Member since August 2026
Sherrita Dorsey is a board-certified corporate healthcare executive, global researcher, and author with a 15+ year record of driving quality patient outcomes, revenue growth, and operational efficiency across diverse roles, industries, and specialties — including oncology, rheumatology, dermatology, nephrology, and rare disease. She currently serves as US Head of Patient & Professional Advocacy for Amicus Therapeutics. Her previous experience includes executive leadership roles in regional and national sales, research, nursing, advocacy, and marketing at globally recognized organizations including Novartis, Amgen, Human Genome Sciences, GlaxoSmithKline, and MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Ms. Dorsey is an alumna of the Prairie View A&M University nursing school and has been recognized for her contributions to healthcare, leadership, and health equity, earning local, national, and international acclaim as one of the 50 Most Influential Women in Houston, a Congressional Letter of Service, and the Trailblazer Award from Women of Color in Pharma (WOCIP). She is also a recipient of the South African Minority International Research Traineeship (MIRT), funded by the National Institutes of Health. She continues to contribute to her community through her membership in The Links, Incorporated, and service on various boards.
She is the proud mother of two children, Alexandria and Calvin Peete III, who are thriving in college studying electrical engineering and global business and supply chain.
AI in Healthcare, Employee Optimization, Health Equity through Board Participation
Excerpts from my book "The Likely Executive", the power of the pivot, my journey from healthcare to the boardroom.
Transformational leadership lessons into academia, and the need for multigenerational readiness for leadership.
We have spent a decade calling it hesitancy. But the communities I've worked with the ones who watched trials come and go without follow-through, who were recruited only when enrollment numbers lagged, who saw research done on them rather than with them would call it something else. They'd call it an accurate read of the evidence. Trust isn't a messaging problem. It's a track record problem, and track records get built one kept commitment at a time.
I learned that first in an infusion chair at MD Anderson, where trust was earned over four-hour treatment sessions and lost in a single unreturned phone call. I learned it again as US Head of Patient & Professional Advocacy at Amicus Therapeutics, and across my roles at Novartis, GSK, BioMarin, and Amgen, where the stakes were the same but the scale was different. What I kept seeing was organizations investing heavily in outreach while leaving the underlying asymmetry untouched who sets the agenda, who holds the budget, and who is still in the room after the study closes.
In this keynote, I reframe the trust gap as a structural condition with structural remedies. I walk through what actually separates transactional community engagement from genuine partnership timing, decision rights, resource flow, and duration and why the first three matter more than any campaign you can fund. I share real work from rare disease, oncology, and chronic illness, including what changed when community partners moved from being a recruitment channel to being a design partner.
I use my 3Ps Framework: Purpose, Power, and Progression as the operating structure: getting clear on what the partnership genuinely exists to accomplish, being honest about where power actually sits, and committing to a relationship that outlasts the funding cycle. And because I believe in lifting as I climb, I connect this to the workforce question underneath all of it. Communities trust institutions that look like them and stay accountable to them, which makes representation in clinical, research, and executive roles a trust strategy not a separate initiative filed somewhere else.
I close with a challenge to my own field. Patient advocacy has too often been positioned as reputation management with a warm voice. I believe its future is as a strategic discipline that shapes protocol design, endpoint selection, access strategy, and executive decision-making. The organizations making that shift now are the ones these communities will still be working with in ten years.
What you'll leave with:
Every algorithm in healthcare answers a question someone decided to ask, using data someone decided to collect, validated against outcomes someone decided to measure. When those decisions are made without the patients most affected in the room, the technology doesn't correct disparity it accelerates it, at scale and with the authority of objectivity.
Drawing on more than two decades spanning bedside infusion nursing at MD Anderson and senior advocacy leadership across Novartis, GSK, BioMarin, Amgen, and Amicus Therapeutics, I explain how bias enters clinical AI at six distinct points in the lifecycle problem framing, data collection, labeling, model development, validation, and deployment and why the failure is rarely technical. It's a design failure. Somebody wasn't asked.
This keynote moves from diagnosis to prescription. Attendees see where representation gaps in clinical trial data become prediction gaps in the model, how proxy variables quietly encode structural inequity, and why the diagnostic odyssey in rare disease looks very different depending on who the training set was built from. I then apply my 3Ps Framework Purpose, Power, and Progression as a practical governance lens: naming what the tool is actually for, examining who holds decision rights over it, and building the accountability structure that keeps improving it after launch.
I close on the part most organizations skip. Patient advocacy is not a compliance checkbox appended to a development plan; it is a design input, and the organizations treating it that way are building better products. The next era of healthcare AI will be defined less by model performance than by who was considered worth designing for.
Attendees leave with:
Leadership today requires more than managing people and delivering results. Leaders are being asked to navigate organizational change, lead digital and AI-enabled transformation, build new capabilities, make decisions with imperfect information, and bring people with them through unprecedented levels of disruption. Yet amid all that transformation, one leadership challenge remains deeply human: How do you evolve without losing who you are?
