The Wednesday, Sept. 16 event, “Grappling with Pandemics: Global Health Policy in the 21st Century,” brings Northern Michigan an expert with an impressive resume: Dr. Julio Frenk, the president of the University of Miami, former minister of health in Mexico, a former senior fellow at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and former executive director of evidence and investigation at the World Health Organization.

Interviewing Frenk (above right) will be Kenneth Warner (above left), an IAF board member with a similarly impressive resume — and local ties.

Warner, a native of Washington, D.C., has been a resident of Northern Michigan since 2012. This November, he'll be on the ballot for Northwestern Michigan College’s board of trustees. Warner, an economist, has a deep background in health and academia. For 40 years, he's researched tobacco policy and served as the World Bank’s representative to negotiations on the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the world’s first global health treaty. He served as the dean of the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health until 2017, when he retired as the Avedis Donabedian Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Public Health and Dean Emeritus. 

Warner moved to Traverse City with his wife shortly after he went into semi-retirement eight years ago. His wife grew up in Northern Michigan, and today the couple lives on the land where she was raised, in a home overlooking East Grand Traverse Bay. In this week’s Northern Express — sister publication of The Ticker — writer Patrick Sullivan talks with Warner about the IAF upcoming event and his perspective on COVID-19 from his home in northern Michigan.

Read the complete interview online here, or pick up a copy of the Northern Express at newsstand locations in 14 counties across northern Michigan.