Board of Directors
Richard Berman, MBA, MPH
Richard Berman (Secretary) is the Associate Vice President for Strategic Initiatives for Innovation and Research at the University of South Florida, visiting social entrepreneurship professor in the MUMA College of Business, and a professor in the Institute for Advanced Discovery & Innovation.
Mr. Berman is currently an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences (formerly known as the Institute of Medicine) in Washington, DC. He currently serves as a board member for Emblem Health, Seeds of Peace, the Savannah Centre for Diplomacy, Democracy, and Development in Abuja, Nigeria, CATASYS, Inc., and is the Vice Chair of the Board of Directors of Opportunities Industrialization Centers of South Florida. Previously, he has served on the Board of Directors for other organizations, including the Lillian Vernon Corporation; the Westchester Jewish Chronicle, where he chaired the Advisory Board; the American Jewish Committee, Westchester Chapter; and the March of Dimes.
Previous professional experience includes working as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company and serving as the Executive Vice President of NYU Medical Center and Professor of Health Care Management at the NYU School of Medicine. Mr. Berman also served as the Special Advisor to the leader of the African Union United Nations Peacekeeping Mission in Darfur, has held various roles at Korn Ferry International and Howe-Lewis International, and served in cabinet positions with the New York State Government and the U.S. Department of Health Education and Welfare. In 1995, Mr. Berman was selected by Manhattanville College to serve as its tenth President. Mr. Berman is credited with the turnaround of the College, where he served until 2009.
Mr. Berman received his BBA, MBA, and MPH from the University of Michigan and holds honorary doctorates from Manhattanville College and New York Medical College.
Charles R. Evans, FACHE
Charles R. Evans is President of the International Health Services Group (IHSG), a social enterprise he founded in 2007 to support health services development in underserved areas of the world. IHSG’s objective is to collaborate with established organizations to supplement their capabilities in healthcare management and development as they work to achieve their broader missions. Current projects are located in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. IHSG also founded and supports the Leadership Corps for management capacity building. Finally, IHSG is active in encouraging international hospital partnerships between U.S. hospitals and hospitals in economically developing countries.
Mr. Evans is a Senior Advisor at Jackson Healthcare, an Atlanta-based consortium of companies that provide physician and clinician staffing, anesthesia management, and healthcare information technology solutions proven to improve clinical and financial outcomes to hospitals, health systems and physician groups throughout the United States.
Mr. Evans serves as a member of the boards at Jackson Healthcare, MiMedx Group, AnewMed, and Arena. Additionally, he serves on the boards of non-profit organizations including MedShare International, Hospital Charitable Service Awards, and FaithBridge Foster Care. He also serves as a member of the Global Group for Healthcare Partnerships and the International Hospital Federation’s Healthcare Management Special Interest Group. He was recently recognized by the International Hospital Federation as an honorary member.
In 2012, Mr. Evans attained the Board Leadership Fellow credential of the National Association of Corporate Directors. He is an honorary member of the International Hospital Federation and a Fellow in the American College of Healthcare Executives, where he served as a Governor of the College (2004-2007), Chairman Officer (2008-2011), and was the recipient of the 2014 ACHE Gold Medal Award – the highest honor the organization bestows. He currently serves as Special Advisor to ACHE on International Affairs.
Other professional experience includes managing company divisions including North Carolina, MidAmerica, and Southeast for the Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), as well as serving as President of the Eastern Group. Prior to joining HCA, Evans served in executive positions at Memorial Medical Center of Jacksonville (Florida) and Community Hospitals, Indianapolis, Indiana. While at Jacksonville, Mr. Evans and his team participated in an AIHA hospital strengthening partnership with Murmansk, Russia.
A West Virginia native, Mr. Evans received an undergraduate degree from West Virginia Wesleyan College, a Master of Arts from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA from Indiana University.
David Greeley (ex officio)
As AIHA’s President and CEO, Mr. David Greeley is responsible for setting and carrying out the organization’s vision; managing its programs, personnel, and finances; and increasing its visibility and resources.
Mr. Greeley has close to 20 years of experience with international nonprofit health and development organizations and more than 10 years of experience in the private sector. Immediately prior to joining AIHA, he served as President and CEO of Accordia Global Health Foundation. As the flagship corporate responsibility program of the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, Inc., Accordia’s mission is to improve healthcare capacity in Africa. Over the past decade, the Foundation established and helped develop the now renowned Infectious Disease Institute (IDI) in Uganda.
Previously, Mr. Greeley served as Senior Vice President of External Affairs for the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development (TB Alliance), a product development partnership working to bring new tuberculosis treatments to the market. At the TB Alliance, he was responsible for resource mobilization, policy and advocacy, community engagement, and the integration of communications into the external affairs agenda. Prior to the TB Alliance, Mr. Greeley served as Vice President for the Center for Private Sector Health Initiatives at AED, (which subsequently became FHI360), where he managed a team of some 50 individuals and a project portfolio of approximately $35 million annually. The Center’s projects spanned malaria, reproductive health, and HIV/AIDS, and operated in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.
