Academy of Inventors and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He holds a Doctor of Business Administration, Master of Business Administration, Master of Science in Engineering, Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, and five patents.

For over four decades, Dr. Doug McKenzie-Mohr has worked to incorporate scientific knowledge on behavior change into the design and delivery of environmental programs. He founded community-based social marketing, a framework for developing environmental behavior change programs, which is now used globally. Doug is the author/co-author of three books on community-based social marketing — one of which, "Fostering Sustainable Behavior," has been recommended by Time Magazine and has become requisite reading for those who deliver environmental programs.   His work has been featured in the New York Times, and he is the recipient of the American Psychological Association's inaugural award for innovation in environmental psychology, the World Social Marketing Conference's inaugural award for contributions to the field of social marketing, and he is a B.F. Skinner distinguished lecturer. More than 75,000 program managers have attended his workshops. Doug is a former Professor of Psychology and is currently an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria and Royal Roads University in Victoria, Canada.

Nancy Lee has more than 30 years of professional marketing experience, with special expertise in Social Marketing.  She is an adjunct faculty member at the University of Washington and the University of South Florida. She conducts seminars and workshops on social marketing and marketing in the public sector and has participated in the development of more than 100 social marketing campaigns.She has been a guest lecturer at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, the Health Promotion Board in Singapore, Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia, National University of Ireland in Galway, Yale, and Oxford University. She has conducted social marketing workshops for more than 5,000 public sector employees involved in developing public behavior change campaigns.  She has delivered more than 200 social marketing trainings, most recently in Jordan for USAID, Canada for the Ministry of Health, and in Seattle for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  She has been a keynote speaker on social marketing at conferences including ones addressing Public Health, Injury Prevention, Environmental Protection and Poverty Reduction. Nancy is a member of Rotary and the City of Mercer Island's Green Ribbon Commission, has been a volunteer member of the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch Advisory Committee, and the Mercer Island School District's Advisory Committee.

Jeff French is a recognised global leader in the application of behaviour change and social marketing. Jeff has extensive experience of developing leading and evaluating behaviour change projects, social marketing programmes and the development of communication strategies at international, national, regional and local level.

With over 30 years experience at the interface between government, public, private and NGO sectors Jeff has a broad practical and theoretical understanding of national and international health and social development issues.

Jeff and has published over 70 chapters, articles and books in the fields of behaviour change, social marketing, community development, health promotion and communications. Jeff is a visiting professor at Brunel University and Brighton University and a Fellow at Kings College University London and teaches at four other Universities in the UK.

Jeff was the Director of Communication and Policy at the Health Development Agency for five years from 2000 – 2005. In March 2005 From July 2006 through to July 2009 Jeff set up and managed the National Social Marketing Centre for England. In August 2009 Jeff became the Chief Executive of Strategic Social Marketing Ltd.

Strategic Social Marketing works with clients from all over the world in the private, NGO and public sector on the development and evaluation of social behaviour change programmes. Strategic Social Marketing also provides consultancy services to some of the world’s biggest corporate communications and research companies.

Jeff continues to act as the principle adviser to the National Social Marketing Centre and the Department of Health behaviour Change and Social Marketing policy team. Jeff also acts as an advisor to a number of national policy committees, the EUCDC Knowledge and Resource Centre in Health Communication project, and is a member of the organising committee of the Global Social Marketer’s network. Jeff is a member of the editorial Boards of the International Review on Public and Nonprofit Marketing and the Journal of Social Marketing.

Jeff is Conference Chair of the World Social Marketing Conference. His new book ‘Social Marketing and Public Health Theory and Practice’, published by Oxford University Press is now available. Jeff is also the author of the NSMC’s new guide to procuring and managing the delivery of social marketing service.

Simona C. Kwon, DrPH, MPH is an associate professor, director of the Section for Health Equity, and the vice chair for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Department of Population Health at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Dr. Kwon is a socio-behavioral epidemiologist with extensive experience in the use of, among other methods, community-based participatory research, mixed methods approaches, health communication, dissemination and implementation science, and multidisciplinary teams to address community-level health disparities. Dr. Kwon employs a social determinants of health framework to implement and evaluate evidence-based strategies in community settings, focusing on cultural relevance and impact and identifying effective channels through which to translate research into practice.

Tosheena Nez, MPH is a Diné (Navajo) multicultural communication specialist with expertise in public health emphasizing Native American community health at ICF Next. She is Kinyaa'aaníí (towering house clan). She grew up in the Western Agency of the Navajo Nation, in Northern Arizona. She has 5 years of experience in health education, health promotion, community engagement, and partnership development with the Navajo Nation and other tribal communities. Her experience is centered on community outreach and engagement, and culturally sustaining materials development to support healthy lifestyle practices in Native communities. Her work has focused on COVID-19, diabetes, substance use disorder, commercial tobacco cessation, and environmental justice. She earned her Bachelor of Art degree in Public Health Policy from the University of California, Irvine, and her Master of Public Health degree from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Claudia Parvanta, PhD, joined USF as Professor, College of Public Health, and Director of the Florida Prevention Research Center, in 2017. As an anthropologist working in social marketing, she examines how culture affects health behavior as well as culturally appropriate ways to promote interventions. She recently completed a study for the Florida Department of Health examining how individuals respond to anti-smoking public service announcements using facial expression analysis—a neuromarketing tool among several she is testing through her collaboration with the Muma College of Business Center for Sales and Marketing Innovation. Dr. Parvanta is using this and Community Based Prevention Marketing to help develop and test messaging about COVID-19 for vulnerable populations across the US as part of the National Coronavirus Resilience Network, led by the Morehouse School of Medicine and funded by the Office of Minority Health. With the team at the FPRC, she is disseminating results from the Center’s previous project funded by CDC promoting colorectal cancer screening to underserved populations. She recently began an assignment for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) to assist the Center in COVID-related communications for the workplace.

Before joining USF, (2005-17) Dr. Parvanta was the Chair of the Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. From 2000 to 2005, Dr. Parvanta headed the Division of Health Communication at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and helped the agency expand its emergency communication capacity to respond to the 9/11 attacks, anthrax, and SARS. When not in government or academia, Dr. Parvanta has designed, managed, or evaluated programs, or offered capacity-building training in more than 25 countries. Her early days were spent working with the Los Angeles Public Health Foundation WIC program as their ‘consulting anthropologist’ and with Porter/Novelli, a leading social marketing company.  

Dr. Parvanta has received grants from the CDC, the Office of Minority Health, the Florida and Pennsylvania Departments of Health, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, among others. Her publications appear in peer-reviewed journals, and she is the lead author on three APHA endorsed textbooks in health communication.