Eric D. Rasmussen, MD, MDM, FACP

President and Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Eric Rasmussen took the reins in October 2007 as President and Chief Executive Officer of InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters), an international nonprofit organization founded by Google.org and dedicated to delivering innovative technological support to those who help the world stay safe.   Until selected as CEO of InSTEDD, Dr. Rasmussen was both Chairman of the Department of Medicine within Naval Hospital Bremerton near Seattle, Washington, and an advisor in humanitarian informatics for the US Office of the Secretary of Defense. He holds academic positions at several institutions and has been a Principal Investigator for both the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and for the National Science Foundation. He is a Reviewer for the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the American Journal of Public Health and sits on several advisory boards, including the Crisis Management Resources Board for the National Academy of Sciences. He has a number of publications and has been awarded several personal, unit, and theater military decorations, including a Presidential Legion of Merit.

Dr. Rasmussen spent seven years enlisted in nuclear submarines before leaving the Navy to receive his undergraduate and medical degrees from Stanford University. After graduate work in molecular biology at Los Alamos National Laboratory and teaching in Haiti, he completed a Residency in Internal Medicine and re-entered the Navy as Chief Resident in Medicine at the Navy Medical Center in Oakland, California. Subsequent Navy positions included three years as Fleet Surgeon for the US Navy’s Third Fleet.

Dr. Rasmussen, with an additional European Master’s Degree in Disaster Medicine, served on the Afghanistan humanitarian support planning staff within US Central Command Headquarters (CENTCOM) in 2002, and later as a physician to the Iraq Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) for the Iraq War in 2002-2003. As a member of the DART, he served within the International Humanitarian Operations Center in Kuwait and was later selected for the DARPA 2003 "Sustained Excellence in a Principal Investigator" award.

Further work as Director of the Strong Angel series of international humanitarian support demonstrations led to work in Afghanistan in 2004 and 2007, and in Indonesia as head of a Civil-Military Coordination Team for the tsunami response in Banda Aceh in early 2005. Later in 2005, he deployed with Joint Task Force Katrina in New Orleans, coordinating a small portion of the relief response after Hurricane Katrina.

Eric has been married for more than 20 years to Demi, and has daughters Melissa and Faith. He divides his time between Palo Alto and a small ranch near Olympic National Park in western Washington.

Judith Kleinberg, JD

Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and General Counsel

Ms. Kleinberg is a business law attorney with specialties in public policy, government regulation, mediation, and nonprofit law and governance. She has broad expertise in public policies affecting disaster planning and currently serves on the California Emergency Partnership Advisory Working Group to assist the Directors of the Office of Emergency Services and Office of Homeland Security in creating a comprehensive public-private disaster management program. A member of the Palo Alto City Council for eight years, she was elected Mayor of Palo Alto in 2006, during which time she created the Palo Alto/Stanford Red Ribbon Task Force on Disaster Planning, as well as serving as Chair of the Santa Clara County Emergency Preparedness Council. An avid environmentalist, she signed the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement to advance the goals of the Kyoto Protocol and created a community-wide initiative to promote sustainable community policies and practices.

Immediately prior to joining InSTEDD, she was Vice President of Policy and Programs at Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, where she created and directed the multi-sector, public-private Silicon Valley Disaster Planning Initiative, as well as the Technology Convergence Consortium promoting nanobioconvergence technology innovation in California. Prior to that, she was an Executive Director of AeA (formerly the American Electronics Association) responsible for advancing the business interests of over 500 high tech companies.

Ms. Kleinberg has been an executive at several public policy and law reform organizations, from an organization she created to support pediatric AIDS research to an international women’s foundation. As the executive of the award-winning children's advocacy organization, Kids in Common, she created a nationally recognized children's immunization initiative, successfully bringing together multiple sectors to promote the health security of children. And for over a decade, she helped lift the veil on the workings of the American legal system as a law professor and as a legal affairs television reporter and documentary producer.

A recognized professional in multiple fields, she is a member of the Women’s High Tech Coalition and a Senior Fellow of the American Leadership Forum, Silicon Valley. She received a B.A. from the University of Michigan, Honors College, and a J.D. from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a member of the California Law Review. She has been the recipient of numerous awards for her leadership in community service, her creation of resources for vulnerable children and families, her advocacy on behalf of women's rights, and her achievements in building collaboratives of diverse stakeholders working together for common goals.