From 1998-2008, Mr. Greeley worked for Merck & Co. Inc., first leading the public affairs, communications, and policy function for the Latin American division and then heading up the company’s global HIV/AIDS programs, policy, and stakeholder relations within the Office of Corporate Responsibility. Prior to Merck, he worked for Population Services International (PSI) for more than seven years. There he created the organization’s new business development department and led operations in India before being tapped to oversee PSI programming throughout Asia, as well as the business development department. At CARE, Mr. Greeley worked in Indonesia, Belize, and Niger in various programmatic and management capacities. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Burkina Faso, West Africa, in the early 1980s.
Mr. Greeley has health expertise in HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria, family planning, maternal and child health, and building healthcare capacity, as well as experience in public affairs, communications, policy and advocacy, developing public-private partnerships, resource mobilization, and program and financial management. He has travelled to more than 90 countries and worked in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the United States, including extended stays in Burkina Faso, Niger, the Democratic Republic of Congo, India, and Indonesia. He has a Master’s Degree in International Relations from Columbia University with a dual degree in Economic and Political Development and African Affairs.
Muhammad Ali Pate, MD, MBA
Dr. Muhammad Ali Pate joined the World Bank Group in July 2019 as the new Global Director for Health, Nutrition, and Population and as the new Director of the Global Financing Facility for Women, Children and Adolescents. Previously, Dr. Pate served as the Chief Executive Officer of Big Win Philanthropy, a foundation that invests in maternal, child, and reproductive health, nutrition, and education, among other areas. He is an adjunct professor with the Duke Global Health Institute at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina and served as the 2016 R.L. Menschel Senior Leadership fellow at Harvard University’s Chan School of Public Health.
From 2011 to 2013, Dr. Pate served as Minister of State for Health in Nigeria, where he helped mobilize more than US$1 billion in additional financing for primary health care, implemented innovative programs such as prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, clinical governance, and chaired the Presidential Task Force on Polio Eradication. He led Nigeria’s Saving One Million Lives Initiative and previously served as Executive Director of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency from 2008-2011.
Dr. Pate served as co-chair of the Harvard-London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine panel to review and advise the global health system on the lessons learned from the 2014 West African Ebola Outbreak. Since June 2010, Dr. Pate has co-chaired the Private Sector Health Alliance of Nigeria, which raised US$24 million domestically for investments to complement the Nigerian government’s Saving One Million Lives Initiative.
Prior to his public service in Nigeria, Dr. Pate worked at the World Bank as a senior public health specialist overseeing programs in Africa and the East Asia and Pacific region.
Earlier in his career, Dr. Pate served as a resident physician at Howard University Hospital in Washington, D.C. He completed a sub-specialty fellowship in infectious diseases at the University of Rochester Medical Center in upstate New York. He also served as a medical officer in Nigeria and with the British Medical Research Council Laboratoriesin The Gambia.
He earned a medical degree in 1990 from Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria, an MBA with a health sector concentration from Duke University, and a Master of Science in Health System Management from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Dr. Pate has been honored with numerous global health awards, including the 2012 Harvard Health Leadership Award, and has authored or contributed to dozens of peer reviewed publications and books.
Ariel Pablos-Mendez, MD, MPH
Dr. Ariel Pablos-Méndez is a physician, scholar, and creative global health leader committed to achieving a world where universal health coverage is a reality for everyone, everywhere.
Dr. Pablos-Méndez is a board-certified specialist in internal medicine and a professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center.
From 2011 to 2016, Dr. Pablos-Méndez led the Bureau for Global Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), where he drove the vision to end preventable child and maternal deaths and contributed to shaping an AIDS-Free Generation while supporting health systems strengthening, family planning, and country ownership through initiatives such as the Global Financing Facility for Every Woman Every Child. He participated in the U.S. response to Ebola and Zika and championed the Global Virome Project.
Dr. Pablos-Méndez began his public health career at Columbia University working on the emergence of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in New York City in 1991; in 1997 he led the Global Surveillance Project on Anti-Tuberculosis Drug Resistance at the World Health Organization (WHO). In both instances, his research and publications brought about significant and successful policy changes in the field.
He previously served as Managing Director at the Rockefeller Foundation, where he developed and led the Foundation’s initiatives on public-private partnerships for diseases of poverty and the transformation of global health systems toward universal health coverage in Africa and Asia. He also served as Director of Knowledge Management at in the WHO in Geneva, where he established the organization’s first eHealth unit.
Dr. Pablos-Méndez received his MD from the University of Guadalajara (Mexico) and his MPH from Columbia University. He has more than 100 publications and has been a member of various international commissions and boards. In November 2017, he joined the Board of Directors of the TB Alliance, an organization he helped create in 2001.
Sheila A. Ryan, PhD, RN (Chair, Nominating Committee)
Dr. Ryan is professor and the Charlotte Peck Lienemann and Distinguished Alumni Chair, as well as Director of International Programs in Nursing, at the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Nursing in Omaha.
