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Blair Palmer
Innovation Partnerships
UNICEF
Bio
For the past 15 years, Blair Palmer has leveraged her knowledge of technological innovations, project implementation, corporate responsibility, stakeholder engagement, and social enterprise programs to empower global health programs.  She currently serves to coordinate partnerships for San Francisco for UNICEF’s Innovation Unit, tasked with identifying, prototyping, and scaling technologies and practices that strengthen UNICEF’s work. Blair works to ensure universal access to basic services through the design of programs to maximize social impact and health outcomes and is responsible for sourcing new projects and ideas to connect Silicon Valley with the work of UNICEF Innovation, including the stewardship of strategic partnerships across the globe. She has also worked to advance mobile health technology as a Director of Special Projects at Medic Mobile, conducted infectious disease research at UCSF and the Institute for OneWorld Health, as well as to lead corporate responsibility efforts to improve access to healthcare worldwide at Levi Strauss & Co. and Gilead Sciences. For her work, she was named to the #Inspire100 list by Dell Computers of world changers in entrepreneurship, philanthropy, education and media who use technology to empower and inspire others and was recognized as the "Good Innovator" on Wareable Magazine's list of the Outsiders of Wearable Tech.  Blair holds a Bachelor's degree in Neuroscience from Vanderbilt University and a Master's in Public Health with a concentration in epidemiology and infectious diseases from Yale University where she was nominated for a Fulbright Scholarship.
Sessions
  • Scaleable Innovation for Social Good: UNICEF's Wearables for Good Challenge
    11:20 AM - 11:40 AM Jun 2
    Although the ability to do nearly anything with today’s consumer technology is seemingly ubiquitous, there are still millions of people around the world without access to even the most basic services. Thanks to visionary engineers, designers and business people, emerging low power, smart technologies such as wearables, sensor-based and connected devices are overcoming barriers in infrastructure, healthcare and economic development. Wearable and sensor technology have the potential to deliver life-enhancing and life-saving services. Currently they are mainly used as gadgets that are nice to have, but they have the potential to be things people need to have. When designed specifically for the end-user, in a local context, wearable and sensor technology could revolutionize the way we deliver services to populations at the last mile. Can we develop innovative, affordable solutions to make wearables and sensor technology a game-changer for women and children across the world? What is the path forward to scaling these solutions to demonstrate social impact? This presentation will demonstrate how UNICEF brought together leaders in the space for the Wearables for Good Challenge, and discuss how disruption of this market - at all levels - can change the way the industry is thinking about wearables and sensor technology, including how to benefit the next billion.
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