Florence Wasko has been a certified athletic trainer for the American Samoa Department of Education for over 10 years. Florence oversees all ASDOE sports that cover 9  schools and their student-athletes, created standards of care and concussion protocols for Athletic Division, and is responsible for injury care, prevention, diagnosis, and rehabilitation of all sports injuries sustained by ASDOE student-athletes.

Mark D'Anza, MEd, LAT, ATC, serves a variety of roles in his home state of Nevada. He works for the Clark County School District as an AED Project Facilitator, teaches as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, works as an athletic trainer for Dignity Health Physical Therapy and is the lead AT Spotter in Las Vegas for the National Football League. Mark serves on the Sports Medicine Advisory Committee in Nevada. As a member of the Far West Athletic Trainers’ Association, Mark is the Secondary School Athletic Trainers’ Committee Chair and a member of the Scholarships Committee and the Ethnic Diversity Advisory Committee.

David S. Cohen, MS, ATC, Esq. is the General Counsel of Tempus Ex Machina, Inc., a sports technology startup, a partner with the law firm of Daniel, Ebeling, Maccia, and Cohen, and Founder/CEO Major League Business LLC. With Tempus Ex, he provides strategic business, administrative, and legal advice and service to a quickly scaling sports technology startup. Cohen built and served as Head of Player Operations of the Alliance of American Football and for five years as the General Counsel of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Tampa, Florida. He is a licensed California attorney and a National Athletic Trainers Association Certified Athletic Trainer. Before joining the Buccaneers, David spent nine years overseeing the legal department for Angels Baseball LP and AM830 KLAA and nine years working as an Athletic Trainer in the Baltimore Orioles, Boston Red Sox, and Montreal Expos organizations. His peers in the Association Corporate Counsel (ACC) selected him as a 2013 “Top 10 Thirty-Something,” and the Professional Baseball Athletic Trainers Society honored him as the "2001 Minor League Baseball Athletic Trainer of the Year". He was a 2014, 2016, and 2017 Tampa Bay Business Journal Top Corporate Counsel Awards finalist. David is a 2015 inductee of the West Virginia University College of Physical Activity and Sport Sciences Hall of Fame. While working in-house for the Angels and Buccaneers, David was responsible for drafting and negotiating legal and business terms of contracts with sponsors, vendors, employees, season seat holders, and suite licensees. He oversaw all organizational litigation and has significant experience managing complex and class action lawsuits. David also oversaw human resources, security, insurance, compliance, and privacy functions for the Buccaneers. David earned a B.S in Exercise Physiology/Athletic Training and an M.S, in Community Health Promotion from West Virginia University School of Medicine in Morgantown, West Virginia. He also holds a Juris Doctor from California Western School of Law in San Diego, California. David also completed Major League Baseball Scouting Bureau’s Scout Development Program. David is a leader in the ACC and is currently Chair of ACC’s Network Leadership Counsel. In the past, David served as President of ACC’s Tampa Bay Chapter, Chair of the ACC Sports & Entertainment Committee, Vice-Chair and Secretary of ACC’s Network Leadership Counsel, as well as ACC-SoCal Chapter Vice-President, Board of Directors Member and Chair of its In-House Counsel Conference Committee. He was also a leader in the Tort, Trial, and Insurance Practice Section of the American Bar Association (TIPS). He served two years as the Student Liaison to the TIPS Council and was a leader of several task forces, general committees, and standing committees.

Kacie Kergides is an associate in Montgomery McCracken’s Institutional Response Practice Group as well as its Catastrophic Sports Injury Defense Practice Group. Kacie concentrates her practice on Title IX investigations and advising, institutional response to sex and/or gender-based harassment and misconduct and the adjudication of student, employee and management disputes, and sports injury cases including traumatic brain injury (TBI) litigation. In addition to handling investigations and litigation in both practice areas, Kacie counsels athletes, schools, and sports organizations on sports-related injuries such as concussion and TBI, provides guidance on the management of sport-related injuries and Title IX complaints, and advises these institutions on minimizing and managing risk.

Tammi Gaw is the Founder and Executive Director of Advantage Rule, a consulting group focused on athlete health and safety, with an emphasis on amateur athletes' rights. As one of only a handful of professionals licensed as both an attorney and an athletic trainer, Tammi's career has included in-house counsel positions, non-profit management and board participation, and C-suite level work with integrated planning for large and medium scale sporting events. Tammi is an international speaker on issues around sports business, law, medicine, and social justice, and is based in Washington, DC.

Dr. Samantha Scarneo-Miller serves as an Assistant Professor and Program Director for the Master of Science in Athletic Training in the Division of Athletic Training, School of Medicine at West Virginia University. Her overall research goal is to prevent unnecessary deaths from participation in sport through the administration of healthcare administration documents. Ultimately, she aims to make it easier for athletic trainers to save more lives. 

She has published over 50 research articles in various areas with a majority of her research focusing on emergency action plans and policies and procedures. Dr. Scarneo-Miller has presented at several state, district and national meetings and is also a recipient of several grants including a NIH Loan Repayment Award. 

Dr. Scarneo-Miller received her bachelors degree from the University of New Hampshire, and graduate degrees from UConn. She also served as the Vice President for the Korey Stringer Institute. She and her partner, Jelan, live in Morgantown with their sons Jrue and Jovi and dog Milo.

