Dr. William Bithoney is an experienced healthcare professional with more than 35 years of experience in the healthcare sector having served as a physician executive in diverse academic and hospital systems. He is skilled in developing managed care strategies, academic strategies, a self-sustaining cycle of continuous performance and quality improvement, utilization review, utilization management, and research directions.

Dr. Bithoney served as Chief of General Pediatrics Primary Care at Boston Children’s Hospital for 17 years. While there, he received the clinical appointment of Senior Associate in Medicine, the highest clinical appointment available at Harvard Medical School/Boston Children’s. He has been a Professor at both Harvard and the SUNY Downstate Medical School and served as Vice Dean and Professor at NY Medical College where he managed 9 hospitals and the care provided by 5,000 physicians. He has been Chief Medical Officer (CMO) for several health systems with revenue between $1 Billion and $2.4 Billion per annum, managing the clinical, financial, and supply chain processes for dozens of successful general medical and primary care programs in various health systems. He has extensive experience managing health system pharmacies and leading hospital formulary committees. Dr. Bithoney has served as Managing Director and Chief Physician Executive at BDO, an international consulting group where he consulted on hospital and health system management, population health, biotech evaluation, and health care technology.

In addition, Dr. Bithoney has served as the National Medical Leader for Thomson Reuters’ medical division now part of IBM Watson. He was the founding CMO and a Board Member of Medical Missions for Children, a telemedicine company operating in over 100 countries. In 2013 he consulted with the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and their federal Area Health Education Center charged with establishing an Island wide e-prescribing program. He served as President & CEO at Mercy Physicians, P.C., directing Mercy’s Hospital based Accountable Care Organization (ACO), Medicare Advantage and general practice activities. In 2010, Dr. Bithoney and his Mercy team won the National Innovation Award from the American College of Health Executives for their work developing a primary care network that significantly reduced the cost of care and improved the quality of patient care. In 2010, 2011 and again in 2012, Dr. Bithoney and his colleagues received further recognition when the Mercy System was named one of the 100 Top Hospitals in the United States for quality and value by Cleverly and Associates.

M.D., School of Medicine, Yale University

A.B., Molecular Biology, Harvard College, magna cum laude

Dr Douglas Watt was trained in psychology and neuropsychology at Harvard University and Boston College, completing his PhD studies in 1985 after getting a BA in 1972 at Harvard and a Master’s Degree in Psychology at Northeastern in 1976.

Over the past 40 years of a varied clinical practice, he has served as Director of Clinical Neuropsychology at two local Boston teaching hospitals, and has been on the faculty of the Boston University School of Medicine for more than 20 years. He was also a faculty member at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis and Institute for the Study of Violence for several years, teaching doctoral level courses on affective neuroscience and its implications for the mental health sciences. He had a teaching fellow/community faculty appointment at Harvard Medical School for seven years, teaching a yearly course for postdoctoral fellows, neurologists, psychiatrists, and neuropsychologists in clinical neuroscience, neuroanatomy, and neurodegenerative disorders in Cambridge MA from 2007 until June of 2013, and also an Adjunct Professor appointment at Lesley University, also in Cambridge, MA, teaching behavioral neuroscience and biological psychology in their graduate school program in psychology.

Dr. Watt suffers, as one colleague described, from a “deplorable excess of interests,” among them the core ‘impossible questions’ in science about the nested hierarchy of the three fundamental mysteries: the emergence of matter, with that, the emergence of life, and within those evolutionary trajectories, the emergence of mind. He has always believed in the value of the ‘big picture overview,’ and credits Marcel Mesulam with providing a lucid model early in his career for benchmark scientific reviews of complex and challenging subjects, when he was exposed in his doctoral program to the brilliant first chapter by Marcel in his 1985 classic textbook, the Principles of Behavioral Neurology. This cemented a long-term interest in both clinical neuroscience and in scientific writing. Committed to teaching and the clarification of scientific concepts and findings, Dr. Watt has given over 100 talks to local, national, and international groups on clinical syndromes in neuropsychiatry and neuropsychology, and on topics in cognitive and affective neuroscience.

He has contributed roughly 75 peer-reviewed articles and reviews, and over a half dozen book chapters, on varied subjects in neuroscience and neurobiology, covering the biology of aging, the neurobiology and neuropsychology of depression, the neurobiology of Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative dementias, and the neurobiology of delirium and confusional states. He counts as one of the great privileges of his professional career a 2+ decades-long collaboration, friendship and mentoring from preeminent neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, with whom he shared many projects, including six week-long seminars covering subjects in affective neuroscience, and a half-dozen or more publications. Specifically, he co-authored with Jaak Panksepp a 25,000 word target article on the neurobiology of depression, emphasizing its conserved evolutionary basis and its primary mechanistic relationship to protracted separation distress, offering a social brain-centric view of depression lacking in much of contemporary mainstream biological psychiatry. Dr. Watt and Dr. Panksepp also collaborated on an edited volume on the neurobiology and psychology of empathy, published by Nova Science just before Jaak's untimely death in April of 2017.

