Eric D. Rasmussen, MD, MDM, FACP

President and Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Eric Rasmussen arrived as President and Chief Executive Officer of InSTEDD in October 2007. 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.

Beginning around age 17, 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.

In addition to his responsibilities at InSTEDD, he currently serves as Permanent Advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General's High-Level Forum on Water Disasters, as a member of the US Congressional Task Force on Global Biosurveillance, and as a member of Kofi Annan's Global Humanitarian Forum in Geneva.

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, InSTEDD's first employee in April 2007, 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 the Green Ribbon Task Force on Climate Protection, a community-wide initiative to promote sustainable government, business and 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 and now merged with ITAA to form TechAmerica) where she was responsible for advancing the business interests of over 500 high tech companies.

Judy 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 was recently named one of the "2009 Women of Influence in Silicon Valley" by the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal, and was also recently honored by the California State Legislature as "Woman of the Year" from the Silicon Valley-located 21st Assembly District. She is a member of the Women’s High Tech Coalition and the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives, and is 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 12 years in collaboration technology, developing systems for health data collection, disaster relief, NGO field security, telemedicine, conflict mediation and civil-military cooperation. His work with technology industry partners, government agencies, and international humanitarian organizations has explored ways that the design of virtual interaction environments may influence trust-building, information sharing, and joint decision making across technical, organizational, and cultural 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) under Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie.

In 2003, Robert worked in Baghdad to improve coordination between members of the Coalition Provisional Authority and Iraqi  ministries of Health, Finance, Human Rights, and Communications.  In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Robert provided technology support to US Navy, National Guard, and first responders in New Orleans and Waveland, Mississippi. Following the devastating earthquake in 2005,  Robert worked in Muzaffarabad, Kashmir with several relief organizations designing tools for data collection and supply logistics.  He participated in two missions in northern and central Afghanistan (2006, 2007) prototyping distributed collaboration and data integration technologies to improve information flow for NGOs involved in telemedicine support and the Afghan National Solidarity Program.   

Robert is a member of the Highlands Forum, the Global Humanitarian Forum, CrisisMappers, and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.  He is a reviewer for ISCRAM, and he sits on the Executive Committee for the Strong Angel series of disaster-response demonstrations. Robert serves as Chair of the Open Mobile Consortium.

Dennis Israelski, MD

Vice President, 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.

Dennis 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, Dennis 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. Dennis 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

Vice President, 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.

Ed also developed a strategy for building communities consisting of academia, software vendors, other technical partners, customers and grassroots participants by initiating a 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 with unaccompanied minors in a 200,000-person Rwandan refugee camp after the genocide, 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.

David Cliquennoi

Technology Director, Mekong Collaboration Program

Dave Cliquennoi joined InSTEDD in 2009 to serve as Technology Director for InSTEDD’s Mekong Collaboration Program. In that role, he builds and manages the technical teams for InSTEDD’s Innovation Lab in Phnom Penh. He is also helping build technical relationships throughout the region in support of InSTEDD’s mission to apply innovative technology to improve public health.  After completing a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, he started his career at Intel where he worked in roles ranging from VLSI circuit designer on the Itanium FPU to improving Stephen Hawking's speech system. In order to pursue a dream of working in audio technology, he joined Dolby Laboratories, where he managed a team of engineers to implement next generation audio technologies, and soon became a senior software developer focusing on standards like Dolby Digital for digital television and DVD, and AAC audio compression for Apple’s iTunes.

After 10 years of working in the high tech industry, he wanted to tackle the more difficult problems of the world and worked at an orphanage in Nepal for several months during civil unrest. Upon the advice of a nurse with the San Francisco Public Health Department, he had brought basic medical supplies and the book ‘Where There is No Doctor,’ and to his surprise, he was taking care of urgent health issues soon after arrival. He returned to the US to do hurricane relief work with the Red Cross and others.  Hoping to learn more about social enterprise, he next took on the role of CTO at Digital Divide Data, which provides training, scholarships and employment to disadvantaged young people in Cambodia. For 2.5 years, he provided on-the-ground technical leadership throughout Southeast Asia to create a software team and build the capacity of the IT teams and infrastructure, and helped DDD to nearly double to 450 people and to offer more sophisticated IT services. His experience at DDD raised the bar for his idea of ‘real’ IT work – now to include climbing on top of the huge diesel generator to re-attach the exhaust pipe and to be the only one to volunteer to flip the huge knife switches after major electrical work!
 
Dave is living happily in Phnom Penh with his Cambodian wife, Phalla, and they are expecting a baby boy in May.

Nicolas di Tada

Technology Director, Platform Engineering

Nicolás di Tada is a software developer and project manager with a strong background in scientific and technical applications of software crafting. Prior to starting his company, Manas Technology Solutions, Nicolás spent 10 years as a software architect and project leader for a diverse range of organizations, including startups and large corporations, acquiring a varied background in information retrieval, machine learning, information visualization and web development. Passionate about the possibilites of the convergence between technology, science and art,  Nicolas provides consulting services that help organizations build state of the art software solutions with a strong emphasis in usability and user friendliness. Nicolas currently works with the distributed INSTEDD engineering team, open source contributors, interns and volunteers to incorporate these areas into the InSTEDD platform components.

Luke Beckman

National Response Liaison

Luke Beckman arrived at InSTEDD in the spring of 2007 and serves as the US National Response Liaison developing InSTEDD's efforts in Humanitarian Relief and Disaster Response. In that position he manages relationships with crisis response organizations and his focus is geographical rather than topical, focused primarily on issues within US borders. Luke has been working in disaster response and pandemic influenza for the past four years, focusing on community resilience and the increasing of collaboration between citizens and the government in times of crisis. He began working in 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, and has most recently worked in the U.S. Senate on the design and implementation of a National Disaster Response Corps. He has worked in Southeast Asia on regional health initiatives, on health education and treatment in the highlands of Guatemala as a public health team leader for the Global Healthcare Project, and in Palo Alto as a member of a team writing a Pandemic Flu Preparedness manual that is now distributed globally in more than seven languages.

He is enrolled at Stanford University with the core of his studies being in international security, public service, and human biology, concentrating in decision-making in global biodefense. At Stanford, Mr. Beckman is a Haas Center Public Service Leadership Fellow and an honors candidate with the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation. His thesis, "Using Collaboration Technology to Enhance the Citizen-Government Relationship in Pandemic Flu Preparedness" is in development. 

Luke holds a patent in detecting, assessing, and diagnosing sleep apnea, and in the assessing of preconditions for stroke through the use of transcranial doppler technology.

Taha A. Kass-Hout, MD, MS

Advisor, Global Public Health and Informatics

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.