Modern medicine has transformed how we treat disease, yet many of the greatest improvements in human health have come long before patients enter a hospital or doctor's office. In this compelling keynote, internationally renowned epidemiologist and public health leader Dr. Michelle A. Williams explores the remarkable history of public health—from clean water and vaccines to environmental protections and disease prevention—and why these foundational investments remain essential to the future of society. Drawing from her acclaimed book The Cure for Everything, Dr. Williams examines how the environments we build, the policies we enact, and the choices we make collectively determine whether people merely survive or truly thrive. She challenges leaders to think beyond healthcare systems alone and embrace a broader vision of health that strengthens communities, expands opportunity, and prepares us for the public health challenges of the twenty-first century. Read More >

Audiences will learn:

• Why prevention and public health have delivered some of history's greatest advances in health and longevity.

• How policy, environment, education, and community investments shape health outcomes as much as medical care.

• What leaders across healthcare, business, government, and education can do to build healthier, more resilient communities for generations to come Read Less ^

For nearly a century, roughly three cents of every American health care dollar has gone to public health, while the remaining ninety-seven have gone to treating people after they are already sick. Dr. Michelle A. Williams argues this is not a budgeting quirk but one of the most consequential misallocations in the modern economy — and that business leaders, not only governments, have both the most to lose from it and the most power to correct it. Drawing on her work co-chairing the Reform for Resilience Commission, her collaboration with Deloitte on the economics of health, and her service on the board of directors of ICF, she reframes prevention as an asset rather than an expense: a driver of workforce productivity, operational continuity, consumer demand, and long-run growth. The pandemic demonstrated what happens when health fails — economies stop. This keynote makes the affirmative case for what happens when health is built deliberately, and shows executives where the returns actually sit. Read More >

Audiences will learn:

• Why prevention consistently outperforms treatment on return, and why capital still flows the other way.

• How employee health, community health, and business performance connect in ways that show up on the balance sheet.

• Where companies can invest — in benefits, workplace design, operations, and community partnerships — for measurable returns rather than reputational credit. Read Less ^

Women live longer than men but spend more of their lives in poor health — a gap that is not biological destiny but the accumulated result of a century of underinvestment. Women were largely excluded from clinical research until the 1990s, and the consequences persist today in delayed diagnoses, dismissed symptoms, and vast evidence gaps in conditions from endometriosis and menopause to heart disease. Dr. Michelle A. Williams, a co-principal investigator of the Apple Women’s Health Study — among the largest studies of women’s health ever undertaken — and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Alliance for Women’s Health, brings both the science and the economics into focus. She makes the case that closing this gap is not only a matter of fairness but one of the largest untapped opportunities available to employers, investors, and health systems, and she outlines what it will take to seize it. Read More >

Audiences will learn:

• Where the evidence gaps in women’s health actually are, and how they translate into misdiagnosis, delay, and preventable cost.

• What large-scale, technology-enabled research is beginning to reveal about menstrual, reproductive, and midlife health.

• How employers, insurers, investors, and policymakers can turn women’s health from an afterthought into a strategic priority. Read Less ^

The United States spends more on healthcare than any nation on earth and yet remains the most dangerous wealthy country in which to give birth. Black women die of pregnancy-related causes at roughly three times the rate of white women, a disparity that persists across income and education levels. The great majority of these deaths are preventable. Dr. Michelle A. Williams has spent more than three decades studying reproductive, perinatal, and maternal health, and she traces the crisis to its actual roots: fragmented postpartum care, a research base that long treated pregnancy as a contraindication rather than a condition worth studying, and the social and economic conditions surrounding women before they ever conceive. In this keynote, she moves from the delivery room outward, showing why maternal outcomes are among the most sensitive indicators we have of how a society treats its people — and what it would take to change them. Read More >

Audiences will learn:

• Why the U.S. maternal mortality crisis persists despite world-leading medical technology and spending.

• How racial disparities in maternal outcomes are produced by systems rather than by biology, and what the evidence shows about closing them.

• Which interventions — clinical, policy, and workplace — have the strongest track record of protecting mothers and infants. Read Less ^

In 2014, a single traveler carried Ebola into Lagos, a city of twenty million people. Nigeria contained the outbreak within weeks — not by luck, but because a decade of investment in disease surveillance, laboratories, and trained field epidemiologists had built the capacity to respond. Dr. Michelle A. Williams uses that story, and others drawn from her work across South America, Southeast Asia, and Africa, to make an argument that the pandemic should have settled: a pathogen anywhere is a flight away from everywhere, and health security is not charity but infrastructure. Drawing on her experience directing international research training programs across more than a dozen countries, her service on the boards of Americares and the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, and her work co-chairing the Reform for Resilience Commission, she examines what preparedness actually requires — and why climate change is now accelerating the timeline. Read More >

Audiences will learn:

• What separates countries that contain outbreaks from those that are overwhelmed by them.

• How climate disruption, urbanization, and habitat loss are increasing the frequency of pathogens crossing from animals to humans.

• Where governments, multinational employers, and philanthropies should be investing now to be ready for the next event. Read Less ^

More than a century ago, W.E.B. Du Bois walked door to door through Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward and proved that the health gap between Black and white residents was produced by conditions, not by biology. His finding was ignored for seventy years. Today the evidence is overwhelming: life expectancy can vary by a decade or more between neighborhoods a few miles apart, and the difference is written into housing, schooling, air quality, and access to care. Dr. Michelle A. Williams — who delivered this argument as the Alexander Langmuir Lecture and as a keynote to the National Academies, and who has worked with Deloitte on the economic modeling of health inequity — presents both halves of the case. Inequity is a moral failure, and it is also a measurable drag on productivity, workforce participation, and growth. She shows leaders where the leverage points are. Read More >

Audiences will learn:

• How social conditions become biological outcomes, and what the epidemiological evidence actually establishes.

• Why life expectancy can differ by a decade between neighborhoods a few miles apart, and what accounts for the gap.

• Which interventions — in housing, education, environment, and access to care — have actually narrowed disparities, and which have not. Read Less ^

America loses more than forty thousand people a year to firearms, and firearm injury is now the leading cause of death among American children and adolescents. Yet the public conversation remains stuck on a single question — legislation — while the majority of these deaths, the ones that occur by suicide, go largely undiscussed. Dr. Michelle A. Williams argues that this is a failure of framing. Public health did not reduce traffic deaths by debating whether cars should exist; it studied who was at risk, under what conditions, and what interrupted the chain of events. Applied to firearms, the same discipline yields approaches that are already working: violence-interruption programs that treat retaliation as transmissible, and means-safety partnerships in which firearm instructors, range owners, and Second Amendment groups have become among the most effective messengers in suicide prevention. Drawing on the reporting in The Cure for Everything, she offers a path forward that does not require anyone to change their politics first. Read More >

Audiences will learn:

• Why the majority of firearm deaths are self-inflicted, and what the evidence shows about how access, timing, and impulse interact.

• How epidemic-control methods — interrupting transmission, containing risk, and shifting community norms — have measurably reduced violence in the places they have been tried.

• What health systems, schools, employers, and community organizations can do now, independent of the legislative debate. Read Less ^