Keynote Speakers
Dr. Erica Taylor, MD, MBA
Vice President of Health Equity for the Duke Clinician Practice; Vice Chair of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for the Department of Orthopaedics, Duke Health
Dr. Erica Taylor is a practicing orthopaedic upper extremity surgeon at Duke University. She achieved her degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Virginia and obtained her medical degree from the Duke School of Medicine. She completed a fellowship in Hand and Upper Extremity Surgery at The Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. She joined the Duke School of Medicine faculty in 2013 and received her Masters of Business Administration from the Duke Fuqua School of Business in 2020. She earned a faculty appointment of Executive in Residence at the Duke Fuqua School of Business, where she lectures on the intricacies of strategic diversity leadership in healthcare.
As a proud member of the Duke University Community, she is heavily committed to various aspects of leadership, including extensive engagement in surgical governance, spending 7 years as the Duke Raleigh Hospital Chief of Orthopaedics. In addition, she is the Vice Chair of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for the Department of Orthopaedics. In 2020, she was appointed as the first Vice President of Health Equity for the Duke Clinician Practice. In this senior leadership role, she works alongside colleagues and institutional leaders to develop thoughtful strategy and best practices towards implementation of health equity across clinical environments and specialties.
Dr. Taylor has also served on national for-profit and non-profit boards, including spending 7 years on the J. Robert Gladden Orthopaedic Society Board. She was named as one of 2022’s Top Diversity Officers in Healthcare. In 2020 she founded the Orthopaedic Diversity Leadership Consortium, a pioneering organization whose mission is to elevate the necessary components of inclusive leadership in healthcare through network and strategy development. In 2024, ODLC was selected as an Equity Transformation Partner for the American Hospital Association, a coveted designation awarded to select organizations identified as a vetted and validated resource for the advancement of health equity for the nation’s health systems.
Dr. Taylor brings a lifetime of experience, passion, and has a proven track record as a leader for change. She believes that achievement of shared goals must be sustained through creative thinking, unified efforts, and sincere commitment. Her family and her faith are the cornerstones that bring her the energy and unwavering spirit of love to do this work.
Dr. Charlene Wong, MD
Fmr. Senior Adviser for Health Strategy, CDC; Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Duke University School of Medicine
Charlene Wong, MD MSHP served as the Senior Advisor for Health Strategy to the Director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In this role, she led CDC’s collaborative approach to protecting health through intentional partnerships with health care and other federal, state and local entities in the agency’s priority areas of supporting young families, mental health and overdose, and readiness and response. She previously served as the inaugural Assistant Secretary for Children and Families and the Chief Health Policy Officer for COVID-19 in the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.
Dr. Wong was previously faculty at Duke University and served as the Executive Director of North Carolina Integrated Care for Kids (NC InCK), an innovative model serving ~100,000 Medicaid-insured children in central North Carolina that integrates supports and data across health care, educational, and social sectors (e.g., schools, housing, food, early care and education, child welfare). She is a primary care pediatrician, specializing in adolescent and young adult medicine.
Dr. Wong's research and policy training includes fellowships at the CDC and in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program. She received her undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Morehead-Cain scholar and completed her medical and research training at Emory University, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, University of Washington, Seattle Children’s Hospital, University of Pennsylvania, and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.