Linda Alexander
Dr. Linda Alexander is chief academic officer for the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH). She is responsible for initiatives that support education, accreditation, practice, professional development, workforce development and data management. She works collaboratively with ASPPH members, stakeholders and global partner organizations and institutions to enhance educational excellence and strengthen the public health workforce. She brings to this position over 30 years of strategic leadership experience through roles in academia, government and community-based non-government organizations. Dr. Alexander contributed significantly to research in the field of tobacco-related health disparities as a principal investigator on federally funded grants and contracts and as senior volume editor for the National Cancer Institute’s Monograph 22, the first such publication devoted exclusively to a comprehensive understanding of smoking-attributable diseases for racial, ethnic and social minorities.
Howard Berkes
Howard Berkes is a retired investigative reporter who worked at NPR for 38 years and garnered more than 40 journalism awards. His investigative work focused on occupational safety and health, environmental health and regulation, workers’ compensation, and the resurgence of black lung disease, including a previously unreported epidemic of severe black lung. Berkes has partnered with ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity, PBS Frontline and local newspapers and public radio stations. He was awarded a Nieman Journalism Fellowship at Harvard University in 1997.
Fernanda Camarena
Fernanda Camarena is an award-winning TV and radio reporter and editor who is currently a faculty member at the Poynter Institute. She was previously a manager on NBC News’ Standards and Practices team, where she provided support and guidance to all NBC News, MSNBC, Telemundo and streaming platforms to ensure quality control and high journalistic standards. She’s led teams and coached and mentored journalists who changed lives and changed laws.
Her career started in TV news. She was the youngest news anchor and correspondent in the history of Televisa in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and continued with on-air reporting jobs at Telemundo in El Paso – where she helped launch the first Telemundo news program in that city.
She’s worked as a senior editor for the Texas Newsroom, an NPR collaborative project between Texas local stations and NPR National. She also worked as a senior editor for Latino USA, where she oversaw the company’s news team and brought in investigative work through collaborations, and at the Center for Investigative Reporting, where she won numerous awards, including a Peabody.
Camarena was born and raised in Ciudad Juarez, across the US-Mexico border from El Paso, and crossed the international border every day to attend elementary school through college.
Robert Harrison
Dr. Robert Harrison founded the Occupational and Environmental Medicine Clinic at the University of California San Francisco, where he continues as senior physician. He has degrees in medicine and public health and has diagnosed and treated thousands of patients with work-related and environmentally induced diseases or injuries. Dr. Harrison also directs the worker-tracking and investigation program for the California Department of Public Health. He is the co-author of the major textbook in his field and has written numerous articles and papers on occupational health.
Annette LoVoi (chair)
Annette LoVoi is the former chair of the Consumer Reports board of directors. She has dedicated her career to working on behalf of consumers, particularly low-income and immigrant consumers, and has experience at all levels of government, from the U.S. Congress to the Texas governor’s office. Former Texas Governor Ann Richards appointed her as the state’s first ombuds to hear and analyze public concerns and advance policy and management change. LoVoi was the first executive director of Texas Appleseed, a nonprofit created to attract top lawyers to donate pro bono work to social-justice projects. Under her leadership, Texas Appleseed spearheaded the passage of legislation that has more than tripled state expenditures on indigent defense. Her work with Appleseed also led to a first-of-its-kind law in Texas affording consumer protections to immigrants who send home tens of millions of dollars a year in earnings – money transfers known as remittances. The Texas law served as a catalyst for a more far-reaching federal law following the 2008 recession. LoVoi has twice been elected to public office, serving as a citywide trustee for the Austin Independent School District.
Jim Morris
Jim Morris is founder, executive director and editor-in-chief of Public Health Watch. He has been a journalist since 1978, focusing on public health and the environment, and has received more than 80 awards for his work, including the George Polk award, the Sidney Hillman award, three National Association of Science Writers awards, two national Edward R. Murrow awards and five Texas Headliners awards. Morris spent more than 13 years with the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative news organization in Washington, D.C., as a senior reporter, managing editor, acting CEO and executive editor. While there, he directed a global investigation of the asbestos industry that won the John B. Oakes award for environmental reporting from Columbia University and an IRE Medal from Investigative Reporters and Editors in 2011. In 2013, Morris and two colleagues received the Edgar A. Poe award for national reporting from the White House Correspondents’ Association for “Hard Labor,” a series on health and safety threats to American workers. Morris helped edit “Breathless and Burdened,” a 2013 investigation into the flawed federal black lung benefits program that won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. He spent the first half of his career in Texas, working for newspapers in Dallas, El Paso, Fort Worth, Galveston, Houston, Longview and San Angelo.
