Envisioning Equity in Eye Care Keynotes
Opening Keynote
Lessons from the Health Equity COVID-19 Task Force
Marcella Nunez-Smith, MD, MHS
Associate Dean for Health Equity Research
Yale School of Medicine
Marcella Nunez-Smith, MD, MHS, is Associate Dean for Health Equity Research; C.N.H Long Professor of Medicine, Public Health, and Management; and Director of the Equity Research and Innovation Center at Yale.
Her research focuses on health and healthcare equity for marginalized populations with an emphasis on the social and structural determinants of health, the influence of healthcare systems on health disparities, and the advancement of community-academic partnered scholarship.
Nunez-Smith served as senior advisor to the White House COVID-19 Response Team and chair of the Presidential COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force, co-chair of the Biden-Harris Transition COVID-19 Advisory Board and chair of the governor’s ReOpen CT Advisory Group Community Committee.
An elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, she attended Jefferson Medical College, did her residency at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and fellowship at the Yale Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program.
Closing Keynote Panel
Public health and disparities research - A NIH/NEI strategic area of emphasis
Michael F. Chiang, MD
Director of National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Michael F. Chiang is Director of the National Eye Institute at the National Institutes of Health.
His clinical practice focuses on pediatric ophthalmology and strabismus, and he is board-certified in clinical informatics. His research develops and applies biomedical informatics methods to clinical ophthalmology in areas such as retinopathy of prematurity (ROP), telehealth, artificial intelligence, clinical information systems, data science, and genotype-phenotype correlation. He is an adjunct investigator at the National Library of Medicine, and his group has published over 250 peer-reviewed papers and developed an assistive artificial intelligence system for ROP that received Breakthrough Status from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Chiang began at NIH in November 2020. He serves as co-chair of a trans-NIH working group for high value data asset sustainability, chair of a trans-NIH clinical trials infrastructure working group, co-chair of a trans-NIH medical imaging working group, co-chair of the NIH AIM-AHEAD advisory committee, and co-chair of the NIH Common Fund Bridge2AI program. He is also a member of the NIH scientific data council.
Chiang currently serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association and is associate editor of the textbook Biomedical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care and Biomedicine. He has previously served as an associate editor for Journal of the American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus and on the editorial boards for Ophthalmology, Ophthalmology Retina and for Asia-Pacific Journal of Ophthalmology.
Chiang received his MD from Harvard Medical School and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, and his MA in Biomedical Informatics from Columbia University. He completed residency and pediatric ophthalmology fellowship training at the Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute.
Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable, MD
Director of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD)
Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable, MD, is Director of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He oversees NIMHD’s annual budget to advance the science of minority health and health disparities research.
Since joining NIMHD in September 2015, Dr. Pérez-Stable has been cultivating the Institute’s position on the cutting edge of the science of minority health and health disparities. Through this effort, the Institute has produced a collection of resources that guide and facilitate the conduct of research to promote health equity.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Pérez-Stable has positioned NIMHD at the forefront of the research response to COVID-19 health disparities by co-chairing three major new NIH-wide research programs and collaborating with other NIH institutes and centers. The two most prominent NIH-wide programs that have been established to promote health equity by reducing COVID-19 associated morbidity and mortality disparities experienced by underserved and vulnerable communities are the Community Engagement Alliance (CEAL) Against COVID-19 Disparities and the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics for Underserved Populations (RADx-UP) initiatives. In October 2021, Pérez-Stable was named co-recipient of the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal (Sammies) and was awarded the COVID-19 Response Medal for his extraordinary role in fighting the pandemic in communities of color.
Pérez-Stable’s research interests have centered on improving the health of racial and ethnic minorities through effective prevention interventions, understanding underlying causes of health disparities, and advancing patient-centered care for underserved populations. Recognized as a leader in Latino health care and disparities research, he has published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers and was continuously funded by NIH grants for 30 years prior to becoming NIMHD Director.
Pérez-Stable is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine) of the National Academy of Science, and the American Society of Clinical Investigation. He earned his MD from the University of Miami, then completed his primary care internal medicine residency and a research fellowship in general internal medicine at Univcersity of California San Francisco.
