Alison Beam
Acting Secretary of Health, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

Alison Beam is currently the Acting Secretary of Health for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Ms. Beam has experience advising and supporting key health care priorities, such as stabilizing and sustaining the health insurance markets, increasing access to health care for all Pennsylvanians, and ensuring the high caliber of health care delivered in the commonwealth continues.

Ms. Beam most recently served as Deputy Chief of Staff to Governor Wolf, where she coordinated policy development, fiscal and legal management, legislative initiatives, and communications and stakeholder engagement across Pennsylvania’s departments of Health, Human Services, Drug and Alcohol Programs, Aging and Insurance. Prior to transitioning to the Governor’s Office, Alison served as the Chief of Staff to the Insurance Commissioner.

She also previously served as the Director of Public Policy and Associate Counsel for Independence Health Group in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she guided interactions with regulators, legislators and national trade associations and developed and implemented internal response strategies.

Alison graduated from Drexel University School of Law in 2013. Before embarking on law school, she was a Senior Consultant at McBee Associates, a health care consulting firm in Manhattan, New York. Alison holds a Bachelor of Science in Health Policy and Administration from the Pennsylvania State University.

Dr. Debra Bogen, MD
Director, Allegheny County Health Department

Dr. Debra L. Bogen is the Director of the Allegheny County Health Department. She assumed her leadership role in March 2020, nearly two months in advance of her scheduled start date, to address the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since taking the helm of the Health Department, Dr. Bogen has guided our county through the numerous and unpredictable challenges of a global pandemic. Most recently, she prioritized an equitable and universal distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines. Even while facing a pandemic, she and her ACHD team also advanced significant regulatory improvements for environmental health during her first year, including overhauling plumbing and air quality regulations. In response to need, she launched the COVID-19 Field Response Team in July 2020 to visit area food establishments and conduct education and compliance assistance with state and local COVID-19 health orders.

Dr. Bogen is absolutely committed to improving community and family health using public health data to drive policy and practice. She has proven a strong partner for Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) and community organizations and is committed to working with groups that share a passion for the mission of public health.

Prior to her appointment as ACHD Director, Dr. Bogen was a member of the Pittsburgh region medical and research community for more than two decades. She held a primary academic appointment as Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh, and secondary appointments in psychiatry and clinical and translational sciences. She served as the Vice Chair of Education for the Department of Pediatrics at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.

Dr. Bogen earned her medical degree from the University of Colorado School of Medicine and completed both her pediatric residency and General Academic Pediatrics fellowship at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She is one of the founders of the Mid-Atlantic Mothers’ Milk Bank and serves as the organization’s Volunteer Medical Director. She and her family live in Regent Square.

Dr. Ariangela Kozik, PhD
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Michigan; Co-founder and Vice President, Black Microbiologists Association

Dr. Kozik is a Research Fellow at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor-Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, where she studies microbial-immune relationships in adult asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Her work on the microbiome is currently focused on the contribution of the respiratory microbiome to adult asthma phenotype and treatment response. She is also the Co-Founder and Vice President of the Black Microbiologists Association, and a member of the Microbes and Social Equity Working Group. Dr. Kozik has been engaged in outreach efforts to various groups throughout the pandemic to address topics including pathogenesis, mitigation strategies, and vaccination.

Dr. Anuradha Ray, PhD
Professor, Department of Medicine & Immunology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine

Dr. Anuradha Ray is a Professor of Medicine and Immunology and Endowed Chair of Lung Immunology in Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. She received her Ph.D. from Calcutta University in India and underwent postdoctoral training at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY and at Rockefeller University in New York.  She was on the faculty at Rockefeller University and at Yale University between the years 1990 and 2001 before moving to the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Ray’s early research led to the first identification of anti-inflammatory effects of steroid hormones and the identification of immune mechanisms that promote allergic asthma. The primary goal of Dr. Ray’s current research is to understand immune mechanisms that drive severe steroid-refractory asthma that incurs more than 28 billion dollars in healthcare costs in the US. She is also studying mechanisms underlying host-pathogen interactions during respiratory infections.  Her research has been continuously funded by multiple grants from the National Institute of Health. She is an elected member of the Advisory Council of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the NIH.