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The CEO of the AARP is on a mission to have all of us recognize that people over 50 are an economic force. Their households account for 56 cents of every dollar spent in this country. Workers over 50 make up more than 40% of the workforce. Dr. Myechia Minter-Jordan joins Claudia to talk about what America would look like if our culture, workplaces, products, infrastructure and policies actually reflected this reality.
Claudia and Myechia cover:
Dr. Minter-Jordan says there is an economic and business rationale for moving to a longevity economy:
“Our demographics are changing, people are living longer, they're staying in the workplace longer, there are now five generations in the workplace. So all of these pieces together have created the urgency for us to think differently about aging.“
Relevant Links
Get more information about joining AARP
Find more details on the AARP Community Challenge Grant Program
Read the Credit for Caring Act Dr. Minter-Jordan mentioned
About Our Guest
As CEO of AARP, Dr. Myechia Minter-Jordan leads the world’s largest nonprofit, nonpartisan membership organization, harnessing the power and passion of almost 2,300 staff members, 60,000 volunteers, and numerous strategic partners.
Dr. Minter-Jordan, who was named CEO in November 2024, is an accomplished physician, passionate advocate, and innovative leader who deftly merges a passion for social impact with the business acumen to make strategic decisions, foster meaningful collaboration across engaged teams, and successfully lead organizations through periods of rapid change and growth.
Throughout her career, she has fought to shine a national spotlight on the importance of social equity and the far-reaching impact of philanthropy and giving back. After a successful early career in academic medicine at Johns Hopkins, where she was an attending physician and instructor, she was inspired to serve as Chief Medical Officer and ultimately President and CEO of the Dimock Center, one of the largest community health centers in Massachusetts.
Dr. Minter-Jordan’s journey to transform the health care industry continued at the CareQuest Institute for Oral Health in Charlestown, Massachusetts, where she served as President and CEO from 2020 until 2024.
Dr. Minter-Jordan has consistently prioritized giving back through her service on a wide range of boards and commissions, including BlueShield of California, Yawkey Foundation, Point 32 Health, and The Boston Foundation. She has received numerous awards for her contributions, including Harvard Medical School’s Reede Scholar Vision Award and the Terrance Keenan Leadership Award in Health Philanthropy from Grantmakers in Health.
Dr. Minter-Jordan is a graduate of Brown University and earned her MD from the Brown University School of Medicine and her MBA from the Carey School of Business at Johns Hopkins University. She holds an Honorary Doctor of Public Service degree from Northeastern University and an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Newbury College.
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For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email [email protected] and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn
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Dr. Francis Collins served as NIH director for 12 years across three administrations (Obama, Trump, Biden), both Democrat and Republican. He brought enormous scientific vision to the role, along with a level of connection and humanity rare in any leader. A year and a half ago, he left NIH, not by his own choice. And now, he joins Claudia to ask: How do we make the case for future investments in science in a world of distrust?
Dr. Collins and Claudia cover:
Dr. Collins says, for him, science and religion can walk hand-in-hand because they answer different questions:
“Science is the right way to answer questions about the natural world, but it doesn't help you so much with other questions like is there a God? Why am I here? Why is there something instead of nothing? That's where faith, if you're gonna get answers at all, comes to the rescue of the silence of science. And I think it's exciting to be able to consider all those questions. And if, as it is now in my worldview, the natural world is the handiwork of a creator, then studying the natural world is also getting a glimpse of God's mind, which means science and faith are in fact connected to each other and the laboratory maybe is… And even if you want to say what you're doing in science is to uncover with awe things about creation, this feels like worship.”
Relevant Links
Read Vannevar Bush’s 1945 paper “Science, the Endless Frontier”
See Dr. Collin’s 2003 Nature paper called “A vision for the future of genomics research”
Find latest update on NIH’s All of Us Research Program
Read Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Explore Braver Angels, the cross-partisan, volunteer movement Dr. Collins references
Listen to Carrie Newcomer’s song “If Not Now”
About Our Guest
Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., is the former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). As the longest serving director of NIH — spanning 12 years and three presidencies — he oversaw the work of the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world, from basic to clinical research.
Dr. Collins is a physician-geneticist noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the international Human Genome Project, which culminated in April 2003 with the completion of a finished sequence of the human DNA instruction book. He served as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the NIH from 1993-2008.
