HEATHER LEIGH FLANNERY, CEO & Co-Founder, AI MINDSystems Foundation

Heather Leigh Flannery is an applied futurist, policy and patient advocate, and complex systems theorist. She is CEO at AI MINDSystems Foundation, a nonprofit she co-founded in March 2024 with Chief Scientific Officer, Sean Manion, PhD, and other industry leaders with a timely vision for structural interventions for humanity's health, safety, prosperity, and privacy. Heather is also the Chair of the Healthcare & Life Sciences Working Group at the Government Blockchain Association (GBA), Chair of the Washington, DC Chapter of AI 2030, develops standards at IEEE, and serves as the Women Economic Forum G100 USA Northeast Regional Chair for Humanity, Technology & Innovation.

Prior to AI MINDSystems Foundation, Heather was the Founder and CEO at Consensys Health, which began in 2018 incubated within Consensys. Consensys Health was spun-off March 2020, and rebranded to Equideum Health January 2022. Equideum Health focused on blockchain-facilitated, multi-party decentralized AI and analytics, collaborative (federated) machine learning, privacy enhancing technologies (PETs), and web3 identity and verifiable credentials for granular, dynamic consent. Initiatives include veterans health, decentralized trials (DeSci) and Clinical Research as a Care Option (CRAACO).

Prior to Equideum Health, in 2009 Heather founded Obesity Prevention, Policy, and Management, Inc. ("Obesity PPM"), a digital health tech-enabled services company with innovations in capitated, multi-specialty chronic disease and acute care management, population health, research administration, and market access for new United States FDA-approved treatments.

From 2015, Obesity PPM sought to adopt blockchain to improve its "Managed Ecosystems for Integrated Obesity Treatment." Heather became an expert on the barriers to blockchain adoption in health, and co-founded a trade association for industry self-regulation and evidence-based policy, Blockchain in Healthcare Global (BiHG) under IEEE ISTO. She continues as a patient advocate for ending discrimination against people with obesity. Obesity PPM focused on weight bias and evidence-based treatment as primary prevention of obesity's comorbidities, including 16 hormone-sensitive cancers and the full cardiometabolic disease spectrum.

Heather has driven business model innovation throughout her 30-year career. She builds organizations through values-alignment: impact, inclusion, sustainability, and a global focus informed by her work in global health, development, and deep tech diplomacy.