On September 29th, Drugs & Diagnostics for Tropical Diseases (DDTD) will host our 6th Annual Health For All Humanity night in support of treatments and diagnostics for diseases that primarily affect impoverished populations. The event will take place at the Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center in the JAI Room starting with a networking happy hour including refreshments, food stations, and a silent auction at 5pm, followed by the program. Our co-emcees for the evening will be veteran Emmy award-winning broadcast journalists, Phil Blauer, and Maria Arcega-Dunn.
 
Phil Blauer is an evening anchor on Fox 5 San Diego. Before joining FOX 5 News as an anchor/reporter, Phil spent time across town at KFMB, in Los Angeles at KCBS, KCAL and KCOP and in Palm Springs at KESQ. He has also appeared on Crime Watch Daily, Investigation Discovery, CNN and 48 Hours. He has covered major national and international stories and has interviewed six U.S. Presidents. Phil has received numerous Emmys, the Edward R. Murrow Award for Investigative Reporting and San Diego Press Club honors. Raised in Santa Ana, California, Phil started honing his journalism skills while working on student newspapers all the way through high school. He went on to study Communications at Cal State Fullerton, where he received his bachelor’s degree in Print Journalism.

Maria Arcega-Dunn is FOX 5’s weekday anchor at 1, 4 and 7 p.m. With 25 years as a broadcast journalist, the multi-Emmy Award winner has reported internationally covering global news events and conflicts in Southeast Asia, Canada and throughout the United States for networks including CNN International, CTV, Global Canada, ABC, ABS-CBN and FOX News. In recent years, Maria has been recognized by Congress, California State Assembly, and the City of San Diego as a leader and trailblazer, for being the first Filipino American journalist to hit the airwaves in San Diego County and in the city of Seattle.
 
We are excited to announce this year’s keynote speaker is Meredith Wadman, a Senior Reporter at Science Magazine. At Science in Washington, D.C., Meredith covers biology research, policy, the impact of climate change on human health and sexual harassment. Previously, she was a fellow at the New America Foundation, a reporter for Nature and a contributing writer at Fortune. Her op-eds have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post.  Her critically acclaimed book, The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease, about the struggle to develop a German measles vaccine in the 1960s, was long and short listed for prominent prizes.

Before becoming a journalist, Wadman earned her B.A. in Human Biology at Stanford University and began medical school at the University of British Columbia in her native Vancouver. She completed her medical degree as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. As a medical student, she worked in Ghana, South Africa and Sarawak, Malaysia on the island of Borneo, where she accompanied a public health team visiting remote indigenous populations by longboat. After graduating from medical school, Wadman earned a master of science at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

As DDTD focuses on developing ultra-low-cost treatments and diagnostics for diseases that affect impoverished populations, proceeds from this year’s event will support seeding new projects for diseases that affect low income populations where testing has not yet been developed.