Paul Newhouse, M.D. holds the Jim Turner Chair in Cognitive Disorders at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and is Professor of Psychiatry, Pharmacology, and Medicine. He is Director of the Vanderbilt Center for Cognitive Medicine (VCCM) in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He directs the Clinical Core for the Vanderbilt Alzheimer's Disease Research Center and is also a physician-scientist at the Veterans Affairs Tennessee Valley Health Systems Geriatric Research, Education, and Clinical Center (GRECC). He is an Army veteran and served in Operation Desert Storm.

Dr. Newhouse received his undergraduate education at Kansas State University, attended medical school at Loyola University, Stritch School of Medicine, and completed his residency training in psychiatry at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center followed by a fellowship in Geriatric Psychopharmacology Research at the National Institute of Mental Health. He is a diplomat of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in both General Psychiatry and Geriatric Psychiatry and was awarded the American Psychiatric Association Profiles in Courage award in 2002 and the Loyola University Alumnus of the Year Award for Research in 2017.

Dr. Newhouse's research has focused on brain cholinergic mechanisms in cognitive aging and the role of nicotinic cholinergic receptor systems in normal and impaired cognitive functioning in humans. His work established the importance of brain nicotinic cholinergic receptor systems in normal cognitive processes and established these receptors as a therapeutic target in Alzheimer’s disease and related conditions. He has pioneered the development of human models for new cognitive drug development including early first-in-human studies to the design and implementation of national multicenter trials. He has emphasized the development of novel cholinergic agents for clinical use in cognitive disorders and has established novel brain imaging and biomarker-based measures of brain drug effects through the use of novel pharmacologic‐imaging methodologies. His research has been continuously funded by NIH since 1989 and he is funded currently by the National Institute on Aging, the Alzheimer’s Association, the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation, and other private companies and foundations.

Sudhanshu Patwardhan is a British-Indian, U.K.-licensed medical doctor, passionate about Healthtech innovation in cancer prevention. For the past two decades, he has lived and worked in three continents, doing senior roles in research, strategy and policy in the pharmaceutical and tobacco industries. 

In his early years in tobacco harm reduction, his team of clinical researchers and lab scientists set the foundations for the assessment of reduced-risk products, now accepted by regulators and the industry as the definitive approach for duty of care and regulatory compliance. At Nicoventures, a wholly owned subsidiary of BAT, he was instrumental in enabling the first e-cigarette company acquisition by a global tobacco business leading to a successful application for a medical license with the MHRA for an e-cigarette. In his policy role there, Patwardhan shaped the creation of a global key opinion leader network in consumer advocacy and public health champions. With the British Standards Institution (BSI), Patwardhan led the creation of the world’s first vaping product standards for safety and quality in 2015 and the BSI Online Age Checking specifications in collaboration with the Westminster-based Digital Policy Alliance in 2018. 

Patwardhan splits time between the U.K. and South Asia on projects that address the needs of the most disadvantaged tobacco users. In 2018, he co-founded the Centre for Health Research and Education that now has a team of over 100 medical and public health experts globally working in cancer prevention. Since 2021, Patwardhan is working with digital tech partners for innovating in oral cancer screening.