Our Leadership Team

Bob Burgin
CEO
Bob brings over thirty years of leadership experience to his position as CEO at Amplifire. Bob founded the Amplifire Healthcare Alliance, a collaboration of hospital systems dedicated to improving patient care and reducing the incidence of avoidable harm by eliminating confidently held misinformation. Bob brings Alliance members together with the common goal of reducing patient risk and clinical variation. Outcomes data proves that clinical variation can be overcome when health systems employ the right tools with a collective will to solve problems together.

JK Hullett
CFO
JK brings 25 years of financial and operational experience. He worked in corporate and business development at American Airlines, and was CFO of @Last Software before it was acquired by Google and CEO of Net Identity before it was acquired by Tucows. JK is a Principal at Lacuna Gap Capital, an investment group that supported Amplifire through early-stage product development and market implementation. Mr. Hullett oversees all financial activity, from contract development, renewals, and negotiations, to patent filings and legal compliance matters.

Charles J. Smith
Chief Research Officer &
Co-Founder
Charles has launched five companies. He is known for two innovations: the royalty-free model at Digital Stock, later sold to Bill Gates, and the knowledge engineering approach built into the Amplifire learning algorithm. Charles organized the Amplifire Science Advisory Board and leads efforts to move insights from cognitive science into the Amplifire platform to help people reach their full potential. In his spare time, he is a board member of Nature and Culture International, which has protected 22 million acres of tropical ecosystems in South America, and a co-founder of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation.

Bryan Bushick MD
GM & Chief Healthcare Innovation Officer
Bryan brings over thirty years of healthcare experience to his responsibility for expanding and serving the Amplifire Healthcare Alliance. A seasoned executive and consultant, Bryan applies insights from previous roles that include COO at DocSite, interim CMO with Prominence Health Plan, enterprise-wide quality leadership as System VP at Allina Health, and relationship building with customers and partners as SVP of Business Development at CareScience. Bryan also had tenures with United Healthcare/Medica and Towers Perrin after initiating a career devoted to population health, patient safety, and performance improvement.

Nick Hjort
Chief Product Officer
Nick brings over twenty years of technical leadership driving teams to deliver products quickly and efficiently. Nick’s experience has ranged from large companies like MediaNews Group, where he was the VP of Technical Operations, providing senior leadership on the platform powering 75 daily newspaper websites, to small companies like Indigio, where he served as the Director of Engineering and helped grow the organization from 12 to 90 employees. Nick has also been active in the startup community where he launched a mobile app company prior to joining Amplifire where he oversees all aspects of product design and development.

Dan Morley
Executive VP, Sales & Client Operations
Dan has an impressive track record in the telecommunications, cable, and software industries. He brings expertise in business development, strategic planning, operations, and sales that have increased profitability and and improved customer experience. With a deep background building high performing teams, designing operation processes, and product development, Dan has been a key player helping Amplifire set up multiple large-scale strategic projects across Fortune 500 companies that have benefited their employees and bottom line.

Bryan Merchant
VP, Software Engineering & IT Operations
Bryan has over twenty-five years of technical and leadership experience driving excellence in teams to create development and operations efficiency. He has guided companies ranging from Staples and Otterbox to GHX, where he built teams to support development, reporting, and operations environments. As the Director of IT at Datalogix, now owned by Oracle, Bryan provided leadership to the teams supporting online, direct mail, and mobile services. Building from these business experiences, Bryan is currently leading all aspects of Development, Support, and Operations at Amplifire, where he provides senior expertise working across the organization.

Kristie Invie
VP, Client Solutions
Kristie is a dynamic client relations executive who offers expertise in creating and cultivating a high-performance team focused on developing long-lasting client relationships. Kristie has more than twenty years’ experience spanning provider and technology environments with a passion for leading teams responsible for improving outcomes and efficiency using project management, quality improvement, data, and training. At Amplifire, Kristie oversees the teams responsible for delighting our customers through on-time and hassle-free deployments while also building their training programs to achieve measurable organizational proficiency, productivity, and profitability.

Matthew Jensen Hays, Ph.D.
VP, Research and Analytics
Matt has over twenty years of experience analyzing and enhancing how people learn and remember. His Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology is from UCLA, where he worked with Drs. Elizabeth and Robert Bjork. He has conducted research on memory and learning and applied those findings to the design of training systems, intelligent tutors, multi-million-dollar simulators, and other educational experiences for civilian and military applications. His published articles have been cited hundreds of times and nominated for or won Best Paper awards at several conferences. Matt ensures that Amplifire is constantly improving its ability to accelerate learning and impede forgetting.

Laura Jensen
Controller
Laura is a Certified Public Accountant and holds a Masters degree in Accounting. With over twenty-five years of accounting experience, she has mainly focused on high-tech start-up companies that have produced products ranging from spectrometers to circuit boards to injection molding machines. Her last position was as CFO for a respiratory products company, where she upgraded their ERP system to streamline their financial reporting.
Her responsibilities at Amplifire include financial reporting, accounting, audit management, GAAP and tax compliance, and privacy compliance. In addition to her accounting duties, she oversees HR and benefits administration.
Our Science Advisory Board
The Science Advisory Board continually reviews, validates, and enhances the methodology and algorithms of the Amplifire platform.