Robert Kirkpatrick

Chief Technology Officer

Robert Kirkpatrick is an expert in the design and use of technology to facilitate cross-organizational collaboration in austere field environments, developing countries, and sudden-onset emergencies. He has spent more than 10 years in collaboration technology, supporting the use of ICT for health data collection, disaster relief, NGO field security, telemedicine, conflict mediation, and civil-military cooperation. Robert’s work with technology industry partners, government agencies, and international humanitarian organizations has explored ways that system design may impact trust- building and information sharing behavior across cultural, organizational, and linguistic boundaries. Robert co-founded and led solutions development for two pioneering humanitarian technology teams, first at Groove Networks, and later at Microsoft where he served as Lead Architect for Microsoft Humanitarian Systems (MHS).

While at Microsoft, he and the MHS team designed a set of tools for mesh-based collaboration and low-bandwidth data transport among humanitarian workers in Afghanistan. Following the Pakistan earthquake in 2006, Robert worked on humanitarian relief solutions for earthquake victims in Kashmir, and he later prototyped a telemedicine application in Afghanistan.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Robert spent more than a month working with NGOs, military, and first responders in New Orleans and Mississippi, where he designed a suite of applications for registration, medical treatment, and family reunification. In 2005, as Lead Architect for Groove Humanitarian Systems, he developed the GIS-enabled DPKO SatComms tracking system used by UN Peacekeeping to manage global UN satellite communications. At the onset of the Iraq War, Robert developed the Virtual Iraqi Health Logistics Center, a system used during and after the invasion by both humanitarian and military personnel. He later worked in Baghdad under US Ambassador Paul Bremer as an advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority Executive Secretariat. Robert is a member of the Executive Committee for the Strong Angel series of humanitarian disaster-response demonstrations. In 2006, he directed application integration for Strong Angel III in San Diego, CA, and in 2004 for Strong Angel II in Kona, Hawai’i. Robert holds a B.A. in Greek and Latin from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has done graduate work in social anthropology at Harvard University.

Dennis Israelski, M.D.

Director of Programs

Dr. Israelski currently directs InSTEDD’s Mekong Collaboration Program in Southeast Asia and has had extensive experience in Africa, particularly in the fight against AIDS. He is Clinical Professor of Medicine in Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine and is a recognized physician leader in the field of Infectious Diseases. He has over 20 years as a leading clinician administrator, educator and researcher, and has devoted his career to local and global public health. He has focused on community-based healthcare of indigent patients, quality service delivery to vulnerable populations, and innovative systems for the control and prevention of communicable diseases. He is on the Board of Trustees and Medical Director of AIDSETI (AIDS Empowerment and Treatment International) that promotes community-driven development programs enhancing health service delivery.

He is also the co-founder of the World Wide AIDS Coalition (WWAC) that uses models for social innovation to support healthcare in countries with severe resource constraints. He is Medical Director of the Pangaea Global AIDS Foundation, an NGO with considerable experience in supporting national governments in development and delivery of HIV/AIDS care and treatment. He has worked in Ethiopia, Burundi, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Cote D’Ivoire and Togo. Since 1988, Dr. Israelski has served as the Chief of Infectious Diseases and Director of Research at the San Mateo County Medical Center and Health Department. He has an extensive portfolio of past and current research and has published widely on drug treatment trials, studies in pathogenesis of chronic viral diseases (e.g., HIV, HCV, HBV), STDs, behavioral medicine, health services delivery and public health policy.

His current active research interests include implementation of lower cost diagnostics for point of care testing of communicable diseases, pandemic influenza preparedness and methods for building community resilience, and translational laboratory projects examining compartmental HIV shedding, resistance and impact on opportunistic infections. Dr. Israelski has been the recipient of many California, federal and industry research grants and over the years has received awards for distinguished community service, physician leadership, innovation in health care and postgraduate education.

Eduardo Jezierski

Director of Engineering

Eduardo Jezierski has spent his whole career designing, implementing, and deploying software solutions on a global scale. He originally received an MsC in Informatics after initial work in nuclear engineering, and later worked in Argentina in the areas of GIS analysis, machine learning, and modeling for anthropology challenges. His Master’s thesis was on robotics control, genetic algorithms and neural networks. He spent nine years in software development at Microsoft, first supporting largest enterprise customers, then later as Program Manager and Solutions Architect.   He was one of the founders of a team dedicated to building software assets (tools, practices, frameworks, services, content and information architectures) to improve quality and productivity of Microsoft’s business customers. The usage of these assets and frameworks climbed at its inception from zero to more than a million developers worldwide and adoption in excess of 80% of the target market – including financial, healthcare, military, and manufacturing customers.

