International Advisory Committee
The Sanford F. Kuvin Center for the Study of Infectious and Tropical Diseases at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was established in 1976 and is a leader in vector-borne research. Kuvin Center scientists combine biochemistry, entomology, molecular biology, genetics and immunology to investigate prevalent tropical and infectious diseases, including malaria, leishmaniasis, trypanosomiasis, and helminthic diseases. The mission of the Kuvin Center is to advance research in infectious and tropical diseases and to promote peace through cooperative science. The International Advisory Committee is responsible for stewardship of the Kuvin Center for the Study of Infectious and Tropical Diseases. The Committee does not manage the Center’s day-to-day activities; rather, the Committee serves to promote the mission of the Kuvin Center.
Jeffrey Kuvin (Chair)
Jeffrey Kuvin (Chair) is Professor and Chair, Department of Cardiology, Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra, Chair of Cardiology, North Shore University Hospital and Long Island Jewish Medical Center, and Senior Vice President of Cardiology at Northwell Health. Jeff received his undergraduate degree in Near East / North African Studies from the University of Michigan in 1988. He graduated from Emory University School of Medicine and trained in internal medicine and cardiovascular diseases at Tufts Medical Center. While an attending cardiologist at Tufts, Jeff was the Director of Education and Fellowship Training, Associate Chief of Cardiology, and Associate Chief Medical Officer for Graduate Medical Education. Prior to his move to New York, Jeff was the Chief of Cardiology at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and Professor of Medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College. He serves as a trustee of the American College of Cardiology and is an associate editor for the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Jeff is the son of Sanford and Gabrielle Kuvin, founders of the Kuvin Center, and lives in New York City with his wife, Emily, and their two children.
Daniel Benjamin
Daniel Benjamin is the president of the American Academy in Berlin. Prior to his Academy appointment, Dan was director of the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. Before he arrived at Dartmouth, in 2013, he served as Ambassador-at-Large and Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the US Department of State from 2009-2012. He was a senior fellow in foreign policy studies and director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. He has also been a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a fellow at the United States Institute of Peace. He spent more than five years on the National Security Council staff in the 1990s, where he served first as foreign-policy speechwriter and special assistant to President Bill Clinton and later as director for transnational threats. Dan has written extensively on US foreign policy, terrorism, and international affairs. He is co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror (2002), which was awarded the Arthur Ross Prize of the Council on Foreign Relations and named a 2002 New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post Best Book. He also co-authored The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right (2005), a Washington Post and Financial Times Best Book of the Year and a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, New York Review of Books, Politico, and many other publications. Dan began his career as a journalist and was Germany bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal and Germany correspondent for TIME. He received a master’s degree from Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a bachelor’s degree from Harvard.
Anne Blumberg
Anne Blumberg worked for the Division of Health Care Policy and Finance in Massachusetts and as a program coordinator in clinical trials at Merck and Company in New Jersey. She currently serves on the Presidential Advisory Board of the Baruch S. Blumberg Institute. Anne has a degree in physical anthropology from Barnard College and an MPH from Boston University School of Public Health. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts with her husband and two children.
Kirk Deitsch
Kirk Deitsch is Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. He received his bachelor’s degree (biology, chemistry) from Central Michigan University and his PhD (genetics) and post-doctoral experience at Michigan State University. Thereafter, he spent five years as a senior staff fellow at the National Institutes of Health, Malaria Genetics Section of NIAID. Kirk has spent the bulk of his career, thus far, to studying the molecular biology of malaria parasites, primarily working on the molecular basis of antigenic variation. At Cornell, he received a New Scholar Award in Global Infectious Diseases from the Ellison Medical Foundation, a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE), and an award for excellence in medical teaching. His laboratory published >85 manuscripts on work primarily funded by NIH grants. His current work focuses on understanding various aspects of gene regulation in malaria parasites, including gene expression patterns that result in antigenic variation and an interesting link between metabolism, environmental sensing and epigenetic gene regulation. In addition, he is interested in genome plasticity, particularly in how parasites generate diversity within the multi-copy gene families utilized for antigenic variation.
Dana Gershon
Dana Gershon is an attorney with a private practice that specializes in employment law. She counsels clients on all aspects of employment relationships, including federal and state anti-discrimination laws, wage and hour laws, and employee non-competition agreements. She represents numerous clients in the healthcare industry, independently and through an affiliation with Ankner & Levy, PC. Prior to starting her own practice, Dana worked at Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C. She also served as Manager of the Litigation Department at Goodwin Proctor, LLP, and taught legal research, writing and oral advocacy at Boston University School of Law. Dana received her J.D. from Columbia University School of Law, where she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. She received her B.A. from Cornell University, magna cum laude, and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society. She is a member of the Bars of Massachusetts and New York. Dana is a past President of the Board of Trustees of the Rashi School in Dedham, MA and a current trustee there. She is a trustee of the Boston Jewish Community Relations Council, and on the Council at Temple Israel in Boston. Dana co-chaired Combined Jewish Philanthropy’s Boston-Haifa Connection and was instrumental in the founding of the Parents and the Center Program in Haifa, Israel. Dana is also on the Board of Advisors of the New England Center for Children in Southborough, MA.