Yuri Hosokawa is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Sport Sciences, Waseda University, Japan. Her research interests include prevention and education of sudden death in sport, establishing best practices in road race medicine, developing regional-specific heat guidelines for exertional heat illness prevention, and developing heat acclimatization guidelines for tactical athletes. She is also partaking in research projects in biometeorology to promote interdisciplinary research across physiologists, climatologists, and public health researchers.

Dr. Hosokawa served as a member of the International Olympic Committee Adverse Weather Impact Expert Working Group for the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 and led the effort to implement best practices for prehospital care of exertional heat stroke in Japan. She established and coordinated prehospital exertional heat stroke management plans for seventeen disciplines during the Olympics and five disciplines during the Paralympics that were deemed high risk for exertional heat stroke. Tokyo Games marked Japan’s first mass-sporting event to implement evidence-based exertional heat stroke prehospital care. Hosokawa’s effort set the standard for future athlete medical service and showcased the expertise of athletic trainers in Japan.

Dr. Hosokawa currently serves as a heat advisor for the Japan Coast Guard, Fifth Regional Coast Guard, to optimize the resilience of the special rescue team. She is also a member of the Expert and Advisory Board of the World Athletics’ World Academy for Endurance Medicine and the World Lacrosse Medical Commission.

Dr. Hosokawa received her bachelor’s degree in Sport Sciences from Waseda University in 2011, her master’s degree in Athletic Training from the University of Arkansas in 2013, and her doctoral degree from the University of Connecticut in 2016. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Korey Stringer Institute (2016–2017) and worked at the Ritsumeikan University as an Assistant Professor in the College of Health and Sport Science (2018–2019).

Dr. Jimmy Onate joined The Ohio State University in January 2010. He earned his PhD in Human Movement Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2002 with a focus in biomechanics and motor learning. He has been an academic research faculty member interested in all aspects of human movement relative to injury prevention and performance optimization since 2003. He currently serves as the director of the PhD program in Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, chair of graduate studies in Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, a co-director of Ohio State's Sports Medicine's Movement Analysis & Performance (MAP) research program, a research scholar for the National Federation of High School Sports Medicine Advisory Committee, and a research consultant to Naval Special Warfare groups based in Virginia Beach, VA.His main research focus lies in developing functional motion assessment research that bridges the gap across research to clinical systems to allow for evidence-based outcomes for aiding individuals to sustain optimal health and performance throughout their careers and lives.

Research Focus

The specific aims of his research are focused to answer specific issues related to lower extremity injury, in particular anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury, pre-participation examinations and human performance optimization. Funding for his work has been provided through the National Institutes of Health, Office of Naval Research, United States Special Operations Command and Naval Special Warfare Development Group for evaluating lower extremity injury in collegiate athletes and the development of physical performance models in military soldiers. The interaction of these two areas initially seems distinct, yet his approach to the questions lies along the fundamental concept of creating a parsimonious screening approach for evaluating injury risk and performance enhancement for physically active individuals, utilizing the movement assessment information to develop an instructional feedback approach to enhance performance and prevent injury and to integrate these two approaches into an implementable scientific model-driven approach to aid physically active individuals throughout their careers and lifetime to optimize health and performance. Dr. Onate acts as a key component in building the bridges between exercise and performance areas relative to all aspects of personalized health care in the hopes of developing proactive integrative approaches for wellness-based medicine aimed at optimizing lifelong health and performance.

Dr. Steve Jordan is a board certified, fellowship trained orthopaedic surgeon. Dr. Jordan earned his Medical Degree from Medical University of South Carolina. Dr. Jordan specializes in sports medicine; however, he takes a special interest in shoulder injuries, throwing injuries, ACL reconstruction, and Tommy John reconstruction. Dr. Jordan is the Team Physician for both Washington High School and Chipola College.

Darin A. Padua is the Associate Provost for Academic Operations of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As an academic leader, he works to listen, collaborate, and empower others to work as a team towards our shared mission, vision, and priorities.

The Joseph Curtis Sloane Distinguished Professor of Exercise and Sport Science, Padua has been a member of UNC’s faculty since 2001. He teaches courses in biomechanics, human anatomy, and kinesiology with a focus on injury risk mitigation and optimizing human performance. Throughout his career, Padua has mentored fellow faculty, along with hundreds of graduate and undergraduate students. He served as chair in the Department of Exercise and Sport Science from 2013 to 2023.

With more than 25 years of experience, Padua is an internationally recognized scholar and is the Co-Director of the Musculoskeletal Injury Prevention (MOTION) Science Institute. His research revolves around prevention of musculoskeletal injuries, such as ACL rupture, by studying the role of movement quality and biomechanics as injury risk factors and intervention targets. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles, and his work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Athletic Trainers’ Association, and the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine. He

He received the Young Investigator Award by the National Athletic Trainers’ Association (2006) and was later awarded the O’Donoghue Sports Injury Research Award for the most outstanding sport injury related research paper by the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine (2008). He attained Fellow status in the National Academy of Kinesiology, the National Athletic Trainers’ Association, and received the Most Distinguished Athletic Trainer Award. His career research achievements were recognized by the by the National Athletic Trainers’ Association with receipt of the Medal for Distinguished Research (2017).

Padua earned a B.S. in athletic training from San Diego State University, M.A. in exercise and sport science/athletic training from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and PhD in sports medicine from the University of Virginia. Born and raised in Visalia, California, he lives with his wife Jody and three daughters in Durham, NC.