Robert Bjork
PhD, UCLA
Bob is UCLA’s former Chair of Psychology and past president of the Association of Psychological Science. He is a pioneer in understanding the role of desirable difficulties, testing effects, and the counterintuitive nature of learning. Bob’s primary goal is to promote learning and memory performance in educational settings through the investigation of principles in cognitive psychology. The work of Bob and his wife Elizabeth form the basis of Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller, David and Goliath.

Elizabeth Bjork
PhD, UCLA
Elizabeth is the Co-principal investigator of the Bjork Learning and Forgetting Laboratory at UCLA. Her work has shown the public that forgetting is not the unfortunate tendency of a limited system; rather, it is the consequence of an adaptive one. Most people are inaccurate in measuring their own knowledge through judgments of learning because they mistakenly rely on the immediate access to knowledge in order to determine the long-term memory retention and the transfer of such knowledge to different contexts.

Dan Schacter
PhD, Harvard

Rich Mayer
PhD, UCSB
Rich is UCSB’s former Chair of the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences. For fifteen years, Educational Psychology ranked him the “most productive educational psychologist in the world.” His research interests are in applying the science of learning to education, with current projects on multimedia learning, computer-supported learning, and computer games for learning. His research is at the intersection of cognition, instruction, and technology, with a focus on how to help people learn in ways so they can transfer what they have learned to new situations.

Roddy Roediger
PhD, Washington University at St. Louis
Roddy is Washington’s former Chair of Psychology and Chair of the governing board of the Psychonomic Society. Roddy explores various topics in human learning and memory such as educational applications of cognitive psychology, eyewitness memory, metacognition, memory illusions, people with highly superior memory and collective memory. These are diverse topics but are held together by each representing a central and interesting topic in the study of human learning and memory. He is the author of Make It Stick and over 175 research papers.

Kathleen McDermott
PhD, Washington University at St. Louis
Kathleen is a Professor of Psychology at Washington University who investigates human memory encoding and retrieval and how they interact. She is well known for her research on how human memory is encoded and retrieved, with a specific interest in how false memories develop. In collaboration with Henry L. (Roddy) Roediger III, she developed the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm used to study the phenomenon of memory illusions

Chad Lane
PhD, University of Illinois
Chad is a professor at the University of Illinois and is interested in the foundational theories and practices of educational psychology, including learning and development. His research seeks to build advanced learning environments that reap the benefits of timely and appropriate guidance. Chad is known for developing educational technologies that are as compelling and engaging as the very best social media apps, video games, or movies.

Robert Birnbaum
PhD, MD, Vice President of Professional Development & Implementation Science at Mass General Brigham
Bob is the Director of Continuing Professional Development at Partners Healthcare and an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Birnbaum is the founding Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Psychiatry Academy and the founding Executive Director of the MGH Academy. Bob is a practicing psychopharmacologist who has studied education methodology and impact, developed courseware, and managed large-scale medical education efforts.
Clinical Innovation Advisory Board
The Innovation Advisors are some of the most prestigious, accomplished thought leaders in American healthcare, helping target and develop course content and strategic direction in the evolving healthcare landscape.

Brent C. James MD
Clinical Professor at the Clinical Excellence Research Center, Stanford University School of Medicine and Chairman, Amplifire Innovation Advisory Board
Brent is known internationally for his work in quality improvement, patient safety, and the infrastructure that underlies successful improvement efforts, such as culture change, data systems, payment methods, and management roles. For six of the seven years it has been in existence, Brent has been named among Modern Physician’s “50 Most Influential Physician Executives in Healthcare,” and among the “100 Most Powerful People in Healthcare” for five years in Modern Healthcare.

Maureen Bisognano MD
President Emerita and Senior Fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI)
Maureen served as IHI’s President and CEO for five years, after serving as Executive Vice President and COO for 15 years. She is a leading authority on improving health care systems, whose expertise has been recognized by her election to the National Academy of Medicine). Maureen is also an Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a Research Associate in the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities.

Terry Fairbanks
MD, MS, Vice President and Chief Quality and Safety Officer, Medstar
Terry has contributed more than 120 publications to the healthcare quality and safety, human factors engineering, and medical literature, and he co-edited a book on cognitive systems engineering in healthcare. He has served in national and international roles, including the National Patient Safety Foundation Board of Advisors, the POLITICO Health IT Advisory Forum, AHRQ Patient Safety Network Technical Expert Advisory Panel, and he is a Health Research and Educational Trust (HRET) Senior Fellow.

Peter Pronovost
MD, PhD, FCCM, Chief Clinical Transformation Officer at University Hospitals, Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
Peter is a global thought leader, informing US and global health policy. He is world-renowned as a patient safety champion, critical care physician, and a prolific researcher, publishing over 800 peer review publications. According to Atul Gawande in The New Yorker, Pronovost’s “work has already saved more lives than that of any laboratory scientist in the past decade.” In 2008 Time Magazine named Pronovost one of the 100 most influential people in the world. That same year, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

Lucy A. Savitz
PhD, MBA, Director, Center for Health Research and Vice President, Health Research, Kaiser Permanente Northwest
Lucy is a health services researcher with extensive experience translating scientific findings into clinical practice. As director of the Center for Health Research, she oversees the work of about 35 investigators and 255 staff members at CHR’s offices in Portland, Oregon. Nationally, Dr. Savitz serves on the Methods Council, Delivery System Science Fellowship Program Committee, and chairs the Committee for Advocacy in Public Policy at Academy Health. She is a member of the Center for Medicare and Medicare Services Executive Leadership Council.