AATS 102nd Annual Meeting

Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five New York Times bestsellers — The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants. He has been named one of the 100 most influential people by TIME magazine and one of the Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers.

His newest book, The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temp-tation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War (April 2021), was inspired by the four-part series about General Curtis LeMay on his podcast “Revisionist His-tory”. In it Gladwell weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromania-cal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history.

Dr. Valerie Ruschell

Dr. Valerie Rusch has been a member of the Thoracic Surgery Service at MSKCC since March, 1989. A native New Yorker, she is a graduate of Vassar College and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. She completed her general surgery and cardiothoracic surgery residencies at the University of Washington in Seattle. After an additional year of experience in thoracic oncology at MD Anderson Cancer Center, she returned to the University of Washington where she served on the faculty for six years prior to her appointment at MSKCC. Dr. Rusch was Chief of the MSK Thoracic Service from 2000 to 2013.

Dr. Martine Rothblatt

Martine Rothblatt is the Chairperson & CEO of United Therapeutics Corporation (UT). She started UT to save her youngest child's life from a rare illness after having previously created SiriusXM satellite radio and other satellite communications systems. She is also responsible for several innovations in aviation and architecture, including holding the Guinness Record for longest flight in an electric helicopter and creating the world's largest zero carbon footprint building. Her company is now saving hundreds of lives a year with medicines for pulmonary hypertension and neuroblastoma, and by manufacturing transplantable lungs out of rejected donor lungs. UT is also in pre-clinical development of manufactured kidneys, hearts and 3D printed autologous lungs to be delivered via autonomously flown electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) systems.