2023 Annual Awards Gala

Kaveeta P. Vasisht, MD, PharmD

Kaveeta Vasisht MD, PharmD, is the Associate Commissioner for Women’s Health at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). She directs the FDA Office of Women’s Health (OWH), which serves to protect and advance the health of women through scientific programs, policy development, research, education, stakeholder collaboration, and outreach.

Dr. Vasisht leads efforts to advance regulatory science through understanding sex differences, promoting the inclusion of women and diversity in clinical trials, and establishing women’s health research priorities at FDA. Under her leadership OWH recently developed the Knowledge and News on Women’s Health Initiative, bringing broader awareness to conditions that not only impact women, but also highlighting how health conditions can affect women differently. In addition, she leads efforts to bridge important knowledge gaps on medication use in pregnancy and lactation.

Dr. Vasisht and OWH have received numerous FDA awards in recognition of their contributions.

Prior to her current role, she served as a Deputy Director in FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) Office of Medical Policy and has extensive expertise in leading regulatory policy development.

She also provided clinical expertise on multidisciplinary teams in the review and evaluation of scientific data to make regulatory decisions on the safety and effectiveness of therapeutics during her tenure in CDER’s Office of New Drugs.

Dr. Vasisht is board-certified in both internal medicine and adult endocrinology. She completed her internal medicine and endocrinology fellowship training at the University of Chicago Hospitals, where she also served on the faculty. She also holds a Doctor of Pharmacy degree from Rutgers College of Pharmacy where she graduated from the Honors Research Program.

Pauline M. Maki, PhD

Keli Walbert

Keli Walbert joined Horizon in 2018 and has more than 25 years of pharmaceutical and health care industry experience primarily focused on building integrated marketing teams and leading medicine launches. She previously led the U.S. commercial organization, overseeing the infused medicines portfolio, including the Horizon launches of TEPEZZA and UPLIZNA, life-cycle management and consumer and digital marketing. She currently leads Horizon’s strategic and corporate marketing.

Before joining Horizon, Walbert was with AbbVie where she led the consumer, advocacy and patient services functions as well as the overall launch of a drug-device combination product, DUOPA. Before AbbVie, she built and led the consumer organization at Abbott (now AbbVie) for the launch of HUMIRA. Walbert also held senior marketing and advertising leadership roles at the American Medical Association (AMA) and Draft Worldwide (now FCB), a global advertising agency.

Walbert has a bachelor’s degree in communication from the University of Louisville and a master’s degree in marketing communications from Northwestern University.

Julie Louise Gerberding, MD, MPH

Dr. Julie Louise Gerberding is the CEO of the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, a non-profit organization that builds public-private research partnerships to support the mission of the NIH.  She co-chairs the CSIS Commission on Strengthening America’s Health Security and is a member of the Commonwealth Fund Commission on a National Public Health System.  Previously, she served as President of the vaccines business and as Executive Vice President and the Chief Patient Officer at Merck & Co., Inc.  From 2003-2009, Dr. Gerberding led the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  She serves on the boards of HilleVax, Mayo Clinic, National Health Council, and Case Western Reserve University.  Dr. Gerberding is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the adjunct faculties of the University of California, San Francisco, and Case Western Reserve University. 

Jenelle Krishnamoorthy, PhD

Jenelle S. Krishnamoorthy, PhD, is the associate vice president for global policy, communications and population health at Merck.

Prior to joining Merck in January 2015, Krishnamoorthy worked on health policy for 10 years for Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). She served for five years as the health policy director for the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee when Harkin was chairman. Krishnamoorthy first joined Harkin’s team as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow in 2003 and 2004. During 2004 and 200, she worked at the U.S. State Department in the Bureau of South Asian Affairs on health, science, technology, and environment issues with India on a AAAS Diplomacy Fellowship.

Trained as a licensed clinical psychologist, Krishnamoorthy completed her pediatric clinical psychology internship and postdoctoral fellowship at Brown Medical School, where she conducted research in the areas of childhood obesity and tobacco issues. She received her bachelor’s degree from Randolph-Macon College, her master’s degree from the University of Tennessee, and her doctorate from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Sudip Parikh, PhD

Sudip Parikh is the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and executive publisher of the Science family of journals, since January 2020. Parikh has spent over two decades at the intersection of science, policy, and business as a Senate staffer, life science business leader, and in the policy community. He was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship while earning his Ph.D. in macromolecular structure and chemistry from the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California and earned his BS in Applied Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

Gretta Stone

Gretta Stone is a health policy communications consultant at Reservoir Communications Group with deep knowledge of the biopharmaceutical sector and the health system more broadly.

At Reservoir, she works with a range of clients on advocacy, reputation, and organization brand. Before coming to Reservoir, she served as Deputy Vice President of Policy & Research at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), where she led a range of issues related to the value of medicines, the R&D process, FDA regulation, and personalized medicine. In her more than 15 years at PhRMA, she worked extensively on orphan drugs, cancer, the biopharmaceutical pipeline, the research ecosystem, the cost of medicines, and marketing and promotion. Prior to joining PhRMA, Stone worked in a lab researching language and the brain at Georgetown University, where she received a Bachelor of Science in biology.