Dr. Collins' research laboratory has discovered a number of important genes, including those responsible for cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis, Huntington's disease, a familial endocrine cancer syndrome, and most recently, genes for type 2 diabetes, and the gene that causes Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, a rare condition that causes premature aging.
Dr. Collins received a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Virginia, a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Yale University, and an M.D. with honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to coming to the NIH in 1993, he spent nine years on the faculty of the University of Michigan, where he was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. He is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Collins was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2007 and the National Medal of Science in 2009.
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For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email [email protected] and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn
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Today’s guest, Dr. Meena Seshamani, ran Medicare at CMS and is now Secretary of Health in Maryland. She is leading one of the country’s most ambitious health reform efforts: evolving Maryland’s all-payer model, expanding investment in primary care, and using data infrastructure to strengthen coverage and population health—all while navigating the implementation of HR1. In this conversation, recorded at Aspen Ideas Health, Meena makes the case that policy design matters, but implementation is where its promise is realized or lost.
Meena and Claudia discuss:
Meena shares how Maryland is strengthening food systems using rural health transformation funding:
“We are also taking rural health transformation dollars and investing in cold storage, food aggregators, and distribution hubs for our local Maryland farms, so that when we are doing outreach on healthy eating and providing nutritious food to people, that's actually coming from our local Maryland farms. So it's boosting the local economy in our rural areas as well.“
Relevant Links
Maryland’s Total Cost of Care Model: Evaluation of the First Four Years
Article on the impact of Maryland’s model
How CRISP supports Medicaid redetermination
The state’s Rural Health Transformation plan
About Our Guest
Meena Seshamani, MD, PhD serves as the Secretary of Health for Maryland in the Moore-Miller Administration, where she stewards a $20 billion health system that encompasses public health, Medicaid, disability, behavioral health, and 11 state-run hospitals. She leads the state’s mission to improve the health and well-being of all Marylanders through a focus on accessibility, affordability, and equity.
Under her leadership, Maryland has emerged as a national laboratory for healthcare innovation. Dr. Seshamani successfully negotiated a first-of-its-kind, multi-billion dollar healthcare payment model with federal partners and secured $168 million in inaugural funding to transform rural health delivery. Her tenure is also marked by a proactive approach to public health, exemplified by ensuring broad vaccine access in the state through the creation of a landmark program providing free vaccines to uninsured and underinsured residents—codifying health security as a statewide priority.
Prior to her cabinet appointment, Dr. Seshamani served as Deputy Administrator and Director of the Center for Medicare at CMS. There, she executed the most significant pharmaceutical reform in decades: the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation program, achieving $6 billion in first-year savings. Her work at CMS fundamentally shifted the Medicare model to value-based care by introducing payments for community health services, caregiver training, and navigating patient care, while simultaneously tightening accountability and oversight.
A board-certified head and neck surgeon and an Oxford-trained health economist, Dr. Seshamani’s perspective is grounded in how health care policy and operations impact the real lives of patients. She previously served as Vice President of Clinical Care Transformation at MedStar Health, maintaining a surgical practice while leading large-scale system changes.
A widely published author in the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA, her insights are frequently sought by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and major news networks. Dr. Seshamani holds her MD from Johns Hopkins University and her PhD from the University of Oxford, where she was a Marshall Scholar.
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For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email [email protected] and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn
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Fifteen years ago Congress created the CMS Innovation Center to test new ways of delivering quality care at lower costs. Since then, the Innovation Center has tested dozens of models - some have been successes, and many have not. Director Abe Sutton joins The Other 80 for a candid conversation about the Innovation Center’s record, its next chapter, and the big bets ahead.
Abe identifies three features of successful models:
Abe says success should not be measured by how many models work, but by overall return on investment:
“If we are taking bold bets, if we're trying to say, all right, let's back the next thing that could really transform care in a country and put the country on a more solid fiscal foundation while improving care and the affordability of care. Well, one thing that really was transformative and did that well may be worth the cost of running 20 things.”
Relevant Links
Read the CMS Accountable Communities Evaluation
Access the GAO report evaluating the CMMI model from 2011-2024
Read the CMMI’s most recent Strategic Plan
About Our Guest
Abe Sutton serves as the Director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation and Deputy Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Before assuming this role in January of 2025, he co-founded two health service companies; Honest Health, which focuses on enabling primary care physicians, and Evergreen Nephrology, which focuses on enabling nephrologists. Sutton focused on health policy with the federal government from 2017 to 2019, serving at the National Economic Council, Domestic Policy Council and Department of Health and Human Services. In these roles, he coordinated health policy across the federal government, with a focus on the shift to paying-for-value within Medicare, increasing choice and competition in health care markets, and updating the federal government’s approach to kidney care.