Anne Robertson
Anne Robertson is vice president at Robertson Stephens, a wealth-management firm, and founder of Toxic Free Future for Our Children. She has dedicated 25 years to developing revenue-building strategies for nonprofits and socially responsible businesses and has chaired major fundraising events. She has concentrated her energy on the health effects of chemical exposures, especially among children. Chronic illness and emotional distress among our nation’s youth have increased at an alarming rate during the past 20 years due to such exposures. In that time, conditions such as autism, asthma, cancer, learning disabilities, diabetes, depression and obesity have skyrocketed. Robertson has committed her time and resources to bring together a coalition of concerned individuals, organizations, businesses and communities for the sake of our children’s future. She serves or has served on the boards of organizations including Healthy Child Healthy World, the Mt. Sinai Children’s Environmental Health Center and the Texas Campaign for the Environment. She is the great-granddaughter of Richard S. Reynolds, founder of the Reynolds Metals Company. Her upbringing provided a unique perspective on the power – both positive and negative – big business can wield in the marketplace.
Jonathan Ruckdeschel
Jonathan Ruckdeschel has represented victims of asbestos-related disease since 1997. A graduate of the University of Maryland School of Law, he is licensed to practice law in the state and federal trial and appellate courts for Maryland and Florida, and the Supreme Court of the United States. Before starting his own practice in 2004, he was an associate attorney with the law firms of Parker, Dumler & Kiely, LLP and Gebhardt & Smith, LLP, building his experience in complex litigation. In 2004, he founded The Ruckdeschel Law Firm, LLC, to allow him the freedom of pursuing justice for his clients without compromise. Since then, he has successfully challenged many of the largest corporations – in the United States and abroad – on behalf of his clients and their families.
Ricardo Sandoval-Palos
Ricardo Sandoval-Palos is the public editor of the Public Broadcasting Service. In that role, he serves as the interlocutor between audiences and PBS and its community of content creators. Sandoval-Palos is an award-winning investigative reporter and multimedia editor. He has helped shape the reporting teams at nonprofit newsrooms such as InsideClimate News, 100Reporters and palabra, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ digital publishing platform. Sandoval-Palos is a former supervising editor of NPR’s Morning Edition, was an editor with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and was assistant city editor at the Sacramento Bee newspaper. He was a Latin America correspondent for The Dallas Morning News and the San Jose Mercury News, and an investigative reporter for the Orange County Register and the San Francisco Examiner. With his wife, Susan Ferriss, Sandoval-Palos coauthored the biography, “The Fight in The Fields: Cesar Chavez and The Farmworkers Movement.” His work has been recognized by the Overseas Press Club, the Inter-American Press Association, the Gerald Loeb Awards for Business Journalism, the Society of Professional Journalists, Boston College’s Myers Center Awards and the Los Angeles Press Club.
Cliff Walker
Cliff Walker is a seasoned progressive strategist with 18 years of experience in campaign management, organization-building, and candidate advising. In 2012, he spearheaded the Texas House Democratic campaign effort, and in 2014 helped launch Battleground Texas. Joining the Texas Democratic Party in 2015, he created Project LIFT, an initiative that recruited, trained, and elected over 150 candidates to local, nonpartisan offices. Promoted to Deputy Executive Director in 2019, Cliff guided strategic direction, shaped the party’s voice, and secured funding to sustain a robust team of over 250 campaign operatives and technical experts. In 2021, Cliff co-founded Seeker Strategies, a progressive, POC-owned public affairs firm where he currently advises labor, environmental, and voting rights organizations, leveraging his deep expertise in strategic communications and political advocacy. Cliff is a San Antonio native who studied Government at Yale University.
Susan White
Susan White is an independent investigative editor who has edited three Pulitzer Prize-winning projects. She was the first assigning editor hired by ProPublica, where she edited Sheri Fink’s Pulitzer-winning project “Five Days at Memorial,” about the collapse of health care at a New Orleans hospital in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. At ProPublica she also edited Abrahm Lustgarten’s ground-breaking reporting on hydraulic fracturing, which won a George Polk Award for environmental reporting. As executive editor of InsideClimate News, she edited its Pulitzer- winning project “The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard of.” At The San Diego Union-Tribune she was an editor on the project that sent former Congressman Randy Cunningham to prison for tax evasion and conspiracy to commit bribery, mail fraud and wire fraud.
Chris Worthington
Chris Worthington is the former editor-in-chief and founder of APM Reports, which won many national awards, including two Peabodys and a George Polk Award. Worthington also led the Minnesota Public Radio News, once public radio’s largest regional news operation, during a time when the station was honored regionally and nationally for its journalism and investigative reporting with Peabody, duPont and Murrow awards. Worthington was the managing editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press and worked for Newsday and The Dallas Morning News.