Husky Days in the Bay

Biographies provided by speakers

Elliot Marseille, DrPH, MPP
Director, Collaborative for the Economics of Psychedelics (CEP) | UCB/UCSF CGHDDE 

Dr. Elliot Marseille is a leading expert on the economics of the emerging psychedelic-assisted therapies. He is the founding Director of the University of California’s Berkeley’s Collaborative for the Economics of Psychedelics (CEP). CEP is a network of health economists and health services researchers dedicated to realizing the potential of psychedelic therapies for high-priority mental health conditions. Through the application of policy-relevant economic analyses, CEP seeks to enhance the efficiency of service delivery and increase access to these promising therapies. Central to CEP’s mission is providing the cost and cost effectiveness information that third-party payers will need if they are to make psychedelic therapies a reimbursed benefit. Current projects include analyses of the economics of psilocybin-assisted therapy for major depression, psilocybin for tobacco cessation, extended analyses of the economics of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD and collaboration with the Psychedelic Health Equity Initiative in laying the foundation for broad and equitable access to psychedelic-assisted therapies. Additional projects now underway include the development of an economic model to assess the impact of ibogaine-assisted therapy for opioid use disorder, Reviewing the published literature on the health effects of the use of MDMA in non-clinical settings, and modeling the epidemic and cost impact of making MDMA-assisted therapy available for both military personnel and civilians in Ukraine.

Dr. Clayton English
Panel Moderator
Assistant Professor of Pharmacy, University of Washington School of Pharmacy

Dr. Clayton English is an Assistant Professor of Pharmacy at the University of Washington School of Pharmacy. He earned his Bachelor of Science and Doctor of Pharmacy degrees from the University of Connecticut, followed by a specialty residency in psychiatric pharmacy and clinical psychopharmacology at Nova Southeastern University. Clayton is board-certified in Psychiatric Pharmacy (BCPP), Pharmacotherapy (BCPS), and Geriatric Pharmacy (BCGP). From 2010 to 2022, he served on the faculty of Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences and practiced as a clinical pharmacy specialist in psychiatry at the University of Vermont Medical Center, where he expanded inpatient psychiatry pharmacy services and mentored numerous students and residents. His teaching expertise spans neuropsychiatric therapeutics and psychopharmacology.

With clinical and research interests in neurologic and psychiatric pharmacy, Clayton focuses on mental health supports and services that pharmacists provide to patients. Passionate about interprofessional education and the well-being of students and residents, he actively contributes to professional development through his work with the American Association of Psychiatric Pharmacists (AAPP), including as Senior Editor for the AAPP Psychiatric Pharmacotherapy Review Book and Course. He has received multiple awards for his teaching and mentorship, including Vermont Pharmacist of the Year and Teacher of the Year honors.

Nicky Mehtani, MD MPH
Assistant Professor, UCSF Division of General Internal Medicine, UC San Francisco 
Staff Physician, SFDPH MXM Health Resource Center 

Nicky Mehtani, MD MPH is an addiction medicine physician and assistant professor in UCSF Division of General Internal Medicine at ZSFG, where her research focuses on understanding the role and accessibility of psychedelic therapies in addressing substance use disorders among medically and socially complex patients. She is currently involved in several clinical trials and observational studies of psychedelic therapies at UCSF, including leading the first pilot clinical trial of a ketamine-assisted psychotherapy intervention directed toward publicly insured patients with methamphetamine use disorder, specifically those living with or at-risk for HIV. Her clinical work is based out of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, focused on providing low-barrier addiction and HIV care, including the implementation of novel long-acting injectable HIV therapies, for people experiencing homelessness and unstable housing.

Nathan Sackett, MD, MS
Director, Center for Novel Therapeutics in Addiction Psychiatry (NTAP)
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, UW Medicine

Nathan Sackett, MD, MS, is the Director of the Center for Novel Therapeutics in Addiction Psychiatry and Acting Assistant Professor in the University of Washington Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences. His focus is on the intersection between substance use and psychiatric disorders and the use of psychedelics to treat substance use disorders with a particular interest in how psychedelics can augment the psychotherapeutic process and facilitate behavioral change.

Biographies provided by speakers

Sunny Consolvo, ’08, PhD, CIPP/US
Researcher, Google

Sunny is a researcher at Google where she spends most of her time focusing on digital safety. She previously led Google’s Security & Privacy User Experience (UX) team for several years. As part of the At-Risk Research Program that Sunny founded and leads, she and her collaborators have developed a framework for unifying at-risk user research, guidance for conducting safer research that involves at-risk users, and they’ve investigated the digital-safety experiences of youth, online content creators, people being targeted online with hate & harassment (including image-based sexual abuse), people involved with political campaigns, survivors of intimate partner abuse, people facing financial insecurity, and explored the technology experiences of women in South Asia. She has also worked to improve security warnings in the Chrome browser.

Sunny was recognized in 2022 with the Distinguished Alumni Award by the University of Washington’s iSchool. Sunny received her Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Washington.

Ian Schnee
Teaching Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies, UW Department of Philosophy

Ian works on the philosophy of video games, AI, mind, and reasoning, including authoring textbooks and software for teaching mathematical logic. He’s a member of the Dean’s Academy Futurists and the research cluster for writing pedagogy with AI. He co-led UW’s Evidence-Based Teaching Program and in 2020 won the UW Distinguished Teaching Award.

