People

 

Co-Founders

 

Thomas Goetz

Thomas Goetz, a co-founder at Building H, is a journalist, entrepreneur, and author. He uses data and design to help people understand and navigate complicated issues in their world. Thomas is the co-founder of Iodine, an award-winning website that helps millions of people make sense of their health and medicines. In 2016, Iodine was acquired by GoodRx, America’s leading source for prescription drug savings, where he presently serves as chief of research. Thomas was previously the executive editor at WIRED, which he led to a dozen National Magazine Awards in as many years. He began his career as a reporter at the Village Voice and the Wall Street Journal. He currently writes the LaunchPad column for Inc. magazine. Full profile.

 
 

Steve Downs

Steve Downs works at Building H as a co-founder. Prior to his role at Building H, Steve was the chief technology and strategy officer at Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) where he led a transformation of the Foundation’s practice of program strategy, putting in place an approach that is highly flexible and adaptive. Over his career at RWJF, Steve held a variety of management roles — including chief technology and information officer, assistant vice president of the health group, and founding leader of the foundation’s innovation portfolio — while also funding and working directly with a broad portfolio of innovators at the intersection of tech and health. Downs is a lecturer at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) at Stanford University and adjunct faculty at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. Full profile.

 
 

Research Associate

 

Alec McMorris

Alec McMorris is working as a research associate with Building H, conducting a literature analysis on the health impacts of social media and exploring how different platforms impact critical health behaviors. He is interested in researching marginalized communities and contextualizing social determinants to improve healthcare access and education. Alec was previously a USC Gehr Family Center Student Innovator Fellow, where he contributed to the thematic coding of interviews around self-expressed identity among Latinx and non-Latinx Child Cancer Survivor (CCS). Furthermore, he examined the linked quantitative data to understand trauma centrality. Recently, he completed his final semester at the University of Southern California. He will be receiving his Master’s in Public Health with a concentration in global health. Alec plans to further his education and apply to PhD programs next fall. Full profile.

 

Advisors

 

Niko Canner

Niko Canner founded the strategy consultancy Incandescent in 2013. He advises leaders of foundations and non-profits regarding the application of strategy to systems change, as well as serving as a thought partner to corporate leaders on strategy, organization and innovation. Alongside his work with larger enterprises, Niko works with a wide range of for-profit and non-profit founders and serves on several boards. He has been an advisor to Acumen for many years, and serves on the their Advisory Council. Prior to founding Incandescent, Niko was co-founder and Managing Partner of the consulting firm Katzenbach Partners, Senior Partner at Booz & Company following the sale of Katzenbach to Booz in 2009, and then a member of the Management Committee of Bridgewater Associates. Full profile.

 
 

Joanne Cheung

Joanne Cheung is a Chinese-American artist and designer. Trained in architecture and urban development, she uses cities as a lens for studying collective action in human and planetary health. She is an Affiliate at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and a Lecturer at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design and UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. She formerly served as a Director at the global design and innovation firm IDEO, where she led the systems change and new ventures portfolios. Her work has been exhibited internationally and featured in Wallpaper, Wired, and the New York Times Magazine. Her recent publications include “Policy Prototyping for the Future of Work” (Harvard Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, 2020) and “Real Estate Politik: Democracy and the Financialization of Social Networks” (Journal of Social Computing, 2021). Full profile.

 
 

Bradley Horowitz

Bradley Horowitz is a Vice President of Product Management at Google. Most recently he helped create Area 120, Google’s incubator for internally-sourced innovation. He’s led a large number of products, programs and initiatives at Google — including Google for Entrepreneurs, Google Photos, Gmail, Google Voice, blogger, and Google News. Before joining Google in February 2008, Horowitz was Yahoo’s vice president of Advanced Development where he drove the acquisitions of Flickr and MyBlogLog, launched the Brickhouse incubator and developed new products like Yahoo! Pipes. Additionally, he was responsible for the company’s initiative to open up its platform which included overseeing the Yahoo Developer Network (YDN). Previously, he was co-founder and CTO of Virage, where he oversaw the technical direction of the company from its founding through its IPO and eventual acquisition by Autonomy. Full profile.

 
 

Risa Lavizzo-Mourey

Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, MD, MBA, is the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Professor Emerita of Health Policy and Health Equity at the University of Pennsylvania. She is Trustee and President Emerita of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a position she held for nearly 15 years. Under her leadership, the RWJF has focused on building a comprehensive Culture of Health for all, extending the Foundation’s 40-year history of addressing key public health issues. A specialist in Geriatric Medicine, Lavizzo-Mourey earned her medical degree from Harvard Medical School, and holds an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. An expert in health policy, she is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The American Philosophical Society, and a former member the President’s Council for Fitness, Sports and Nutrition as well as a frequent consultant to Federal agencies. Dr Lavizo-Mourey is member of the Board of Directors for Better Therapeutics, General Electric, Intel, and Merck corporations. She is the Chair of the Smithsonian Institution Board of Regents and serves the boards of TIAA and HHMI among others. Full profile. 