He holds a law degree from Harvard Law School and undergraduate degrees in political science, management, and health care management and policy from the Wharton School and the College at the University of Pennsylvania.
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For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email [email protected] and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn
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Healthcare pioneer Rushika Fernandopulle joins us to discuss his new venture Liza and why this is the perfect moment to build new primary care models from the bottom up. Rushika argues that “shareholder value” has usurped the needs of patients in US healthcare, and that fundamental rethinking, not optimizing or tweaking at the edges, is needed.
Rushika shares the ‘build principles’ for Liza:
Rushika argues that AI invites us to rethink healthcare based on abundance, not scarcity:
“We've built our whole economy, all our processes with this assumption of scarcity, that there were a scarce number of human brains who could do things, right? Doctors, teachers, et cetera. And now all of a sudden that assumption has gone away. So we need to rethink from scratch how we build these systems. So that's what we're trying to do at Liza. Like, what if we started from scratch?”
Relevant Links
More information on LIZA Health
The book Conscious Capitalism by John Mackey et al
Podcast episode where Tim Ferris and Jerry Colonna talk about sabbaticals
Article by Sara Riggare about living with Parkinson's and her image of blue and red dots
About Our Guest
Rushika Fernandopulle is a practicing physician who is the CEO of Liza Health, a startup building a new AI-enabled platform for Primary Care. He was the co-founder and CEO of Iora Health, an early innovator in Primary Care redesign which was acquired by Amazon in 2023. Prior to this, Rushika was the first Executive Director of the Harvard Interfaculty Program for Health Systems Improvement and Managing Director of the Clinical Initiatives Center at the Advisory Board Company. He is a member of the Schweitzer, Ashoka, Aspen, and Salzburg Global Fellowships, on faculty at Harvard Medical School. He serves on the boards of the Asian American Foundation, Families USA, and Premera Blue Cross, and is a member of the Lancet Commission for Person Centered Care. He earned his A.B., M.D., and M.P.P. from Harvard University, and completed his clinical training at the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts General Hospital.
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For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email [email protected] and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn
Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes!
Does the history of drugs tell us something bigger about the world? That’s what former Wired executive editor and UC Berkeley Senior Impact Fellow Thomas Goetz is betting on with his new podcast Drug Story. He joins Claudia to talk about how big drug breakthroughs have shaped how we live and what it will really take to build health in our society.
Thomas and Claudia dive into:
Thomas says the illusion of free will makes consumers feel like unhealthy choices are their choice alone:
“There is some agency, like somebody decides to take a cigarette out of the pack. People decide whether to have a Coke instead of a glass of water or what have you. But there's also this vast machine, an invisible universe that is so powerful in compelling us from the commercials that are on our TV shows to the infrastructure of fast food in our neighborhoods. And it just is this easy inertia where oftentimes we don't actually have free will… We have much less free will than we think we do when it comes to things like what we eat, how we get our entertainment, where we live. There's a lot that is not really up to us and our choices.”
Relevant Links
Listen to Thomas Goetz’s podcast Drug Story
About Our Guests
Thomas Goetz is an award-winning science journalist and author. He has won National Magazine Awards (print and digital), Webby Awards, and FDA contracts. He created Drug Story as an Impact Fellow at the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health.
The former Executive Editor at WIRED, he has worked at The Wall Street Journal, Inc., and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and has written two award-winning books about technology and medicine. His writing has been selected for the Best American Science Writing and the Best American Technology Writing anthologies. He spent much of the past decade developing digital tools to help people make sense of prescription medications, including leading the development of openFDA for the Food and Drug Administration, and building an economic research team and editorial operations at GoodRx. You can reach him at [email protected]
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For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email [email protected] and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn
Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes!
After spending time in the Obama White House, Kumar Garg came away with a toolset of skills to help drive change, spotlight good ideas and scale them. Now he’s applying those ideas to philanthropy. As the co-founders of Renaissance Philanthropy, Kumar and Tom Kalil have built an organization around a deceptively simple idea: What if philanthropy could help scientists, technologists, and innovators think bigger — and then actually fund the work at the scale required?