Kate Starbird
Associate Professor, UW Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE)

Dr. Starbird is a Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering. Her research is situated within human-computer interaction (HCI) and the emerging field of crisis informatics—the study of how information-communication technologies (ICTs) are used during crisis events. One aspect of her research focuses on how online rumors spread during natural disasters and man-made crisis events. More recently, she has begun to focus on disinformation and other forms of strategic information operations online. In 2018, she received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for research in this area.

Amy X. Zhang
Assistant Professor, UW Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering

Amy X. Zhang is an assistant professor at University of Washington’s Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. At UW, she leads the Social Futures Lab, dedicated to reimagining social and collaborative systems to empower people and improve society. Her work leverages human-computer interaction and AI to design and build systems towards improving discourse, collaboration, and understanding online, with applications to social media and online communities, news and civic participation, education, and computer-supported cooperative work and collective action. Previously, she was a 2019-20 postdoctoral scholar at Stanford CS after completing her Ph.D. at MIT CSAIL in 2019, where she received the George Sprowls Ph.D. Thesis Award at MIT in computer science. She has been a Harvard Berkman Klein Center Fellow, ADL Belfer Fellow, Google PhD Fellow, and an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. She has been awarded an NSF CAREER award, received paper awards at ACM CHI, CSCW, and AAAI HCOMP, profiled on BBC’s Click television program, CBC radio, and featured in articles by ABC News, The Verge, New Scientist, and Poynter. She is also a part-time research scientist at Ai2, research director at MetaGov, and cofounder of Discourse Labs. She received an MPhil in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar and a BS in Computer Science at Rutgers University, where she was captain of the Division I Women’s tennis team.

Ben Packard
Harriet Bullitt Endowed Executive Director of EarthLab, University of Washington,

As the inaugural executive director of EarthLab, a new institute working to accelerate and focus UW expertise to address large-scale environmental challenges, Ben is responsible for working strategically within and beyond the University to promote new learning and action to address environmental challenges by building relationships between the University and public, private and nonprofit sectors.

Before coming to EarthLab, Ben served as the Global Managing Director of Corporate Engagement at The Nature Conservancy (TNC) from 2013 t0 2017.  In this senior management role, Ben was accountable for TNC’s overall corporate engagement strategy in service of the mission to conserve the lands and waters on which all life depends.  Ben lead a team that managed strategic relationships with leading companies to incorporate the value of nature into the core of business plans and decision-making. While at TNC, Ben was also Chair of TNC’s Business Council and on the Board of Directors for The Sustainability Consortium.

From 1998-2013 Ben worked at Starbucks Coffee Company, serving as vice president, Global Responsibility from 2008-2013.  He was part of the original team at Starbucks that established the world-class sustainability strategy for the company. As VP, Ben helped develop and then oversaw Starbucks business approach to ethical sourcing and environmental stewardship.  Ben represented the company in global forums on sustainability and managed key NGO, academic and industry relationships in support of Starbucks responsible business programs.  In this role, he was also accountable for the development of and content in the company’s annual Global Responsibility Report.

Ben graduated from Kenyon College with a BA in History (1989) and holds a Master of Business Administration and Certificate in Environmental Management from the University of Washington Foster School of Business (1998).

Ben currently serves on the IslandWood Board of Directors, the Sustainability Advisory Board for Procter & Gamble, the Board of Directors of Cascadia Consulting and as an Advisor to the Net Impact Chapter at the University of Washington Foster School of Business. Ben is a Fellow of both the Environmental Leadership Program and the US-Japan Leadership Program.

David S. Ginger
Seymour Rabinovitch Endowed Chair, UW Department of Chemistry
Chief Scientist, UW Clean Energy Institute
Adjunct Professor of Physics, Adjunct Professor of Materials Science & Engineering (by courtesy)
Lab Fellow, Pacific Northwest National Lab (dual appointee)
Associate Editor, Chemical Reviews

David S. Ginger’s research centers on understanding new semiconductor materials with applications in solar energy, energy-efficient lighting and next-generation displays, quantum information, and neuromorphic computing. He is currently the B. Seymour Rabinovitch Endowed Chair in Chemistry, Adjunct Professor of Physics and Materials Science and Engineering, and serves as the Chief Scientist of the Washington state-funded UW Clean Energy Institute. He holds a joint appointment as a Lab Fellow at Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL) and is the founding director of the NSF Science and Technology Center for the Integration of Modern Optoelectronic Materials on Demand (IMOD).

Professor Ginger earned dual B.S. degrees in chemistry and physics at Indiana University in 1997 with departmental honors and highest distinction, performing undergraduate research in nuclear chemistry with Victor E. Viola. He received a British Marshall Scholarship and an NSF Graduate Fellowship and completed his Ph.D. in physics with Neil C. Greenham in the Optoelectronics group at the University of Cambridge (UK) in 2001. After a joint NIH and DuPont Postdoctoral Fellowship at Northwestern University in Chad Mirkin’s lab, he joined the faculty at the University of Washington in Seattle.

He is a Fellow of the Materials Research Society, a member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences, an elected fellow of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), and has been named a Research Corporation Cottrell Scholar, a Research Corporation Scialog Fellow in solar energy conversion, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow, and a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar.  He has been recognized with awards, including The Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the ACS Unilever Award in Colloid and Surfactant Science, the Blavatnik National Award Finalist for Young Scientists, and the Burton Medal of the Microscopy Society of America. He is also an Associate Editor of the ACS journal Chemical Reviews.