Combat Veteran Jack Ravin served in the Vietnam War and returned home with PTSD, then unnamed and untreatable. Following his military service, Ravin received his MS, Psychology and later his MSW and Medical Degree in Occupational Health and Medicine. He served as Senior West Coast Aide to Secretary of Veteran Affairs Max Cleland who recommended having a service dog. During that tenure, he developed programs serving veterans with PTSD and TBI; built bridges between veterans and general public for a better understanding of how service dogs can be used as a therapeutic tool for survival. He also implemented Veterans-SOS and Veteran Brothers and Sisters within the VA and the DoD for a lifelong relationship of prevention of suicide. Ravin resides in San Luis Obispo where he is active with veteran-related organizations as a spokesman to encourage and educate about service dogs as a therapeutic option to help heal PTSD and to prevent suicide. He also currently works with New Life K9s Service Dogs, a training program at a local men’s prison.

Katinka Hooyer, Ph.D., is a Medical Anthropologist and an arts/humanities-based researcher. She works mainly in the field of mental health, designing culturally tailored interventions with her community partners that challenge stigma and promote well-being. She collaborates most often with Veterans studying their experiences with non-clinical therapies and co-designing opportunities for healing moral injury and military trauma. Katinka and her partners are the recipients of two National Endowment for the Humanities grants for their program, The Warriors Path: War, Moral Injury, and Reclaiming the Soul. Her community-engaged practice uses film and the performative arts as a pathway to convey difficult experiences and translate research for the public. Katinka works in the Center for Healthy Communities and Research at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Mary Ellen Salzano is the founder and facilitator of the CA Statewide Collaborative for Military and Families, a grassroots organization that has been meeting in Santa Clara County since 2007 to share information, education, and outreach and grow strategic partnerships that streamline and improve access to health and human services for those who have served their country. The California Department of Veterans Affairs in 2013 honored her with their Outstanding Volunteer Award for her work with women veterans.

Meg Daley Olmert is a world-renowned expert on the neurobiology of the human-animal bond and its therapeutic effects. In 2009, her groundbreaking book, Made for Each Other: The Biology of the Human-Animal Bond, was published to international acclaim. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines applauded the clear and rigorous scientific case Olmert made that human civilization and animal domestication are an evolutionary coincidence of our shared neurobiological heritage. It is this shared primal brain network that creates the sense of calm and attraction in which social bonds—among and between species—can flourish. This affiliative mind/body state is also essential to the well-being of all social mammals.

In 2011, Olmert joined Rick Yount in the creation of Warrior Canine Connection, Inc. a non-profit organization that provides an innovative and highly effective service dog training therapy program for the reduction of combat trauma symptoms at leading military and veterans medical centers. Olmert is currently acting as WCC’s Director of Research for two federally funded randomized controlled research protocols to investigate the efficacy of animal-assisted therapy for combat trauma patients at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Olmert continues to publish and collaborate with scientists worldwide and is a much sought-after guest speaker at academic and professional conferences and has given two widely viewed TEDxTalks. She is also the scientific advisor to The Comfort Dog Project in Uganda—saving the hearts and minds of traumatized people and dogs against all odds.

Jacqueline Genovese holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing and a master’s degree in Medical Humanities. She teaches writing and literature for veteran and military-related Stanford students, and she leads a literature and medicine series at Stanford Hospital for physicians and at the VA San Francisco for health professionals. She is the first author on the article “Can Arts and Communication Programs Improve Physician Wellness and Mitigate Physician Suicide?” in the Journal of Clinical Oncology and gave a TEDx talk on the theme of Unchartered Waters about her work at the intersection of medicine and the military.

Mary Cortani is a Vietnam-era veteran, a certified Army Master Instructor of Canine Education, and an American Kennel Club Canine Good Citizen Approved Evaluator. Starting with her time in the military, Cortani has trained dogs for more than 35 years. In 2010, she leveraged her lifelong love of dogs, her extensive dog training background, and her military experience into the creation of Operation Freedom Paws (OFP), a nonprofit organization that provides service dogs, free of charge, to veterans with post-traumatic stress and other disabilities. Realizing that there are thousands of dogs waiting for loving homes, Cortani rescues dogs from shelters and evaluates them over a period of time. Some are eventually fostered into loving homes, but dogs that meet the prescribed standards developed by Cortani enter the OFP service dog program and become paired with veterans. Once matched, the veterans learn to train their own OFP dogs under her supervision. OFP is an expression of her deeply held belief that helping others brings great rewards. For Cortani, the greatest reward of all is witnessing her fellow veterans restore their sense of purpose and independence.

In 2012, Cortani was named one of the Top 10 heroes in the CNN Heroes program, which celebrates ordinary people making extraordinary contributions to improve the lives of others. In 2014, the Santa Clara Valley chapter of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Association honored her exemplary work and volunteer efforts with the Coretta Scott King Award—making her only the fourth person in the chapter’s history to receive this accolade. And in 2015, she was one of six Central Coast recipients to be honored with the prestigious Jefferson Award for Public Service.

Veteran Ryland Taylor enlisted in the U.S. Army in 2000 at age 17. As a sniper in the 75th Ranger Regiment, he was a member of the Task Force that pursued and seized Saddam and his sons in Iraq, and later Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants in Afghanistan. He received a Bronze Star for valor for his actions during the battle at the Haditha Dam. Taylor is featured in “A Battle for Haditha Dam,” an episode of The Warfighters on the History Channel. Subsequent to several years of service, he enrolled in Stanford Law School. During this time, he also attended writing classes, which eventually led to scriptwriting in Hollywood. After graduating from law school, he worked as the coordinator for International Distribution and Co-Productions at IM Global Television. He is a freelance producer and development creative.

MaryCatherine McDonald, PhD is Assistant Professor in Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University, Virginia. She was drawn into the study of philosophical psychology because of her interest in healing suffering post trauma. After receiving her Master’s degree at The New School, where she researched traumatic loss and mourning, she went on to complete her PhD at Boston University. Dr. McDonald has just finished her first book, Haunted, which aims to rethink the nature and experience of traumatic memory from a prismatic approach – one which brings together disciplines to better understand both the phenomenon and one another.