Malaria.com is guided by an international advisory board from the worlds of media, epidemiology and technology.
Board Members
Michael Castleman
Michael Castleman has been called “one of the nation’s top health writers” (Library Journal). He is the author of 13 consumer medical guides, among them: Nature’s Cures, The Healing Herbs, and Before You Call the Doctor. Castleman has also written more than 1,500 articles for magazines and the Web. As a longtime scuba diver, Castleman has traveled to many locales where malaria is a major health problem. Personal use of malaria prophylaxis piqued his interest in the disease—and a commitment to help control it.
Peter Goggin
Peter Goggin has been a pioneer in online health since 1995. As vice-president and co-founder of NetHealth, a division of Epicenter Communications, Inc., Goggin led the development of some of the first vertical health communities online, including Diabetes.com, Alzheimers.com, Depression.com, Obesity.com and others. In January, 1999, he joined PlanetRx as Director of Project Management, and then PlanetRx’s Vice-President of Design and Production. Hi is now a Partner at Argonaut Ventures, LLC, and co-founder of Malaria.com.
Mary Ellen Guroy MD
Mary Ellen Guroy, M.D., is a diplomat of the American Board of Internal Medicine in Infectious Diseases and certified in travel and tropical medicine. She is in private practice in Sausalito, California in infectious diseases, serves as a consultant to the Marin County Department of Health and Human Services, and is an associate of the Northern California Travel Clinic.
Matthew Naythons MD
Dr. Naythons is a physician, journalist, NGO founder and early Internet health entrepreneur.
After covering the exodus of Cambodian refugees into Thailand for TIME Magazine, he formed and led International Medical Teams (IMT), a mobile relief organization that provided medical care to Cambodian refugees and displaced Thai villagers from 1979–1982.
In 1991, Naythons founded Epicenter Communications, which in 1995 published the first guide to online health: The Internet Health, Fitness, and Medicine Yellow Pages. Later that year, Epicenter formed two Internet health divisions: NetMed and NetHealth and created some of the first disease-specific health sites on the Internet. NetHealth/Epicenter websites included Diabetes.com, Depression.com, and Alzheimers.com, among others.
In January 1999, NetHealth was purchased by PlanetRx.com and Naythons became Vice President and Publisher of the online pharmacy. Following PlanetRx, Epicenter Communications resumed building health websites including Mednews.com, Heal.com, and Malaria.com.
Judith Standley
Judith Standley is a certified nurse midwife (CNM) with a Masters degree in Public Health (MPH). She has spent over 25 years living and working in developing countries for both international bilateral and non-governmental organizations in the field of maternal, newborn, and child health including the impact of infectious and vector borne diseases on mothers and children. Judith has worked at global and national level to assist governments in improving health services as well as with communities, to empower women and families with information and skills.
Judith Thurman
Judith Thurman, a Staff Writer at the New Yorker, spent considerable time in East Africa researching Isak Dinesen; The Life of a Storyteller, a biography that won a National Book Award for Non-fiction, and served as the basis for Sydney Pollack’s Oscar-winning film, Out of Africa, on which Thurman was the Associate Producer. She is the author of Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, winner of the Los Angeles Times and Salon book awards for biography; and, most recently, a collection of her New Yorker essays, “Cleopatra’s Nose.”
Alain-jacques Valleron, Dr Sc
Alain-jacques Valleron has pioneered real time electronic surveillance of infectious diseases by developing in 1984, before the popularization of the Internet, the French Communicable Diseases Network, which collects, analyzes, and redistributes in real time information provided online by sentinel GPs. His research group is a World Health Organization (WHO) collaborating center for electronic surveillance of diseases. He has broad experience in the modeling and epidemiology of major infectious diseases (AIDS, Viral Hepatitis C, Influenza, and a variant of the Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease).
Valleron graduated in mathematics from the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, and presented a PhD thesis on the modeling of cell cycle and tumor growth. He is currently professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the University Pierre et Marie Curie and is the director of the Paris Doctoral School of Public Health. He chairs the board of the French National Institute for Blood Transfusion, and is a member of the French Academy of Sciences.