Oren Harman
Oren Harman is the Chair of the Graduate Program in Science, Technology and Society at Bar Ilan University. He was trained in history and biology at the Hebrew University, Oxford, and Harvard, and is a historian of science and a writer. He teaches evolutionary theory, the interplay between scientific, social, and philosophical thought, and writing. His books include The Man Who Invented the Chromosome (Harvard, 2004), Rebels, Mavericks and Heretics in Biology [with Michael Dietrich] (Yale, 2008), Outsider Scientists [with Michael Dietrich] (Chicago, 2013), Dreamers, Visionaries and Revolutionar-ies in the Life Sciences (Chicago, 2018), and The Price of Altruism (W.W. Norton, 2010) which won the 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Book of the Year in Science and Technology, was nominated for the Pulitzer prize, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Oren was a member of the Young Israeli Academy of Sciences, has been a frequent contributor to The New Republic and Haaretz Magazine, and is the co-creator of the Israeli Oscar-nominated documentary series "Did Herzl Really Say That?" His work has been featured in The New York Times, The London Times, Nature, Science, The Economist, Forbes, New Scientist, Scientific American, Times Higher Educa-tion, Discover, The Huffington Post, RADIOLAB and many others. In 2015, Oren was awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award by his university. His next book,Evolutions: Fifteen Myths that Explain Our World is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2018. He grew up in Jerusalem and New York City, and lives with his wife and two children in Tel Aviv.
Stephen Hoffman
Stephen Hoffman is chief executive and scientific officer of Sanaria Inc., a company developing whole sporozoite (PfSPZ) malaria vaccines, and chairman, Protein Potential LLC, a company developing vaccines for diarrheal diseases and COVID-19. During his 21 years as a US naval officer, he led work on malaria, typhoid fever and other tropical infectious disease, including sequencing the Plasmodium falciparum genome and conducting the first clinical trial in the world in which normal humans were immunized with a nucleotide vaccine. He was Sr. VP Biologics at Celera Genomics where he created a program to 1) utilize genomics and proteomics to produce cancer immunotherapeutics and vaccines, initiating the field of personalized (precision) medicine, and 2) sequence the genome of the mosquito, Anopheles gambiae. He has held several professorships, chairs or serves on multiple advisory boards, is past president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH), authored > 475 scientific publications, and numerous patents. He received a BA from University of Pennsylvania, MD from Cornell, and Diploma in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and did residency training at UC San Diego. He is a member of National Academy of Medicine (USA) and recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award from Weill Cornell Medical College and in 2020 the Clara Southmayd Ludlow Medal from the ASTMH for inspirational and pioneering work in tropical medicine.
Marvin Konstam
Marvin Konstam directs the Tufts Medical Center CardioVascular Center, which oversees the Divisions of Cardiology, Cardiac Surgery, Vascular Surgery, and Interventional Cardiology. He served as Chief of Cardiology at Tufts from 1995-2007. His special area of clinical, academic, and research interest is heart failure, with a focus on developing new therapies for this condition. He is a member of the Board of Trustees at Tufts Medical Center. . Marv previously served as Chair of the Academic Cardiology Council of the American College of Cardiology and as President of the Heart Failure Society of America. He co-founded Cardiovascular Clinical Science Foundation (CCSF), a non-profit contract research organization conducting clinical trials in collaboration with the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. He currently serves as the Board Chair and Chief Scientific Officer of CCSF. Among additional prior roles, he has served as the Chief Medical Officer of Orqis Medical, a start-up cardiovascular medical device company; a member of the Cardiovascular and Renal Advisory Committee of the Food and Drug Administration (he continues to serve on FDA Advisory Committees on an ad hoc basis); and a consultant to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, as a member of the Medicare Coverage Advisory Committee and in their programs for improving quality of care in heart failure. Marv received both his undergraduate and medical degrees from Columbia University and performed his post-doctoral training in Internal Medicine and Cardiology at the Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s Hospitals.
Yair Lootsteen
Yair Lootsteen is Chairperson of the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism (IMPJ) - the Israeli Reform Movement. He also serves as Vice Chair of Global Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael - Jewish National Fund. Born in London, England, Yair grew up in Toronto, Ontario. He emigrated to Israel in 1979 and has since resided in Jerusalem. A lawyer, Yair served in the IDF's Military Advocate General Corps for 23 years, completing his term of duty in 2007 with the rank of Colonel. He held several challenging positions during his military career, the last being that of the Legal Advisor to the IDF in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). Since completing his regular IDF service, Yair has invested much of his time on issues relating to Jewish pluralism in Israel. He has served as president of Kehilat Kol Haneshama, Jerusalem's largest Reform synagogue, has been on the IMPJ Board since 2013 and is a member of the Israel team of ARZENU – the International Federation of Reform and Progressive Religious Zionists. From 2008 till 2019 he was also a regular columnist for the Canadian Jewish News. Yair has two children.
Andrew Wetenhall
Andrew Wetenhall is the Co-Head of Morgan Stanley’s Equity Capital Markets business in the Americas. He has responsibility for Wall Street’s leading equity issuance franchise, and he and his team advise industry leading companies regarding IPOs, secondaries, and private placements, among other transactions forms. His prior roles at Morgan Stanley include the Head of the firm’s Basic Materials investment banking coverage group and positions in the financial sponsors coverage and leveraged finance teams. Andrew serves as director of Plusgrade, a private software company focused on the travel industry, and is the owner of The Colony Hotel in Palm Beach. Previously, he served as a Lead Governor of the Canadian Football League and a board member for the American Flag Football League. Andrew graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Vanderbilt University and lives in New York with his wife and three children.