Dr. Ryan recently completed board service for theInstitute for Healthcare Improvement and theRobert Wood Johnson Institute of MedicineHealth Policy Fellow Selection Committee. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursingand an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.
Dr. Ryan’s career includes some 25 years experience as dean of two nursing schools: the University of Rochester School of Nursing andCreighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. Dr. Ryan earned her BSN from the University of Nebraska (1969), her MSN in Psychiatric Nursing from the University of California-San Francisco (1971), and her PhD in clinical nursing research from the University of Arizona (1981).
Dr. Ryan joined the AIHA Board of Directors in 2000. She served as treasurer and chair of the finance and audit committee from 2004 to 2008 and is the current Board chairman.
Alan Weinstein, MBA (Treasurer; Chair, Finance & Audit Committee)
During his 35 year career in the U.S. health industry, Mr. Weinstein has focused on developing start-up businesses by providing services to hospitals through shared programs intended to achieve greater economies of scale.
Over the past 16 years, Mr. Weinstein’s has primarily served as an advisor or board member of health-related companies that sell goods or services to healthcare providers. His consultant services since 2000 have provided insights into hospital organization and management for supplier and services clients. He has provided sales and marketing guidance to many companies and has also assisted companies in the creation of advisory boards, advising on their structure and compensation arrangements, as well as the identification and selection of prospective candidates for these positions.
Mr. Weinstein was the founder and President of Premier Inc.; founder and President and Chief Executive Officer of the Premier Health Alliance; and executive vice president of the Illinois Hospital Association.
His current board and advisory positions include Akorn Pharmaceuticals, OpenMarkets, Champion Healthcare Technologies, Rendina Healthcare Real Estate, and the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. Mr. Weinstein has been a member of AIHA’s Board of Directors since 1992.
Mr. Weinstein received a BA from Allegheny College and an MBA from Cornell University’s Sloan Program in Health Administration.
Debrework Zewdie, PhD
Dr. Debrework Zewdie, Distinguished Scholar at the Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy of the City University of New York (CUNY) and Senior Leadership Fellow at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, is a committed, dynamic, and inspiring public health leader with more than 35 years of experience in international development. Most of her career has been dedicated to mitigating the cross-sectorial impact of the HIV epidemic, women’s empowerment, and poverty.
Over the course of 16 years, Dr. Zewdie has held several key leadership positions at The World Bank, including Manager of the AIDS Campaign for Africa (1999-2002) and Lead Population and Reproductive Health Specialist for the Africa Region (1994-1999). During her tenure, she conceptualized and managed the groundbreaking US$1 billion multi-country HIV/AIDS Program that changed the AIDS funding landscape and pioneered the large scale multi-sectoral response with direct financing to civil society and the private sector. As Director of The World Bank’s Global HIV/AIDS Program, she provided strategic vision and direction for the coordinated resource mobilization efforts of a global HIV/AIDS funding portfolio totaling US$4 billion.
Dr. Zewdie also served in several pivotal roles that contributed to the transformation of The Global Fund, serving as Interim Director of Country Programs (2007-2008), Deputy Executive Director (2010-2012), and Deputy General Manager (2012-2013).
In addition to her work with these leading multilateral organizations, Dr. Zewdie was Deputy Regional Director and Special Assistant to the Director for FHI 360’s USAID-funded AIDS Control and Prevention Project in the Africa Region (1992-1994). In this capacity, she established and managed a highly effective regional office, providing managerial and technical guidance to staff, leading teams and developing short- and mid-term HIV plans for 17 African countries in coordination relevant stakeholders. She acted as focal point for AIDS programming for women.
Dr. Zewdie’s earlier professional experience includes work as a Senior Program Manager for the Ethiopian Ministry of Health’s AIDS/STD Prevention and Control Program (1991-1992), where she forged a strong foundation for the development of a multi-sectoral approach to HIV-related treatment, care, and prevention; Deputy Director and Head of the Referral Laboratory for AIDS at the National Research Institute of Health in Addis Ababa (1988-1991), where she supervised day-to-day operation of the diagnostic laboratories, trained laboratory technicians, established quality assurance systems, and set up a network of 34 screening laboratories in all blood banks and regional hospitals across Ethiopia; and Acting Director of the Ethiopian National Research Institute of Health (1986-1989) — now part of the Ethiopian Public Health Institute —, where she oversaw the work of 300 staff members, managed grants from UNDP, WHO/TDR, and other donor agencies, and played a pivotal role in the development of the Ministry of Health’s Health Research Committee, which was responsible for enhancing research capacity and setting priorities for health research in the country.
Dr. Zewdie earned a Ph.D. in clinical immunology at the University of London; completed a post-doctoral fellowship in microbiology at SYVA, a diagnostic company in Palo Alto, California, and an international laboratory training on the molecular and cellular aspects of immunology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel; and was a Senior MacArthur Fellow at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She graduated from Addis Ababa University with a B.Sc. in biology.
Dr. Zewdie has published articles on a broad range of subjects in more than 100 journals and textbooks, and serves on a number of nonprofit Boards and scientific committees.