Dr. Katrina Firlik is co-founder and chief medical officer of HealthPrize Technologies, an Internet company with a novel solution for improving adherence to prescription medications, critical to improving health outcomes. Before founding HealthPrize, Katrina was a neurosurgeon in private practice at Greenwich Hospital in Greenwich, Connecticut, and on the clinical faculty at Yale University School of Medicine.

In addition to her scientific publications, Katrina is the author of Another Day in the Frontal Lobe:  A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside, published by Random House and reviewed by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and O Magazine. She enjoys conveying medical concepts to the public and has appeared on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC as a commentator on a variety of medical issues.  She is also co-inventor of a brain stimulation device designed to enhance recovery after stroke.

Katrina grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio and attended Cornell University, with an undergraduate major in cultural anthropology.  She attended medical school at Case Western Reserve University in her hometown of Cleveland, and completed her neurosurgery residency at the University of Pittsburgh, one the largest neurosurgery centers in the country, where she was the first woman accepted to the program.  Katrina also completed a specialty fellowship in epilepsy surgery at Yale University. She is currently working on her second book.

Katrina lives in Darien, Connecticut with her husband Andrew, a neurosurgeon-turned-venture capitalist, and their daughter Annika.

Domingo Martinez is the New York Times Best Selling author of The Boy Kings of Texas and was a finalist for The National Book Award in 2012.  The Boy Kings of Texas is a Gold Medal Winner of the Independent Publishers Book Award, a Non-Fiction Finalist for The Washington State Book Awards, and was nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Prize.

 The Boy Kings of Texas was recently “greenlit” for an HBO series through Salma Hayek’s production company, Ventana Rosa.

His work has appeared in Epiphany Literary Journal, Seattle Weekly, Texas Monthly, The New Republic, Saveur Magazine, Huisache Literary Magazine and he is a regular contributor to This American Life. He has also appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered and The Diane Rehm show, and was the recipient of the Bernard De Voto Fellowship for Non-Fiction at Bread Loaf Writer’s Colony in 2013.  Mr. Martinez is also a fundraiser and spokesperson for 826 Seattle, the literacy project founded by Dave Eggers.

His new memoir, My Heart is a Drunken Compass, will be published by Globe Pequot Press in Fall 2014.

Dave Eggers has given this endorsement:

“Domingo Martinez is an essential new American voice, and  My Heart is a Drunken Compass delivers on the promise of The Boy Kings of Texas. In a life of chaos and pain he manages to find grace, and humor, and — contrary to the title of this book — real moral purpose. This is a riveting book.”

Carlos was born in Havana in 1950. He is now the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale, where he has served as chairman of the Department of Religious Studies and the Renaissance Studies Program.  Before joining the Yale faculty in 1996, he taught at St. John’s University in Minnesota and the University of Virginia, and spent two years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, one of them in an office directly across from Einstein’s.  In 1962 he fled to the United States as one of the 14,000 unaccompanied children airlifted out of Cuba through Operation Pedro Pan.  After living in several foster homes in the United States – including one for juvenile delinquents — he was reunited with his mother in 1965, but his father was never able to leave the island.  Working full-time jobs as he attended high school and college, he eventually earned entrance to the Graduate School at Yale University, where he received his Ph.D.  in 1979.

Eire is the author of Waiting for Snow in Havana (Free Press/Simon&Schuster, 2003), a memoir of the Cuban Revolution, which won the nonfiction National Book Award in 2003 and has been translated into thirteen languages.  He is also the author of several highly-acclaimed scholarly books on early modern European religious history, including War Against the Idols (Cambridge, 1986), From Madrid to Purgatory(Cambridge, 1995), and A Very Brief History of Eternity(Princeton, 2009).  In addition to serving on the publications committee of Yale University Press, he is an associate editor of the journal Church History, and was elected President of the American Society for Reformation Research in 2010.  All of his books are banned in Cuba, where he has been proclaimed an enemy of the state: a distinction he regards as the highest honor of all.  A second memoir, Learning to Die in Miami, was published in 2010 (Free Press/ Simon & Schuster), and is currently being turned into a major feature film.  He is currently working on a biography of St. Teresa of Avila, to be published by Princeton University Press.

Carlos Eire can speak about five different areas, and has several talks ready to deliver within each area.