Kumar and Claudia dive into:
Kumar’s intriguing ‘open notebook’ idea:
“It's very valuable to me if a researcher has the equivalent of an open notebook. These are all the ideas… Here's my active research projects. Here's all the interesting sort of experiments I've done… you can imagine then sending an agent out and read[ing] people's open notebook.. it would be a way to discover people's work.”
Relevant Links
Learn more about Renaissance Philanthropy
Get info on the Big If True Science Accelerator (BITS)
See a photo of Kumar’s White House white board on Twitter
About Our Guests
Kumar Garg is the President at Renaissance Philanthropy.
Kumar has helped to shape the science and tech landscape for almost two decades. Working with Eric Schmidt, he helped design and launch moonshot initiatives in education, provided early support to game-changing ideas and pioneers, and built ongoing multi-donor and multi-sector collaboratives.
Prior to that, he helped set budget and policy priorities for the Obama Administration as part of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and drove progress on topics ranging from education and workforce issues, biotechnology, entrepreneurship, space, advanced manufacturing, broadband, nanotechnology, behavioral sciences, digital media, incentive prizes, and broader innovation policy.
In particular, he led the Obama Administration’s efforts to bolster science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education, including development of major budget and policy initiatives in the State of the Union to train 100,000 excellent STEM teachers and bring computer science to all K-12 students, development of the Educate to Innovate campaign with over $1 billion in in-kind and philanthropic investment, and creation of iconic events such as the White House Science Fair.
Prior to his time in government, Kumar worked on behalf of parents and children seeking educational reform as an education lawyer and advocate. Kumar received a B.A. from Dartmouth College and a law degree from Yale Law School.
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For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email [email protected] and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn
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Halle Tecco is an investor, entrepreneur, and author of the new book Massively Better Healthcare. In this live conversation, she offers advice for aspiring health tech founders, reflects on why “hustle culture” needs to be kept in check, and makes the case that founders should become anthropologists of the problems they want to solve. Most importantly, she argues that today’s founders need to be “bilingual” — fluent in both healthcare and technology.
Halle and Claudia cover:
Halle says there is lots of opportunity to build businesses in the healthcare industry, but you need to pick something you are passionate about:
“It is extremely hard to be a founder. It is 10 times harder to be a founder in healthcare… you're working on what I think are the most important problems that we will be able to solve, but it's also really challenging. [Make] sure you're picking a problem that you're genuinely very passionate about solving. That will help drive you and be your North Star when things get inevitably very, very hard. “
Relevant Links
Buy Halle’s book Massively Better Healthcare
Listen to Halle Tecco’s Podcast “The Heart of Healthcare”
Learn more about Rock Health
Menlo Ventures report on the state of AI in healthcare
About Our Guest
Halle Tecco is an entrepreneur, angel investor, and podcast host passionate about fixing our healthcare system. She is the founder of Natalist, which was acquired by Everly Health in October 2021. Previously, Halle founded and ran Rock Health, and was also an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School, teaching the first MBA-level course on digital health investing.
A proud first-generation college graduate, Halle earned an M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins University, an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, and a B.S. from Case Western Reserve University. She has served as a Board Member to the International African American Museum since 2018, and as an Advisor to the Harvard Medical School Department of Biomedical Informatics since 2014. Halle has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and CNBC. She was named as one of Goldman Sach’s Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs and listed on the Forbes 30 under 30. She has spoken at the Aspen Ideas Festival, CES, TechCrunch Disrupt, and was a SXSW Keynote speaker.
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For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email [email protected] and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn
Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes!
After moving to the US from Iran at age 17, entrepreneur and inventor Fred Khosravi went on to launch more than 20 companies and earn hundreds of patents. In this conversation, Fred reflects on the power of immigration, freedom, education and what it means to build a life in a new country. He shares how leaving Iran after the revolution shaped his willingness to take risks, his sense of purpose, and his entrepreneurial drive. Claudia and Fred also get into some of the biggest opportunities he sees ahead, from women’s health to the long-overdue shift from a healthcare system organized around visits to one centered on outcomes and connected care. This interview was recorded in person at the JP Morgan - Berkeley healthcare conference in Taipei.