Mr. Jezierski also developed a strategy for building communities consisting of academia, software vendors, other technical partners, customers and grassroots participants by initiating new SharedSource approach for engineering at Microsoft. There are now more than 25,000 registered members and hundreds of thousands of lines of source code shared between the participants, while still maintaining acceptable IP protection for Microsoft and other members. A practitioner of agile software-design approaches, he has built and led numerous global teams in producing mission-critical assets in just months, and has presented on software architectures and design approaches for large distributed systems in conferences around the globe. Most recent development arenas include transactional and analytics systems, software systems integration, scalable web services, and user interface design.

He helped found a team at Microsoft dedicated to starting new businesses by providing an internal venture capital model and growing innovation practices and entrepreneurship in the company, working directly with the staff of the Chief Software Architect. He contributed to defining strategy and early execution of the new group and delivered prototypes in the domain of mesh architectures, real-time communications and immersive web environments for long-tail retail. Several of these prototypes were designed, written, and validated in the field in collaboration with Microsoft’s Humanitarian Systems Group.

Mary Jane Marcus, MSW

Program Manager

Mary Jane Marcus has fifteen years experience in international and domestic program management, community building, and cross-cultural dynamics. She has a degree in International Affairs and African Studies from Georgetown University and a Masters in Social Work. She has significant field experience, including work in a 200,000-person Rwandan refugee camp after the genocide with unaccompanied minors, during which her programmatic approach was adopted by the United Nations as a regional model. Her Los Angeles Times article after her work, “The Political Implications of Humanitarian Aid,” highlighted the political role humanitarian aid workers unwittingly play in their effort to do good. Her current work focuses on how to work across culture and class in ways that empower everyone involved. She is on the advisory board of the United Nations Association Film Festival, a member of the Global Women’s Leadership Network and a member of the Priority Africa Network. She is also involved with the global indigenous food movement and  recently completed a book on the history of dried fruit.

Susanne Jul, Ph.D.

Manager, Design and Human Factors Research

Dr. Jul combines 20 years of experience in research, design and development of human-computer interfaces with 7 years of research and operational experience in disaster management. Her long-term research interests are in information systems for managing disasters, public health emergencies and humanitarian relief efforts. Much of her work focuses on theory of design to support individual and collective human problem-solving and decision-making. She is particularly interested in design for inexperts--people who need to learn about the task they are trying to accomplish as they are trying to accomplish it.

Luke Beckman

Social Networking Manager

Luke Beckman is currently an undergraduate at Stanford University majoring in Human Biology, specializing in Decision-Making in Global Biodefense. He is minoring in International Relations with a concentration in Comparative Culture and Society. He is an Eagle Scout and began working in the area of disaster management as a Red Cross office and shelter manager following Hurricane Katrina as a member of the Washington, D.C. Armory Disaster Response Team. At Stanford, Mr. Beckman is a Haas Center Public Service Leadership Fellow. He is the Managing Director for Stanford Dance Marathon, a student-run organization that creates, educates, inspires, and mobilizes community to combat HIV/AIDS and support international health, culminating in a 24-hour dance-a-thon. The organization is currently in its 4th year and raised over $150,000 in 2007: over three times the amount raised in 2006.

He got his start in public health working in the highlands of Guatemala as the recruiting coordinator for Global Healthcare Project, a disease awareness and prevention organization that empowers people in under-served areas to end the cycles of poverty, disease, and malnutrition in their communities. He began work with InSTEDD in the spring of 2007 while a member of the Stanford Pandemic Flu Team. That work involved developing comprehensive models for community resilience, internet web portals, and phone hotlines in the event of an outbreak of pandemic influenza. The team’s published work can be found at http://sie-panflu.stanford.edu/. He also has a patent in detecting, assessing and diagnosing sleep apnea through the use of transcranial doppler technology.

Taha A. Kass-Hout, MD, MS

Senior Advisor: Public Health and Biosurveillance

Dr. Kass-Hout’s professional approach to his work is based on the clear articulation of the value of information technology, systems, cross-disciplinary science and research, and information handling in answering to most challenging and difficult health problems. He has memberships in national and international professional societies, has published in several peer-reviewed journals, presented at numerous national and international forums, and was invited as a guest speaker at various health and policy events. Taha holds Doctor of Medicine and Masters of Science degrees, with clinical training at Harvard's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and University of Texas Health Sciences Center at Houston.