Eric D. Rasmussen, MD, MDM, FACP

President and Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Eric Rasmussen arrived 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.

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 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).

Robert has worked in Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority, in Afghanistan on two missions related to information flow for telemedicine and program coordination, in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir following the 2005 earthquake, and in New Orleans, LA and Waveland, MS after Hurricane Katrina. 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. Robert is a member of the Highlands Forum, and a member of the Executive Committee for the Strong Angel series of integrated disaster-response demonstrations. He also serves as Chair of the Open Mobile Consortium.

Dennis Israelski, M.D.

Vice President, Global Health

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

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.

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.

Luke Beckman

National Response Liaison

Luke Beckman is currently an undergraduate at Stanford University majoring in Human Biology, specializing in Decision-Making in Global Biodefense. He 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, and has worked in Southeast Asia on regional health initiatives, in the US Senate on the development of a National Disaster Corps, and in Palo Alto as a member of the team writing a Pandemic Flu Preparedness manual that is now distributed globally in more than seven languages.

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

Taha A. Kass-Hout, MD, MS

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 a medical degree from Harvard and Masters of Science from Yale, with clinical training at Harvard's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and University of Texas Health Sciences Center at Houston.