IMSH 2016 Plenary Speakers
Monday, January 18, 2016
Lou Oberndorf Lecture on Innovation in Healthcare Simulation
Alison Levine
Team Captain of the First American Women's Everest Expedition and Author of the New York Times Best-Seller On the Edge: The Art of High-Impact Leadership
Alison Levine is a history-making polar explorer and mountaineer. She not only served as team captain of the first American Women’s Everest Expedition, but she also climbed the highest peak on each continent and skied to both the North and South Poles—a feat known as the Adventure Grand Slam, which fewer than forty people on the world have achieved. In January 2008, she made history as the first American to complete a 600-mile traverse from west Antarctica to the South Pole following the route of legendary explorer Reinhold Messner. Levine completed this arduous journey on skis while hauling 150 pounds of her gear and supplies in a sled harnessed to her waist. Her success in extreme environments is noteworthy given she has had three heart surgeries and suffers from Raynaud’s disease, which causes the arteries that feed her fingers and toes to collapse in cold weather—leaving her at extreme risk for frostbite.
In addition to having tackled some of the most challenging environments in the outdoors, Levine has also spent more than two decades climbing the corporate ladder. She worked in the pharmaceutical and medical device industry, earned an MBA from Duke University, and spent three years working for Goldman Sachs. She left Goldman in 2003 to serve as deputy finance director for Arnold Schwarzenegger in his successful bid to become Governor of California.
In 2005, Levine founded the Climb High Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of jobless women in Africa by training them to be trekking guides and porters in their local mountains so that they would have the skills to earn a sustainable living wage through climbing-related tourism. Her work in Uganda enabled the first group of local women to make history when they climbed Uganda’s highest peak Mt Stanley, in the Rwenzori Mountains. Her work in Uganda is the subject of the PBS documentary
Living Courageously.
Levine spent four years as an adjunct instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership and is a strategic advisor for the Thayer Leader Development Group at West Point, an executive education a program that shares West Point leadership best practices with senior level-executives from the public and private sectors. She was a contributing author to the book
Leadership in Dangerous Situations: A Handbook for the Armed Forces, Emergency Services and First Responders (Naval Institute Press). She also serves on the board of the Coach K Center on Leadership & Ethics at Duke University.
A sought-after consultant and keynote speaker on the subject of leadership development, Levine has addressed audiences ranging from Fortune 500 companies to professional sports teams to the prestigious World Economic Forum at Davos. She was featured on the CNBC program
The Future of Leadership, alongside other notable leaders such as Gen. (Ret.) Wesley Clark, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander; Henry Paulson, former Treasury secretary; and Robert Kraft, CEO and chairman of the New England Patriots.
Levine is the author of the book On the Edge: The Art of High Impact Leadership (January 2014, Grand Central Publishing). Having spent prolonged periods of time in some of the world's most dangerous and inhospitable places, she tackles the topics of creating cohesive teams, taking responsible risks and developing no-nonsense leaders that can succeed in times of uncertainty.
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Michael S. Gordon Center Lecture in Medical Education
Matt Weinstein
Team Building in Healthcare
Matt Weinstein is the nation’s foremost authority on the use of fun and humor in team building. Matt is the founder and “Emperor” of Playfair, Inc., an international consulting firm based in Northern California. He was elected to the Professional Speaker’s Hall of Fame by the National Speaker’s Association, and was honored by Successful Meetings Magazine as one of the “21 Top Speakers for the 21st Century.”
Matt Weinstein’s television special “Fun Works!: The Power of Humor in the Workplace” was broadcast nationally on PBS. Matt is the author of many popular books including Managing To Have Fun, Gently Down The Stream, and Dogs Don't Bite When A Growl Will Do.
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Kim Binsted, BSc, PhD
Kim Binsted received her BSc in Physics at McGill (1991), and her PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh (1996). Her thesis topic was the computational modeling and generation of punning riddles, and her program, JAPE (Joke Analysis and Production Engine), generated puns such as “What do you call a Martian who drinks beer? An ale-ien!”. She then went to Japan, where she conducted research at Sony’s Computer Science Laboratories on human-computer interfaces, and then started a company, I-Chara KK, which developed social software agents for mobile phones. In 2002, she joined the faculty of the Information and Computer Sciences Department at the University of Hawaii, where she does research on artificial intelligence, human-computer interfaces, and long-duration human space exploration. She is also working on a MS in Planetary Geology, attempting to characterize the deuterium-hydrogen ratio in the primitive Earth mantle.
Kim was a co-investigator at the UH-NASA Astrobiology Institute (2003-2014). She was a NASA Summer Faculty Fellow at Ames Research Center in 2003 and 2004, where she worked on sub-vocal speech recognition technology in the Neuroengineering Lab. She was Chief Scientist on the FMARS 2007 Long Duration Mission, a four-month Mars exploration analogue on Devon Island in the Canadian High Arctic. In 2009, she spent her sabbatical as a visiting scientist at the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), working on the CSA’s planetary analogues program. She is now the principal investigator on the NASA-funded HI-SEAS (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, hi-seas.org) project, which conducts long-duration space exploration simulations at an isolated habitat on Mauna Loa.
Her hobbies include flying, diving, kayaking, cooking and improvisational comedy.
For a list of publications and other information, see http://www2.hawaii.edu/~binsted.