Tag Archives: Margaret Laws

Inside the Health Moonshot Impact Board: A Conversation with Margaret Laws and Shirley Bergin



This week on StartUp Health NOW, we have again handed over the microphones to two members of our Health Moonshot Impact Board and having them interview each other.

At one end of the table we’ve got Margaret Laws, CEO & President of HopeLab, former Director of Innovations for the Underserved at CHCF, and Founder of the CHCF Health Innovation Fund, and at the other end of the interview table is Shirley Bergin, Senior Advisor at ARPA-H, Former CMO/COO of TEDMED, and Advisor to Ellipsis Health and Cure.

The goal of the conversation was simply to hear about the latest projects and passions of two of the most influential and interesting people in health innovation. In the interview, which took place in person at the Lake Nona Impact Forum in Florida, we cover a range of topics, from youth mental health, to the role of AI in diagnostics, to education to address global gaps in the healthcare workforce.

Margaret Laws and Shirley Bergin are thought leaders in health innovation, but they’re also deeply involved in directing funds towards promising programs, so it will be interesting to see how their curiosities and passions as played out here will lead to concrete moves in the future.

Enjoy the conversation.


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For Margaret Laws, Innovation Springs From Co-Creation



Longtime friend of StartUp Health Margaret Laws has built a career on cross-sector, interdisciplinary partnerships. For 17 years, she served as the Director of Public Financing and Policy and the Director of Innovation for the Underserved program at the California Health Care Foundation. Today, as CEO and President of HopeLab, a social innovation lab founded and funded by the creators of eBay, she’s shifted her focus toward improving the health and wellbeing of adolescents. HopeLab’s multifactorial approach seeks to broach the many systemic and structural causes of mental illness in young people: “If there’s one thing that really requires multi-sectoral collaboration, this is it,” Laws says. At a recent Fireside Chat with StartUp Health co-founder Steven Krein, Laws explained how HopeLab’s uniquely holistic approach allows the company to tackle challenges from every angle.

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