Mr. Clear is the Director of the New York State Department of Health AIDS Institute’s Office of Drug User Health. Mr. Clear has worked in the field of drug user health since 1990. He was the Executive Director of the Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center, one of the first syringe exchange programs in New York State, and of the Harm Reduction Coalition, which is the prominent community-based organization promoting harm reduction as a mode of working with drug users in the US. Mr. Clear has served on both local and international advisory bodies, including Governor Cuomo’s End the Epidemic Task Force in 2015 and the United Nations Civil Society Taskforce on Drugs.

An accomplished and practicing physician, Dr. Jha is recognized globally as a trusted expert on major issues impacting public health, and a catalyst for new thinking and approaches. A long-time leader on pandemic preparedness and response, from directing groundbreaking research on Ebola to serving on the frontlines of the COVID-19 response, he has led national and international analysis of key issues and advised local and federal policy makers around the world.

President Joe Biden appointed Dr. Jha as White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator in March 2022, describing him as “one of the leading public health experts in America.” Dr. Jha led the work that increased the development of and access to treatments and newly formulated vaccines, dramatically improved testing and surveillance, facilitated major investments in indoor air quality measures, and put in place an infrastructure to respond to current and future disease outbreaks more effectively.

Dr. David R. Holtgrave, PhD (he, him, his) joined the Department of Health in August 2024 as a Special Advisor to the Commissioner.

From 2022 to 2024, Dr. Holtgrave served in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, a post for which his portfolio spanned public health and translational research aspects of substance use policy.

A first-generation college student, Dr. Holtgrave earned his PhD in 1988 from the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign in Quantitative Psychology and immediately thereafter held a post-doctoral research fellowship in the Interdisciplinary Programs in Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Dr. Bell’s research interests include examining the association of environmental exposures and adverse birth and child health outcomes, including neurodevelopment. She is particularly interested in the relationship between social factors and environmental exposures and their combined impact on child development. Dr. Bell most recently served as co-Principal Investigator of the Upstate KIDS study, a cohort study of over 6000 infants designed to examine risk factors for development differences, Autism and additional growth and developmental outcomes.

Geeta Sood, MD, ScM, is assistant professor of medicine and hospital epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. She has led several successful process improvement initiatives resulting in her winning the Armstrong Clinical Excellence Award in Patient Safety in 2015. She is active in the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology and her research interests are in the role of the microbiome in healthcare infections and using big data to predict healthcare-associated infections.

Dr. Mantis’ research focuses on host-pathogen interactions and the development of vaccines for biodefense and emerging infectious diseases (BDEID). His primary interest is in the role of antibodies in conferring immunity to airborne, foodborne and vectorborne infections. The laboratory has ongoing collaborations with academic and biopharmaceutic partners to develop vaccines and monoclonal antibodies for human use against COVID-19, Lyme disease, pertussis, tetanus, Salmonella, cholera, and ricin toxin.

Dr. Mantis has received research awards from the:

• National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)
• National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)
• National Cancer Institute (NCI)
• National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals (NIIMBL) Department of Defense (DOD)
• Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF).

Ted Long, MD, MHS, is senior vice president of Ambulatory Care and Population Health at New York City Health + Hospitals, the largest public health care system in the U.S. with over five million outpatient visits per year. He served as the executive director of the NYC Test & Trace Corps, the City’s operational response to COVID-19, throughout the COVID-19 public health emergency. He additionally leads the Arrival Center and Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers (HERRCs) for asylum seekers coming into NYC.

Sean Mahar, a graduate of Siena College, is the Interim Commissioner for DEC helping to lead the agency's environmental protection and natural resource conservation efforts. Prior to becoming the Executive Deputy Commissioner in 2022, Sean was Chief of Staff overseeing external agency affairs and operations and guiding implementation of key agency priorities, and previously was the Assistant Commissioner of Public Affairs for the Agency. Before joining DEC, Sean was the Director of Government Relations and Communications for Audubon New York where he led efforts to advance state and federal conservation policies and build support for wildlife conservation initiatives in the state, including climate change adaptation strategies. Sean was also an adjunct professor at Siena College teaching a course on Environmental Policy and Management.