Marisha Burden, MD, MBA, FACP, SFHM is the Division Head of Hospital Medicine and Professor of Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Dr. Burden completed her medical degree at the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine graduating with the honor of Alpha Omega Alpha and completed her residency at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in the hospitalist training track. Dr. Burden is passionate about cultivating a thriving healthcare workforce and developing clinical staffing models that empower healthcare professionals to deliver their best care. She is the co-lead for the Hospital Medicine ReEngineering Network (HOMERuN) Workforce Planning Group, served as principal investigator on an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality study “Discharge in the AM: A Randomized Control Trial of Physician Rounding Styles to Improve Hospital Flow”, and received a Total Worker Health Pilot Grant to study work design. She received funding from the American Medical Association to investigate the relationship between inpatient clinician workloads as measured by electronic health record audit log data and clinician-reported outcomes such as burnout, intent to leave, and job fulfillment across 12 hospitals. Recently she was awarded a grant from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to study the costs of turnover. She was recognized in 2022 with the Society of Hospital Medicine Clinical Leadership Award and recently by receiving the ABIM Foundation Professionalism Article Prize Winner for her work on administrative harm. She is the Co-Creator of GrittyWork, a mobile application and platform to assess in near-real time, clinician perception of work and pair this with electronic measures of workload. 

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Dr. Frederik G. Pferdt believes the future isn’t something we wait for—it’s something we create from within. 

As Google’s first Chief Innovation Evangelist, he helped shape one of the world’s most iconic innovation cultures, guiding tens of thousands of leaders—from Silicon Valley to the United Nations—to imagine boldly, experiment bravely, and lead with radical optimism. 

Today, Frederik serves as Executive-in-Residence at NYU’s Initiative on Purpose and Flourishing and teaches at Stanford’s d.school, where he’s spent over a decade helping students and executives turn uncertainty into possibility. 

His award-winning book, What’s Next Is Now (Harper, 2024), and its German follow-up, Radikal Besser (Murmann, 2025), offer a practical invitation to anyone ready to activate their “Zukunftsgeist”—the inner future spirit that helps us shape what’s next. 

Frederik has worked with organizations in over 25 countries—from the NBA to Lufthansa, NASA to NGOs—helping them build cultures where imagination, empathy, and curiosity thrive. 

Originally from Germany, he now lives off the grid in the Santa Cruz Mountains with his family, where nature, play, and daily experiments continue to inform his most important work: living what he teaches. 

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Allison Pugh is Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. Her fourth book The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World (Princeton 2024) analyzes work that relies on relationship, arguing that “connective labor” is meaningful and important, yet under siege by data analytics and under threat from automation and AI.  The book has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, and Science, and named on “best of” lists by Nature, Public Books, and the New Scientist.  The 2024-5 Vice President of the American Sociological Association, Pugh has given more than 100 invited talks and has served as a visiting scholar in Germany, France and Australia.  Pugh is also a former journalist dedicated to public sociology and published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time and other outlets.

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