Health | Humanity | Ethics
Established in 2016, The Park Street Corporation Speaker Series seeks to engage students in exploring values and ethics related to health and healthcare practices.
Fall 2025 Speakers
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September 10, 2025
Nuila’s stunning debut The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine, which details the stories of five Houstonians unable to access healthcare in his hometown of Houston, TX, was selected as a semi-finalist for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and named one of the Best Books of 2023 by Amazon, Kirkus Reviews, and The Washington Post. Dr. Nuila is an associate professor of medicine, medical ethics, and health policy at Baylor College of Medicine, where he directs the Humanities Expression and Arts Lab (HEAL) program. His work and research on the use of arts and humanities in medical practice have been supported by the Association of American Medical Colleges, and he has received fellowships for his writing from MacDowell, Yaddo, the Logan Nonfiction Program, and the Texas Institute of Letters. His features and essays have appeared in Texas Monthly, The New York Times Sunday Review, VQR, The Atlantic, and The New England Journal of Medicine. His short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, Guernica, and other magazines.
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October 23, 2025
Lia Tadesse Gebremedhin is currently the Executive Director of the Harvard Ministerial Leadership Program and a Professor of the Practice of Public Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Lia served as the Minister of Health of Ethiopia from March 2020 to February 2024 after serving as State Minister of Health from November 2018. As a Minister, she spearheaded the COVID pandemic response and helped her country navigate the pandemic with resilience. Before that, she served as Program Director at the University of Michigan’s Center for International Reproductive Health Training (CIRHT). She was also the Project Director of USAID’s Maternal and Child Survival Program (MCSP) at Jhpiego-Ethiopia and CEO and Vice Provost of St. Paul’s Hospital Millennium Medical College (SPHMMC) in Addis Ababa, where she led hospital service and academic reforms. Lia is passionate about strengthening and reforming health systems and has received several recognitions for her accomplishments in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, in advocacy for gender equity, access to quality health services and training, and has published over 40 articles, commentaries, and papers.
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November 4, 2025
Emily St. John Mandel is the bestselling author of numerous novels, including The Glass Hotel, Station Eleven, and Sea of Tranquility. Her novel Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Toronto Book Award, and the Morning News Tournament of Books, and was adapted into a limited series for HBO. A previous novel, The Singer’s Gun, was the 2014 winner of the Prix Mystere de la Critique in France. Her short fiction and essays have been anthologized in numerous collections, including Best American Mystery Stories 2013. She is a staff writer for The Millions.