Keynote Speakers

Diane Atwood

​For more than 20 years, Diane was the health reporter at NEWS CENTER Maine. In 2002, she went to what is affectionately known in the television news business as the dark side and became the marketing and public relations manager for a Maine hospital. Nine years later, she decided to combine her reporting and marketing/PR skills and become a freelance health and wellness writer. To help market her services she began writing a blog called Catching Health. The strategy worked, but something unexpected also happened. Writing the blog was like being a reporter again, which Diane found extremely rewarding, and Catching Health quickly took on a life of its own. It now has a robust following and has won serval awards. In early 2019, Diane added a podcast called Conversations About Aging. She is traveling the state of Maine interviewing people 60 and older about their lives and their perspectives on aging.

Before she became a health reporter, Diane spent ten years as a radiation therapist, treating cancer patients at Maine Medical Center. It was a profound experience that gave her an appreciation for things she might have otherwise overlooked. The work also revealed the geek in her. As an assistant to the radiation physicist, she learned to calculate doses of radiation and calibrate the treatment machines. And she discovered that she understood and enjoyed the language of medicine, which is a huge help when that’s what you write about. Diane loves interviewing people, researching a wide variety of topics, and sharing information that might make a difference in someone’s life.
Mary Mahoney

Mary Mahoney received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Connecticut where she began her research in histories of bibliotherapy, or the uses of books as medicine. Her work explores the relationships between reading and health, and examines encounters with books in nineteenth-century asylums, in the trenches of World War I, and beyond. She has given numerous talks on her work, and leads community classes that invite students to examine their relationships with books through memoir-writing exercises paired with histories of bibliotherapy.

​Mary is currently at work on a history of bibliotherapy in the United States from 1800 to the present. She hopes it will invite further conversation about the importance of the medical humanities, and of the therapeutic power of subjective acts like reading that resist the standards of science especially in a moment that values quantified selfhood. Mary is the Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Trinity College where she leads digital scholarship initiatives and coordinates research by faculty and students. In her free time, she co-hosts a podcast called American Girls that explores the American Girl series using history and pop culture which has been recommended by the New York Times. 
Blackford Middleton​

Blackford Middleton is Chief Informatics & Innovation Officer at Apervita, Inc., the provider of the largest digital health platform for the creation, exchange, and use of data and analytics in healthcare. Previously, he was a professor of Biomedical Informatics, and or of Medicine, at Stanford, Harvard, and Vanderbilt Universities, and he held executive leadership roles at MedicaLogic/ Medscape (CMO), Partners Healthcare System (Director, Clinical Informatics R&D), and at Vanderbilt (CIO). Dr. Middleton’s work is focused on clinical informatics – the applied science surrounding strategy, design, implementation, and evaluation of clinical information systems in complex environments.

Dr. Middleton is nationally and internationally recognized as a thought-leader in clinical informatics, and healthcare information technology and was recognized by Modern Healthcare as one of the top 300 influential people in Healthcare in 2008 and as one of the US Top 25 Clinical Informaticists in 2010.