Leadership is often taught as a collection of competencies: strategy, communication, influence, execution, and results. But the hardest leadership lessons rarely happen in a classroom. They happen when the plan changes, the organization restructures, the promotion does not come, someone you trusted disappoints you, or you find yourself sitting at a table you worked your entire career to reach and suddenly wonder whether you belong there.
This talk track is for first generational leaders and mid-level leaders and introduces my
"3Ps of Leadership: Purpose, Power, and Progress"
Purpose: Know why you are leading and who benefits when you succeed.
Power: Understand your superpower the combination of experiences, capabilities, relationships, and perspective that only you bring to the room.
Progress: Keep moving. Leadership is rarely a straight line, and sometimes winning means putting one foot in front of the other long enough to see a new path.
Excerpts from my book "The Likely Executive", the power of the pivot, my journey from healthcare to the boardroom.
Transformational leadership lessons into academia, and the need for multigenerational readiness for leadership.
We have spent a decade calling it hesitancy. But the communities I've worked with the ones who watched trials come and go without follow-through, who were recruited only when enrollment numbers lagged, who saw research done on them rather than with them would call it something else. They'd call it an accurate read of the evidence. Trust isn't a messaging problem. It's a track record problem, and track records get built one kept commitment at a time.
I learned that first in an infusion chair at MD Anderson, where trust was earned over four-hour treatment sessions and lost in a single unreturned phone call. I learned it again as US Head of Patient & Professional Advocacy at Amicus Therapeutics, and across my roles at Novartis, GSK, BioMarin, and Amgen, where the stakes were the same but the scale was different. What I kept seeing was organizations investing heavily in outreach while leaving the underlying asymmetry untouched who sets the agenda, who holds the budget, and who is still in the room after the study closes.
In this keynote, I reframe the trust gap as a structural condition with structural remedies. I walk through what actually separates transactional community engagement from genuine partnership timing, decision rights, resource flow, and duration and why the first three matter more than any campaign you can fund. I share real work from rare disease, oncology, and chronic illness, including what changed when community partners moved from being a recruitment channel to being a design partner.
I use my 3Ps Framework: Purpose, Power, and Progression as the operating structure: getting clear on what the partnership genuinely exists to accomplish, being honest about where power actually sits, and committing to a relationship that outlasts the funding cycle. And because I believe in lifting as I climb, I connect this to the workforce question underneath all of it. Communities trust institutions that look like them and stay accountable to them, which makes representation in clinical, research, and executive roles a trust strategy not a separate initiative filed somewhere else.
I close with a challenge to my own field. Patient advocacy has too often been positioned as reputation management with a warm voice. I believe its future is as a strategic discipline that shapes protocol design, endpoint selection, access strategy, and executive decision-making. The organizations making that shift now are the ones these communities will still be working with in ten years.
What you'll leave with:
Every algorithm in healthcare answers a question someone decided to ask, using data someone decided to collect, validated against outcomes someone decided to measure. When those decisions are made without the patients most affected in the room, the technology doesn't correct disparity it accelerates it, at scale and with the authority of objectivity.
Drawing on more than two decades spanning bedside infusion nursing at MD Anderson and senior advocacy leadership across Novartis, GSK, BioMarin, Amgen, and Amicus Therapeutics, I explain how bias enters clinical AI at six distinct points in the lifecycle problem framing, data collection, labeling, model development, validation, and deployment and why the failure is rarely technical. It's a design failure. Somebody wasn't asked.
This keynote moves from diagnosis to prescription. Attendees see where representation gaps in clinical trial data become prediction gaps in the model, how proxy variables quietly encode structural inequity, and why the diagnostic odyssey in rare disease looks very different depending on who the training set was built from. I then apply my 3Ps Framework Purpose, Power, and Progression as a practical governance lens: naming what the tool is actually for, examining who holds decision rights over it, and building the accountability structure that keeps improving it after launch.
I close on the part most organizations skip. Patient advocacy is not a compliance checkbox appended to a development plan; it is a design input, and the organizations treating it that way are building better products. The next era of healthcare AI will be defined less by model performance than by who was considered worth designing for.
Attendees leave with:
Leadership today requires more than managing people and delivering results. Leaders are being asked to navigate organizational change, lead digital and AI-enabled transformation, build new capabilities, make decisions with imperfect information, and bring people with them through unprecedented levels of disruption. Yet amid all that transformation, one leadership challenge remains deeply human: How do you evolve without losing who you are?
Leadership is often taught as a collection of competencies: strategy, communication, influence, execution, and results. But the hardest leadership lessons rarely happen in a classroom. They happen when the plan changes, the organization restructures, the promotion does not come, someone you trusted disappoints you, or you find yourself sitting at a table you worked your entire career to reach and suddenly wonder whether you belong there.
This talk track is for first generational leaders and mid-level leaders and introduces my
"3Ps of Leadership: Purpose, Power, and Progress"
Purpose: Know why you are leading and who benefits when you succeed.
Power: Understand your superpower the combination of experiences, capabilities, relationships, and perspective that only you bring to the room.
Progress: Keep moving. Leadership is rarely a straight line, and sometimes winning means putting one foot in front of the other long enough to see a new path.