A 2004 graduate of New York University, Luca Flabbi is a labor economist with interest in gender differentials and discrimination, bargaining in the labor market and in the household, search models estimation.

Iheoma U. Iruka (pronounced EE-OMAH EE-ROO-KAH) is a tenured full professor in the department of maternal and child health at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, a faculty fellow at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute and the founding director of its Equity Research Action Coalition.

She is leading projects and initiatives focused on ensuring that minoritized children and children from low-income households, especially Black children, are thriving. Her work is focused on ensuring excellence for young diverse learners, especially Black children and their families, through the intersection of antibias, anti-racist, culturally grounded research, programs and policy.

Some areas of focus include family engagement and support, quality rating and improvement systems, and early care and education system and programs. She serves and has served on numerous national and local boards and committees, including the National Advisory Committee for the U.S. Census Bureau; the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; the American Psychological Association’s Board of Educational Affairs; the Brady Education Foundation; and Trust for Learning. She is also the author of the book “We Are the Change We Seek.”

Turk Al-Sabah is a PhD student in the finance program at the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School. His primary research interests lie in the areas of corporate finance, labor and finance, and household finance.

Before starting his graduate studies, Turk worked in investments at State Street Corp and the Kuwait Investment Authority—one of the largest sovereign wealth funds. He received his MFin degree from the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, and his BS and MBA degrees from the College of Business at Kuwait University.

Mark Zitter is the Founder and Chair of the Zetema Project. He founded the Project in 2016 to help inform and energize the national healthcare conversation. He was the Chairman and Founder of Zitter Health Insights, a business intelligence firm that provides insights focused on optimizing patient access to pharmaceuticals to life science companies, specialty pharmacies, and managed healthcare organizations. In 2019, Zitter Health Insights was sold to MMIT, a product, solutions and advisory company that brings transparency to pharmacy and medical benefit information. Mark was co-founder and CEO of Vital Decisions, a telephone counseling company for patients with life-limiting illnesses, which was sold to MTS Partners (now Windrose Health Partners) in 2012.

Mark serves as healthcare advisor and facilitator for the California Health Reform Initiative. He also is on the advisory boards of Riverside Partners, a private equity firm, and the behavior change company Motimatic. He has authored four books and numerous articles on healthcare. Mr. Zitter founded the Society of Chief Medical Officers and has been an editorial advisor for Evidence-Based Oncology and Pharmaceutical Executive. He has produced and chaired many of the nation’s largest conferences on specialty pharmacy, quality improvement, disease management, and pharmacoeconomics. He was publisher of the first newsletters in outcomes management and pharmacoeconomics.

Mark holds an MBA from Stanford University and a BA from Wesleyan University. He has been an invited speaker at hundreds of meetings, and has been a guest lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Harvard School of Public Health, Yale Medical School, Haas Business School at UC Berkeley, and The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He is past Chairman of SFJAZZ and is on the Board of Governors of the Commonwealth Club of California, where he hosts healthcare programs and chairs a series on end-of-life issues.

What made you choose a career path in healthcare?

I got into healthcare accidentally, but have stayed by choice. When I was leaving consulting, I wanted a job where there were interesting problems to solve, good people to work with, and where I felt good about what I did at the end of the day. I took a job at a healthcare company, where I quickly learned there is no end to the interesting problems to solve in healthcare! I have worked for multiple healthcare companies since and continue to be motivated by the fact that we can build profitable businesses for shareholders and employees and simultaneously make healthcare cheaper, safer, and more accessible for patients and providers.

What made you choose UNC & Kenan-Flagler Business School?

KFBS had a combination of things that I was looking for: top 25 school, top notch recruiters, highly rated professors, and a focus on teaming and leadership. But what really set it apart for me was the tightknit community. KFBS has a smaller class size than most other top 20 schools. This made it easy to get to know classmates and professors, including the students in the classes ahead of and behind mine. This is a network for which I continue to be incredibly grateful.

Lowe’s work focuses on the institutional arrangements that lead to more inclusive forms of urban and regional economic development and specifically, the role that practitioners can play in aligning growth and equity goals.

She conducts research in three related areas of economic development. First, she explores how institutional actors responsible for promoting and financing state and local economic development collaborate in innovative ways to encourage more inclusionary business practices and outcomes. Second, she focuses on the link between innovation and local knowledge, especially the institutional factors that enhance the knowledge contribution of actors traditionally viewed as peripheral to processes of innovation and industrial upgrading. Finally, she examines how emergent labor market institutions shape employer behavior and open up opportunities for displaced and disadvantaged workers to transfer existing and newly acquired skills to more secure and technologically sophisticated work environments. Combined, these three areas of study enable Lowe to understand the conditions under which more inclusionary forms of economic development take shape and draw lessons for scaling institutional action and coordination.

Lowe has received funding support from the National Science Foundation, Kauffman Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, Institute for Emerging Issues and UNC-Chapel Hill’s Institute for Arts and Humanities, Global Research Institute, Institute for the Study of the Americas and the College of Arts and Science.

Lowe joined UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of City and Regional Planning in 2005 after receiving her Ph.D. in Economic Development and Planning from MIT. She has consulted on projects for the International Labour Organization, Inter-American Development Bank, Bank of the Northeast Brazil, Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, the Chicagoland Workforce Funder Alliance, the Kenan Institute for Private Enterprise, the Council for Entrepreneurial Development and the North Carolina Department of Commerce and Board of Science and Technology.

Zoey Kernodle brings over a decade of experience at the intersection of healthcare, higher education, and research. As Director of the UNC Center for the Business of Health (CBOH), she oversees the Center’s strategy, research, programs, and team operations. This includes fundraising for and maintenance of a growing annual budget, building a community of healthcare-focused alumni and external constituents and cultivating interdisciplinary partnerships among faculty, health leaders, and students across UNC and North Carolina.

Dr. Kernodle oversees the CBOH Advisory Board and works with school and University leadership to create and implement new programs that prepare students for the challenges and opportunities they will face as they pursue careers across the healthcare industry.

In her research, Dr. Kernodle integrates theories and frameworks from disciplines across the humanities and social sciences to help healthcare and public health leaders better engage, understand, and communicate with the communities that they serve. Her qualitative research crosses traditional discipline boundaries, engaging leaders from healthcare, public health, community development, public policy, religious entities, and academia. The aim of her multidisciplinary approach is to find and integrate shared values and practices at the community and population level that lead to improved health outcomes.

Prior to joining UNC in 2018, Zoey worked in healthcare research and consulting at the Advisory Board Company in Washington, D.C., and held administrative roles at other universities, where she gained extensive experience in fundraising and program implementation. 

She received her DrPH from UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. She has a Master of Theological Studies (MTS) degree from Emory University where she studied ethics and political philosophy, and a BA in religious studies from North Carolina State University. She serves on the board of Emory University’s Candler School of Theology.