Meet the Judges
Anthony McEachern is senior manager and national account executive for Wellpartner, a 340B third party administrator and a division of CVS Health.
For more than eight years, McEachern has been a noteworthy leader in the 340B contract pharmacy space. His work is focused on providing 340B guidance and support to AIDS service organizations (Ryan White clinics), STD and family planning clinics across the United States.
During his tenure at Wellpartner, he has been successful at creating and growing a team dedicated to helping grant-based clients better support their communities by maximizing their 340B benefits. His efforts earned him the CVS Health Premier Award in 2022. He is also a member of the CVS Health HIV Strategy Team and the PRIDE+ Colleague Resource Group.
McEachern’s commitment to building successful 340B programs for community organizations began when he joined Syracuse, New York-based AIDS Community Resources as the director of business development. Prior to joining the nonprofit, McEachern owned his own company but spent several years as a volunteer with the agency, sharing his business and entrepreneurial expertise. He is passionate about the HIV prevention and treatment community and a strong advocate to helping end the HIV epidemic.
Peggy Neu is a senior advisor at the GRACE Communications Foundation, which promotes innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges in the food, environmental and public health sectors.
She is the former president of the Monday Campaigns, a public health initiative founded in 2003 by Sid Lerner, a Syracuse University alum, in association with Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Syracuse universities. The initiative is known for the Meatless Monday and Healthy Monday campaigns, which have been adopted by diverse populations around the world, demonstrating the universal appeal of an idea that is simple to understand and easy to do.
Neu joined the Monday Campaigns in 2008 after a successful career at Grey Worldwide, one of the largest communications firms. She is passionately committed to bringing marketing best practices to the challenges of public health.
Andrew Schwab is the founder and CEO of Platform Government Strategies, a strategic government health policy, advocacy and messaging firm built to “platform” health care organizations inside our national health policy debate.
His deep experience includes having spent the past two decades in and around national health policy and politics, first as a staffer in the United States Senate and New Jersey Legislature, and then as a Washington, D.C., government affairs leader at trade and member associations, nonprofits and public companies.
Schwab began his career as deputy press secretary to U.S. Senator Jon Corzine (D-NJ) where he worked on public affairs implementation of the Medicare Part D drug benefit. As he continued his public service, Schwab was chief of staff for seven years to the New Jersey Legislature’s Chairman of the Financial Institutions and Insurance Committee, passing 23 laws and guiding efforts during the 2008 financial crisis, state implementation of the Affordable Care Act and what became first-in-the-nation leadership on surprise billing legislation.
In 2013, Schwab was recruited to lead federal advocacy at AARP in the areas of Medicare Advantage, Medigap, employer insurance and the ACA. He then moved on to heading federal government affairs at the Alliance of Community Health Plans where he served during 2017’s ACA repeal and replace debate.
In 2020, Schwab became director of policy, federal affairs and partnerships at United States of Care, a nonprofit established by former Obama and Biden administration official Andy Slavitt.
Immediately prior to establishing his own firm, Schwab built the first government affairs function at Oak Street Health where he led efforts to preserve the ACO REACH program from termination, establish the Health Equity Index Reward Factor in Medicare Advantage, and led the department’s transition after the $10.6 billion acquisition by CVS Health.
Schwab holds a bachelor of arts in policy studies and history from Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and a master of public administration from Rutgers University.
Gina Wingood, Sc.D., MPH, is the Sidney and Helaine Lerner Professor of Public Health Promotion; director of the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion; and professor in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
Wingood received a doctorate from Harvard University School of Public Health. She has served as the principal investigator or co-principal investigator on 20 NIH-funded grants. She is currently a co-principal investigator of the NIAID-funded Women’s Interagency HIV Study and the research director of the NIH-funded BIRCWH (Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health). Her research examines the efficacy of HIV prevention interventions for African American women.
She has published over 200 articles, which have appeared in JAMA, Archives of Internal Medicine, JAIDS and AJPH. In 2009, Wingood was invited to the White House inaugural meeting on Women and HIV to speak on her suite of efficacious HIV prevention interventions for women, and in 2012 she was invited back to the White House to discuss the influence of gender-based violence on HIV risk.
In 2011, Wingood was identified by the journal Science as a highly funded African American, NIH grant recipient. Wingood was awarded the Eminent Women in Science Scholar Award from Rutgers University. She is the recipient of the Allen Edwards Endowed Lectureship in Psychology from the University of Washington, and she is the recipient of the John P. McGovern Award in Health Promotion from the University of Texas at Houston.
She serves as an executive director for the NIH-funded Social Behavioral Science Research Network. Fellows attending this program have received 19 federally funded awards.