New Approaches
Conference  

Dr. Derek Yach is an independent global health consultant who has focused his career on advancement of public health around the world. He was the founder and president of the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World, former Executive Director at the World Health Organization (WHO) where he led the development of WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), and has held senior positions at Yale, PepsiCo, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He has served on the advisory boards of private, public, and philanthropic organizations and published over two hundred peer review articles.

Rachael Trimpert Schmidt, CAPT, USPHS (Ret.), is a former senior officer with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Tobacco Products and a regulatory strategy advisor with more than two decades of experience in federal public health, laboratory compliance, and tobacco product regulation. As Assistant Director for Laboratory Compliance and Coordination at FDA, she led national initiatives supporting implementation and enforcement of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act.

During her tenure, CAPT Schmidt established and coordinated FDA’s tobacco regulatory laboratory framework and oversaw product testing and compliance programs. Her work spanned premarket application reviews, post-market surveillance, adverse event assessments, and development of tobacco product standards. Drawing on deep institutional knowledge and an extensive regulatory network, she advises organizations navigating complex regulatory, enforcement, and compliance challenges across the tobacco and nicotine sector.

I help groups address complex public problems and conflicts in ways that strengthen communities and organizations when other forces are pushing them apart. Each year I work on a dozen or so collaborative change projects involving environment and land use, water, historic landscapes, community development, education, and health. I also have intensified my emphasis on race and equity, including work within UVA as well as outside the University.

The bulk of my work involves equitable collaboration - work that emphasizes relationship and that is trauma-informed, inclusive, responsive, truth-seeking, deliberative, and adaptive to organizational and community needs and circumstances.

My teaching integrates knowledge developed over 30 years of my own and my colleagues' practice as well as that offered in academic literature. My teaching takes place through  courses, class and community presentations, independent studies and intern mentoring, and professional training. I help students and others develop the knowledge, skills and critical thinking to be successful at helping shape their built and natural environments in ways that are healthy, resilient, and sustainable ecologically, socially and economically. I also emphasize the need for self-directed learning with students becoming increasingly responsible for their own learning during a semester’s course.

Andrei Andon-Ionita has been covering the European Consumer Staples sector as a sell-side analyst since 2018. He has initiated coverage of the Global Tobacco sector as the lead analyst in 2025, having previously worked as a European Beverages analyst for Jefferies.

Mitch Zeller, J.D., retired from federal service in April 2022.  He was Director of FDA's Center for Tobacco Products from March 2013 through April 2022.

Zeller is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the American University Washington College of Law.  He began his career as a public interest attorney in 1982 at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). In 1988, Zeller became counsel to the Human Resources and Intergovernmental Relations Subcommittee of the House of Representatives Government Operations Committee where he conducted oversight of enforcement of federal health and safety laws.

In 1993, Zeller began his first stint at FDA.  He became Associate Commissioner and Director of FDA's first Office of Tobacco Programs. In 2000, Zeller left FDA to serve as Executive Vice President of the American Legacy Foundation. In 2002, Zeller joined Pinney Associates where, as senior vice president, he provided strategic planning and communications advice on the treatment of tobacco dependence.  He left Pinney Associates in 2013 to return to FDA as Center Director.

Zeller has an academic appointment at the Dartmouth Medical School as a Clinical Instructor and is also a Member of the Koop Institute at Dartmouth College.