Dr. Watt is enthusiastic about teaching, editing and research reviewing, and contributing to the scientific clarification of protective mechanisms in promising nutraceuticals, and how to understand and thereby more effectively treat the multifactorial/multidimensional process of neurodegeneration.

Current projects include an upcoming seminar on the Neurobiology of Alzheimer's disease for the Mass Neuropsychological Society, and an updated comprehensive review paper on depression. He believes that the best science emerges from a fundamental humility in the face of Nature.

Professor Rugini was a long tenure CNR (Italian National Research Centre) researcher at the Olive Growing Study Center in Perugia, Italy, and university professor at the University of Tuscia, of which he was also dean of the Faculty of Agriculture.

After enrolling at the University of Perugia in the 1968/1969 academic year, he graduated in Agricultural Sciences in 1972, with 110/110 honors. After doing his military service, he obtained various scholarships at the CNR, from 1973 to 1976, becoming a researcher at the CNR from 1976 to 1987, and more specifically at the Olive Growing Study Center in Perugia; later he was Research Fellow at the Genetic Department of the Institute of Paper Chemistry (Wisconsin, USA) 1981-82; Research Fellow at East Malling Research Station, 1985 and 1986, for a total of six months; then associate professor, since 1987, at the University of Tuscia; full professor since 1994, also at the University of Tuscia, until October 2018, the year of his retirement.

Eddo Rugini has carried out research activities, mainly in the field of arboreal plants, relating to applied physiology and biochemistry; cell differentiation in vitro (rhizogenesis, somatic embryogenesis and sprout differentiation); flower differentiation, and genetic improvement with conventional and biotechnological techniques, and in particular to genetic modifications with recombinant DNA techniques.

He has been coordinator of projects of national interest (PRIN, MIPAAF, CNR) and head of UO of international projects of the European Union and bilateral projects with England and France in the biotechnological sector of fruit tree species.

From 1986 to 2018 he taught at the University of Tuscia: general arboriculture; special arboriculture; fruit growing; tree cultivation, Olive growing, nursery technique, science and techniques of in vitro crops.

From 2015/2016 to 2016/2017 he taught at the University of ROMA3 for two consecutive years, in the Quality Vegetable Production discipline.

For twelve consecutive years, from 1998 to 2010, he taught Horticultural Biotechnology at the Master CIHEAM (International Center for Advanced Mediterranean Agronomic Studies, UE (Greece)

Associate Editor of Frontiers in Plant Science as of 2018.

He has worked as reviewer for several international journals (Plant Science, Plant Cell Tissue and Organ Culture, Scientia Horticulturae, Trees, Acta Physiol. Plant., Scientia Horticulturae, etc.).

Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture of the University of Tuscia from 2003 to 2009.

Board member and member of the Integrated Academic Senate for a total of nine years.

Member of commissions for the evaluation of European and national research projects.

Member of the Interministerial Commission for Biotechnologies from 1999 to 2003, designated by the Ministry of Health as an expert for MiPAF.

Member of the Commission for Plant Biodiversity.

Member of the Regional Commission for the viticultural problems of Lazio.

Member of the working group for the definition of the IGP Kiwi Latina.

Member of the Scientific Council of Cnr, Institute on Wood Species Propagation, FI, 1997-2001.

Member of the horticultural commission (appointed by the Lazio Region Agriculture Department).

Reviewer of the IFS (International Foundation for Science (Sweden).

International consultant of the International Atomic Energy Agency of Vienna.

Vice-president of the National Academy of Olive and Oil since 2014.

Member (and former vice-president) Society of Agricultural Genetics.

Member of the Georgofili Academy.

Member of Scientific Societies (SIGA, SOI)

General Councilor since 2014 of the "Luca Coscioni Association for the freedom of scientific research"

Member of the Carivit Foundation since 2002.

In 2007 he was awarded the "Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic".

He returned the honor to the President of the Republic in protest in 2016, with the main reason being a lack of consideration by politicians towards research and researchers, especially the numerous young precarious researchers who support research in Italy and to whom no future is guaranteed.

Over 200 printed works, most of them in English.

Over 30 chapters in books published by foreign (Springer, McMillan, Kluwer, CRC Press, Wiley Blackwell, CAB, etc) and Italian publishers.

Editor of two books published by Springer and IHS.

Various curates.

Over 200 communications and posters at conferences, of which about 50 by invitation.

About 80 seminars, mainly in Italy.

Numerous participations in interviews and television and radio debates.