Sawyer Seminar Events 2024-2025
Below is the Fall/Winter 2024 schedule at a glance. Additional details (including Spring 2025 schedule) are forthcoming.
Grace Wickerson Lecture
September 12 at 4pm
Federation of American Scientists (Speaker Bio)
Register and Add to Calendar
"Changing the System: A Policy Agenda to Achieve Health Equity in Medical Innovation"
Black and brown Americans already bearing the brunt of compounding inequities and structural racism will enter sites of care and experience further harm from biased medical technologies and interventions. For example, pulse oximeters, the ubiquitous device that measures oxygen levels, have been proven to operate less effectively on darker skin, causing life threatening care delays. As one of the nation’s largest single-source funders of research and development, the nation’s health regulatory body, the nation’s largest healthcare payer, and the operator of the nation’s largest healthcare system, the Veterans Health Administration, the federal government can play a critical role in correcting bias in technologies and incentivizing future processes for equitable innovation. This talk will unpack the policy levers to change the medical innovation landscape and ensure a more just technology future.
The Light Collective Panel Discussion
Tuesday, October 22 at 4pm
Speakers: Andrea Downing, Valencia Robinson, and Ashley Dedmon (About The Light Collective)
Register and Add to Calendar
View Recording
"No Aggregation without Representation"
There has never been a greater need or opportunity to advance the rights, interests, and voices of patient communities in health technology. The emergence and growth of digital health technology and social media platforms over the past decade has caused a radical shift in global healthcare. Patient populations increasingly turn to social media and other digital health technologies for information and support as they navigate their health challenges.
October is both breast cancer awareness month, and cybersecurity awareness month. Come listen to three dynamic patient community leaders at the forefront of technology advocacy, cybersecurity, and patient rights.
Jeremy Greene Lecture
November 21 at 4pm*
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (Speaker Bio)
Register and Add to Calendar
*After the Lecture, attendees are welcome to stay for a discussion at 5:15pm with the guest speaker on medical humanities methodologies, translational experience in a medical setting, and multidisciplinary/multi-institutional collaboration
"After the Single Use: Healthcare Waste and Environmental Justice"
The modern medical enterprise is distinctively wasteful, but not all people pay the same price for the benefits of our single-use medical technologies. In a relatively short period of time, we have naturalized the use of single-use masks, single-use surgical drapes, single-use plastic syringes, single-use surgical tools, and single-use diagnostic tests, all wrapped in multiple layers of single-use plastics—and then forgotten there was ever any alternative.
In this talk, Jeremy Greene traces the links between local, national, and global frames of environmental justice in relation to healthcare waste. Only with attention to local historical and social context, he argues, can we work to unseat medical waste as a natural category and reconsider it as the outcome of a set of value decisions we have made in the past, and can change in the future.
Craig Watkins Lecture
December 5 at 4pm*
University of Texas at Austin (Speaker Bio)
Register and Add to Calendar
*After the Lecture, attendees are welcome to stay for a discussion at 5:15pm with the guest speaker on medical humanities methodologies, translational experience in a medical setting, and multidisciplinary/multi-institutional collaboration
"Inclusive Design and the Future of Responsible Health AI"
There is widespread consensus that artificial intelligence will play a significant role in the future of healthcare. But several critical questions must be addressed including the need to develop Health AI that is responsible and trustworthy. Drawing from a series of AI-based research projects, Watkins explores why the future of Health AI must be influenced by the AI ethical principle, “inclusive design.” In the context of this talk, inclusive design is defined as the intentional and strategic act of broadening the kinds of expertise and experiences that inform how we develop and deploy AI/ML to mitigate health disparities.
Susannah Fox Lecture
WEBINAR: January 23, 2025 at 4pm
Author of "Rebel Health" (Speaker Bio)
Webinar Registration Link
"Tapping into the Patient-led Revolution"
When mainstream health care fails, people turn to each other to find or invent solutions. It is our opportunity to learn from these rebels and step into our power as Seekers, Networkers, Solvers, and Champions.
Heidi Larson Lecture
February 26, 2025 at 4pm
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (Speaker Bio)
Register and Add to Calendar
*After the Lecture, attendees are welcome to stay for a discussion at 5:15pm with the guest speaker on medical humanities methodologies, translational experience in a medical setting, and multidisciplinary/multi-institutional collaboration
"Emotions, Inequities and Technologies: Why they matter to Public Health"
In 2021, Professor Larson received a MacArthur Foundation award under a special time-limited fund under the theme “ Addressing Inequities and Injustices in the context of Covid-19 Recovery.” She will present her findings from what became a 70-country study and new initiative called The Global Listening Project, which has a strong theme on trust in technology (particularly health and information technologies). This work builds on her 15 years of her work leading the Vaccine Confidence Project which she founded in 2010 and focused on understanding the drivers of trust and confidence in vaccines.
Roderic Crooks Lecture
April 10, 2025 at 4pm
University of California, Irvine (Speaker Bio)
Register and Add to Calendar
*After the Lecture, attendees are welcome to stay for a discussion at 5:15pm with the guest speaker on medical humanities methodologies, translational experience in a medical setting, and multidisciplinary/multi-institutional collaboration
"Access Is Capture: How Edtech Reproduces Racial Inequality"
Over the past two decades, racially and economically segregated primary and secondary schools in the United States have hosted a number of technology-focused interventions aimed in one way or another at improving public education. Based on several years of field-based research in Los Angeles, Access Is Capture (University of California Press, 2024) argues that the pursuit of data-intensive computation in K-12 education enjoins the public to configure a racial project, one marked by extractions of capital from minoritized communities and from the state via investment in commercial digital tools and platforms.
Image: Computer specialist John Smith arranges and examines cannisters of magnetic tape used in the processing of medical data at the National Library of Medicine (c. 1960). Source: https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101648151-img