Rear Admiral Susan Orsega, MSN, FNP-BC, FAANP, FAAN
Director of Commissioned Corps Headquarters
U.S. Public Health Service

As Director of Commissioned Corps Headquarters, Rear Adm. Susan M. Orsega oversees the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) Commissioned Corps, composed of approximately 6,000 uniformed health officers who serve in nearly 800 locations around the world, promoting, protecting, and advancing the health and safety of our nation. This includes the activation of the USPHS Commissioned Corps to support national COVID-19 vaccination efforts.

Appointed to this position in March 2019, she is responsible for directing all functions regarding personnel, operations, readiness, deployment, and policy for the USPHS and development of the Reserve Corps. She is the principal advisor to the assistant secretary for health on activities and policies related to USPHS training, deployment, and total force fitness. Rear Adm. Orsega served as Acting Surgeon General from January 26, 2021 – March 25, 2021 pending the Senate confirmation of Dr. Vivek H. Murthy as the 21st Surgeon General of the United States.

Shawna Butler, RN MBA
Host of SEE YOU NOW podcast

There is a small community of clinicians at the vanguard of digital technologies in health. Shawna is among those pioneers and one of the few nurses. A nurse economist, health tech specialist, and the builder of the global EntrepreNURSE movement, Shawna aims to better position nurses in our health innovation agendas as discovery engines, solution designers, and scale agents. Several years ago, she initiated a global conversation highlighting the rarity of nurses in boardrooms, product design, innovation teams, policy development, tech conferences, and health media. She’s on a mission to change that.

As the host of  SEE YOU NOW podcast, Shawna highlights the innovative and human-centered solutions driven by nurses addressing today’s most challenging healthcare problems. She’s also the managing director of the Exponential Medicine conference working with the pioneers in the thick of integrating robotics, 3D printing, drones, AI, blended reality, voice recognition, digital humans, big data and sensors into our health solutions and lifestyles to improve health, access, experience and outcomes.

Her various roles have taken her across the world and given her an unusually broad understanding of health systems and a population’s health outcomes and the impact technology and policy have on these dimensions. Shawna understands instinctively the need to work cross-sector and upstream to improve health outcomes and has done so throughout her career by working with city planners, musicians, arts organizations, chefs, farmers, food systems, schools, home builders, philanthropists, investors, inventors, rebels, legends, and anyone with a conviction to improve health and our shared human experience.