 
 

Kelly McCarthy

Kelly McCarthy is Head of Impact at Vistria PRG at The Vistria Group, where she leads the firm’s impact management strategy. Kelly is a pioneer in impact investing, having dedicated her career to redefining the role of business and investment as a force for good. Kelly served as Chief Impact Officer at the Global Impact Investing Network, where she spent over a decade leading the organization’s work to develop tools and infrastructure for integrating impact into investment management. During this time, she was the chief architect behind the IRIS+ system, the most widely used impact investing standard in the world for measuring, managing, and optimizing impact performance. Kelly built an impact measurement and management practice for a global portfolio of 250 companies across 7 environmental themes for New Ventures at the World Resources Institute and has worked for the consultancy SustainAbility on accountability within Fortune 500 companies. Early in her career, Kelly co-founded Good Harvest Market, an organic foods and lifestyle marketplace dedicated to ensuring that all socio-economic groups have the same access to healthy living choices. Full profile.

 
 

Advisor and Core Collaborator

 

Sara Singer

Sara J. Singer, MBA, PhD, is a Professor of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Professor of Organizational Behavior, by courtesy, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She is Associate Director of the Clinical Excellence Research Center in the Department of Medicine and Faculty Director of the Health Leadership, Organization, and Innovation Labs in the Division of Primary Care and Population Health. She is affiliated faculty with Stanford Department of Health Policy, Clinical Excellence Research Center, Center for Innovation in Global Health, and Woods Institute for the Environment. Dr. Singer studies health care teams and organizations to understand how leaders and policymakers can improve the safety, quality, and equity of health care delivery through changes in institutional culture, leadership, organization design, and team dynamics. Full profile.

 

Current Collaborators

 

Gracianna Breault

Gracianna Breault works with Building H as a research assistant on the Building H Index. Gracianna is a second year MPH student at the University of Southern California, with a concentration in community health promotion and education. She has a BS in Kinesiology from Seattle University and is a certified personal trainer. She is also studying to get a nutritionist certification. Gracianna has a deep passion for helping people live healthier more sustainable lives. Her goal is to teach others how to have a more well rounded approach to leading a healthy lifestyle and ultimately reducing risk of disease on a nationwide level. Full profile.

 
 

Cheryl Collins

Cheryl Collins is working with Building H as a research assistant analyzing the impact that fast food chain restaurants, meal kit services, and food delivery services have on health behaviors. Her experience includes product management of healthcare infection prevention solutions at a medical device manufacturing company. Cheryl is interested in studying how exposures in everyday life can foster preventive health behaviors beyond the healthcare industry. She is currently completing her MPH at the University of Southern California with an emphasis on epidemiology and biostatistics. Full profile.

 
 

Evan Cook

Evan Cook works with Building H as a research assistant on the Building H Index. he in his second year in the MPH Program at University of Southern California with an emphasis in epidemiology and biostatistics. Evan has an interest in the relationship and interactions between food/ nutrition, lifestyle, and long term health. He hopes to use the knowledge gained from both current and previous research to better understand how people can maximize their longevity. Full profile.

 

Inah Golez

Inah Golez is working with Building H as a research assistant, helping to develop a model that can be used to quantify the societal cost of health behaviors that are influenced by different consumer products and services. She has experience working in the pharmaceutical industry and in academic research laboratories that specialize in cancer research, immunology, and drug development. After years of working on the bench, Inah hopes to use her experience to extend her understanding of how health behaviors can shape disease prevention, population health, and health equity at a macro level. She is currently a final year University of Southern California MPH student with a focus on Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Full profile. 

 
 

Abigail Horn

Abigail Horn, PhD, is a Research Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and a Research Lead at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California. The general area of her research is the combination of approaches from network and computational social science and systems modeling with large-scale data sources to design solutions to pressing public health challenges from food supply systems and nutrition to infectious disease modeling. Her recent work has focused on using novel data streams including human mobility from smartphones, social media, and restaurant menus to quantify how people of diverse backgrounds move around their environments to access food, how these environments link to their diet and health, and how this informs more optimized strategies for interventions to improve nutritional health. Full profile.

 
 

Lorena Moreno Aguilar

Lorena is working with Building H as a research assistant analyzing the impact that popular gaming products like consoles and games have on different health behaviors. Lorena is a pre-med student interested in disease prevention through health education and in bringing real-life solutions to the problems her community is facing. She currently works in the public health sector by supporting COVID prevention and mitigation efforts. She has previously done research on immune perturbation during development and its effects on disease susceptibility in adulthood. As a final year MPH student at the University of Southern California, her focus has been combining her previous experience and education to maximize her impact as a public health educator. Full profile.

 

Vanessa Rogers

Vanessa Rogers is is working with Building H as a research assistant on the Building H Index, with a focus on transportation. Vanessa is a published author, founder of Well Life, Inc., and a second-year MPH student at USC with a concentration in Community Health Promotion. With a background in behavioral science, health research, and nutrition, Vanessa has been leading change as a National Board Certified Health & Wellness Coach for over a decade, designing and implementing group and individual health empowerment programs. Her passion lies in reshaping health culture and built environments to foster the wellbeing of communities with more ease, leading to equitable health outcomes and quality of life. She is an active board member of the Mental Health Commission of Contra Costa County and an advocate for positive change. Full profile.

 

Alums

 

We’ve been fortunate to work with a number of terrific people who’ve joined us on staff as volunteers or students completing practicum assignments:

 
 
 

Community Supporters