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Advisory Council

Gail H. Cassell, Ph.D., D. Sc (hon)

Advisory Council

Gail H. Cassell, Ph.D., D. Sc (hon) is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School. She is a past President of the American Society for Microbiology, Chair, Board of Scientific Counselors Center for Infectious Diseases, Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Advisory Board Directors of National Institutes of Health, CDC, and member Secretary of Health and Human Services Advisory Council of Public Health Preparedness, member Food and Drug Administration’s Science Board, the Advisory Committee to the Commissioner. She was amember of the NIH Science Management Board, the newly appointed “NIH Board of Trustees” and the Advisory Council of the Fogarty International Center of NIH and Advisory Council to the Director (Tony Fauci), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Dr. Cassell has received national and international awards for her research in infectious diseases, including two honorary degrees and the CDC Honor Award in Public Health for exceptional leadership and contributions in the development and implementation of CDC’s Emerging Infectious Disease Plan 1997 and a Citation from the FDA Commissioner for her role as Chair of the review of science and technology at the FDA and the Report FDA: Science and Mission at Risk 2008. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine [formerly the Institute of Medicine (IOM)] of the National Academies of Science and served two, 3-year terms on the IOM Council, the governing board. She was elected in 2011 to lifetime membership on the U.S Council of Foreign Relations. She is an Emeritus Member of the Board and Treasurer of Research!America and a former member and Chair of the Board of Directors of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. She has served on the Leadership Council of the School of Public Health of Harvard University, member of the Executive Committee of Columbia University Medical Center Board of Visitors, member of the Chancellor’s Advisory Cabinet for the University of Texas System, Dean’s Advisory Council of the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health, and the Dean’s Advisory Committee Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. She currently co-chairs the Board of Visitors for the School of Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Christian Kanady

Advisory Council

Mr. Kanady is the founder and CEO of Echo Energy and all of its subsidiaries. Kanady oversees over $1.2B in assets under management and has acquired interests in over 3,000 unconventional wells across Oklahoma and Texas. Echo’s assets include one of the largest privately held mineral portfolios in the United States. In 2019, Kanady co-founded Zeno Technologies, an enterprise-level software startup in partnership with 8VC, a Silicon Valley based venture capital fund. Kanady has been in the energy business for almost two decades and began his career at Chesapeake Energy. Kanady’s real estate investments include the Ziggurat, an award-winning office building in downtown Oklahoma City. He is active in his local community with strategic philanthropic and academic partnerships with the University of Oklahoma’s College of Engineering, the University of Oklahoma’s Athletics Department, Water4, Fields and Futures, Oklahoma City Rescue Mission, Oklahoma Contemporary and City Center. Kanady graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a BBA in Energy Management and Finance.

Sajan Pillai

Advisory Council

Founder and CEO of SeasonTwo, a Venture Capital firm investing globally in disruptive technologies within Energy, HealthCare, Analytics & Banking.  He was also the founding member and former CEO of UST Global, a global billion dollar Technology and Digital services company.  Sajan has served on the boards of multiple nonprofit organizations, including the California Science Center, The Global Virus Network, Centro Fox in Mexico, and PEACE One Day Corporate Coalition.

Steve Prescott, M.D.

Advisory Council

Steve Prescott, M.D. An internationally recognized leader in the studies of the basic mechanisms of human disease, Dr. Stephen Prescott came to OMRF from the University of Utah, where he was a professor of internal medicine and held the H.A. & Edna Benning Presidential Endowed Chair, founded the Eccles Program in Human and Molecular Biology and Genetics, and served as the executive director of the Huntsman Cancer Institute. At OMRF, Prescott has overseen the largest campus expansion in the foundation’s history. The centerpiece of this growth is OMRF’s research tower. Completed in 2011, the 186,000-square-foot tower has earned gold-level LEED certification and, crowned by 18 wind turbines, is believed to house the world’s largest rooftop wind farm. To date, Prescott has raised more than $100 million to fund OMRF’s expansion, which includes not only the new tower but also the addition of more than 30 new principal scientists to OMRF’s faculty. Under Prescott’s leadership, the National Institutes of Health has designated OMRF as one of only 11 Autoimmunity Centers of Excellence in the U.S. In 2016, he received OKBio’s Hall of Fame Leadership Award for his role in the advancement of the biosciences. A native of Texas, Dr. Prescott received his undergraduate degree at Texas A&M University and his M.D. degree from the Baylor College of Medicine. He has authored more than 250 scientific articles, served as a senior editor of the influential Journal of Biological Chemistry and is on the board of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. He has also served on medical and scientific advisory committees for the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association, and the American Cancer Society. He is a founder of LineaGen, a biotechnology company. Among the awards he has received are the Utah Governor’s Medal for Science and Technology, the Sol Sherry Prize from the American Heart Association, and the Houssay-Braun-Menendez Medal from the Argentine Association for the Advancement of Science

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