Dr. Bonnie Feldman, DDS, MBA – @DrBonnie360
Bonnie is a strategist, connector, storyteller, and trend-weaver.
She has combined her expertise as a clinical dentist and Wall Street analyst to spearhead her current career as a digital health consultant & autoimmune patient advocate – adding in her personal passion, upbeat spirit, and sense of humor along the way!
Over her 25 years of multidimensional business experience, Bonnie has:
- Built 2 dental practices from scratch
- Analyzed & evaluated new technology and business models of nearly 1000 healthcare companies
- Amassed 3000+ contacts in more than 6 industry segments, with an exceptional network of healthcare & technology relationships
In the past 2 years alone, as DrBonnie360/Your Autoimmunity Connection, she has:
- Interviewed 250+ start-up companies
- Attended 60+ digital health meetings on behalf of the 50M+ autoimmune patients
- Been an invited speaker for events including TEDx, SXSW, and Stanford Medicine X
- Featured work in The Mighty, Medium, The Doctor Weighs In, Forbes, Thrive Global, and more.
With her unique experiences as a healthcare provider, researcher, analyst, scientist, and patient, Bonnie bridges diverse industries and helps propel the growing convergence of science, tech, and patient demand towards individualized autoimmune care through her consulting, writing, and speaking.
View Bonnie’s full visual resume.
Ellen M Martin, MBA – @ellenmmartin
How a dinosaur learns to think outside the box
Precocious & unconventional
My lifelong interest in science and words took off when I was four, inspired by a drawing of dinosaurs in my father’s Boy Scout manual. Fascinated by these extinct monsters and delighted to learn that “dinosaur” meant “terrible lizard,” I devoured books at home and haunted the public library. Naturally, my family thought I would become a professor, and our camping trips furthered my interests in fossils, geology and Indian mounds.
From bones to business
My mother urged me to join the high school debate team and take typing class, avant-garde advice that I use to this day. Archaeological digs in high school led me to major in physical anthropology in college (minors in English & musicology). As a graduate fellow, I taught genetics and osteology, but the tenured positions were filled, so I left the field.
Following my now-husband’s example, I earned an MBA, expanding my worldview to include economics, finance, marketing, management and operations.
So, in the ’80s I was a banker: in Chicago doing tax-exempt bond arbitrage deals for cultural organizations, rescuing the Lyric Opera from financial disaster; in California making real estate loans for the bank Patty Hearst robbed. But falling interest rates and tax code changes deflated that bubble and triggered an avalanche of bank mergers. Laid off, I became a residential realtor, in time for the crash of ’91 but picking up copywriting, marketing and desktop publishing on the way.
Biotech & other high technologies
I forged a path combining science, writing and business, leading to a 30-year career in leading-edge technology communications. In the mid-’90s, on the rebound from my first full-time biotech job, I discovered the digital world and lead a team that created one of the first biotech corporate websites. I met Bonnie Feldman when I was IR director at XOMA and she was an analyst covering the stock.
I entered the 21st Century as a partner in virtual IR/PR agency Kureczka|Martin Associates. We helped senior managers clarify and articulate their emerging companies’ strategic positioning and created a wide variety of content for print and online. Since 2003, I have been co-owner of boutique IT systems integrator Haddon Hill Group Inc, managing marketing, corporate communications and administration, as well as being editor-in-chief of our Haddon Hill Group website.
Over the decades, I’ve accumulated knowledge across many other domains: aesthetic medicine, blockchain, digital health, genomics, medical devices, microbiomics, pharmacology, optics, zoology and many others. I’m still an amateur naturalist; leisure interests include art, cocktails, dance, gardening, history, music, philosophy and period fiction: past and future.
Becca Malizia, BS, expected MS & Food Studies Certificate, 2019
“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” 1973 – Theodosius Dobzhansky
Becca is a scientist and educator at heart, passionate about storytelling for a non-science audience.
She grew up in Chapel Hill, NC, attended college in Washington D.C, worked in Birmingham, AL, then moved to Los Angeles, CA to pursue graduate studies in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Her interests and skills are as diverse as the many places she calls home.
Becca received a BS in Biology from The George Washington University in 2015. She graduated Cum Laude, with a double minor in Archaeology and Fine Arts, while playing for their Division I soccer team.
With medical school on her mind, she fell in love with the field of Evolutionary Medicine, seeing health and disease in evolutionary and ecological context. After graduating, she became a clinical research assistant for the Emergency Department at UAB, focussing on trauma and the transition from prehospital to hospital care. Simultaneously, she was a clinical assistant triaging patients for various clinics at Children’s of Alabama, the main outpatient children’s hospital in the state.
While working in clinical care she continued her studies of evolutionary medicine and after two years in Alabama, moved to California to pursue a Master’s of Science in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA, with a focus on Evolutionary Medicine (the first and only of its kind in the US). With her ever-expanding curiosity to guide her, she added a Food Studies Certificate, broadening her knowledge surrounding many aspects of food.
Bringing an eclectic mix of interests and expertise, she views autoimmunity through an evolutionary lens, illuminating on topics such as food, the microbiome, and overall health and wellness.
View Becca’s visual resume
Change Makers in Training (“The Interns”)
- Ellie Macartney: Senior Psychobiology major at UCLA
- Carly Christensen: Senior Psychology major and Entrepreneurship minor at UCLA
- Hailey Motooka: Senior Biology major at UCLA
- Kelsey O’Donoghue: Senior Molecular Cell & Developmental Biology major and Global Health minor at UCLA
- Harish Balasubramani: Senior Molecular Cell & Developmental Biology major at UCLA
- Anna Simon: Senior Psychobiology major at UCLA
- Mariella Lodi: Senior Art History major at UCLA