Fred and Claudia dive into:
Fred says strong regulation is the foundation, not a barrier, to America’s global leadership in biotech:
“I happen to believe that the reason American medical technology and American pharmaceuticals are the most sought after in the world, if you can afford it, is because of the FDA. I like to say it's because of entrepreneurs like me, and it's because of everybody who's actually working so hard on it… We could not achieve the results that we're achieving around the world… If it weren't for the systems of standards and highest quality level thinking… that the FDA is bringing to the table.”
Relevant Links
Learn more about Imperative Care’s vision for treating stroke and other thromboembolic diseases
About Our Guest
Fred (Farhad) Khosravi is a Silicon Valley medical device entrepreneur who has held management and executive positions in both large and small medical technology enterprises over the last 30+ years. Throughout his career, he has been either the inventor or co-inventor for over 200 U.S. and worldwide granted and patent applications, making him one of the most prolific minds and leaders in the industry.
However, Fred’s passion for improving people’s lives goes beyond the medtech field. He currently serves on the Board of Trustees at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan think tank dedicated to providing strategic national security insights to help decision makers chart a course toward a better world; is a member of the Board of Directors at Spirit of America, a nonprofit that promotes private-sector support for the safety and success of our troops and the local people they want to help; and is a convening board member for Technology for America, a nonprofit for promotion of innovation as a way to engage public-private dialogue that benefit all Americans.
Fred holds a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering and graduated cum laude with an M.S. degree in mechanical engineering from Tennessee Tech University.
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For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email [email protected] and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn
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Patient innovators Liz Salmi and Hugo Campos join The Other 80 to discuss the evolving role of patients in healthcare, using the recent release of ChatGPT Health as a central lens. They delve into how AI is shifting the power dynamic by enabling greater patient agency and creating new expectations for health systems. Drawing on their personal experiences, including Liz's work with OpenNotes and Hugo's long struggle for access to his cardiac device data, they explore how technology can serve as a bridge for collaboration, rather than a source of conflict, between patients and clinicians.
Claudia, Liz and Hugo talk about:
Liz says AI is surfacing the same reactions she saw around patients googling health information:
“It makes me think of the Dr. Google era of when clinicians were like, ‘patients shouldn't go online and look for information about their own health because they don't know how to search accurately for their own health information’. And I think we're at this early stage of the tension between health systems wanting to still control how patients find their own health information, versus our own curiosity and exploration of digging into our own health information and… asking the questions that are important to us and then discovering the answers ourselves in our own journey.”
Relevant Links
Read Liz and Hugo’s paper on Critical AI Health Literacy
Watch Hugo’s TEDx Talk on Fighting for the Right to Open His Heart Data
Learn more about the patient data transparency movement at OpenNotes
Read the full text of the 21st Century Cures Act
About Our Guests
Hugo Campos is an internationally recognized patient advocate, combining creative and technical expertise to promote participatory medicine and patient-centered, AI-enabled healthcare. Named a White House Champion of Change for Precision Medicine by President Obama in 2015, he advocates for patient rights and health data access while managing his own cardiac condition. Hugo serves on the NIH’s All of Us Research Program Steering Committee, co-leads patient engagement for PCORI’s THRIVE trial, and advises UCSF/UC Berkeley’s Computational Precision Health program. A TEDx Cambridge speaker, his advocacy has been featured in national media and scientific publications. Hugo lives in Oakland, California, with his husband, elderly father, and Memphis the cat.
Source
Liz Salmi is the Communications & Patient Initiatives Director for OpenNotes. In this role, Liz helps clinicians, hospitals and health systems understand through “the patient’s eyes” the changing nature of patient-clinician communication in an age of growing transparency. Her research areas of interest include: the effects of transparency on patient-clinician communication, stakeholder engagement, research dissemination, and the role of social media in patient-clinician-researcher collaborations.
As a person living with a low grade malignant brain tumor, Liz is passionate about helping all people engage in their own health care by improving their experience as patients. Over the last 17 years she has been: a research subject; an advisor in patient stakeholder groups; a leader in “patient engagement” research initiatives; and an innovator, educator and investigator in national educational and research projects.
In addition to her work with OpenNotes, Liz led the Brain Cancer Quality of Life Collaborative, a multi-stakeholder group dedicated to advancing science and improving the quality of life for people with malignant brain tumors. In fall 2021, members of the BCQoLC team (along with established investigators), were awarded a $12.8 million Center Grant from the National Cancer Institute to determine optimal methods for patient enrollment in a brain tumor registry.
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For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email [email protected] and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn
Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes!
From the publisher's feed

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