Deborah Kan is a media entrepreneur, founder of Deborah Kan Media, media speaker and award-winning news anchor and journalist.
Executive Editor and Founder of Being Patient, she is redefining health media by creating single-subject platforms around specific long-term illnesses. Being Patient launched its first platform solely dedicated to covering Alzheimer’s disease in July 2017.
Previously Executive Producer at the Wall Street Journal, Ms. Kan launched and ran the Journal’s video and multimedia initiative in Asia and grew it into a substantial operation, spanning nine countries throughout the region. During this time, she launched and anchored global consumer technology show “Digits” and spearheaded the production of several documentaries and multimedia projects in Asia. The documentary “City of Imagination: Kowloon Walled City” under her leadership won numerous awards and the Society of News Design Best Digital Design award. The multimedia immersive “What is Alibaba?” also won a Society of Publishers Award.
Ms. Kan has interviewed many world leaders and CEOs during her tenure as a journalist. Uber founder Travis Kalanick, Airbnb’s co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk and Twitter’s former CEO Dick Costolo are among technology leaders she obtained exclusive interviews with. When she interviewed Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt in 2014, she broke the story of Google’s criticism of the U.S. National Security Agency.
Executive Producer of Video & Interviewer, Bloomberg New Economy Forum, Ms. Kan formulated the video production and website content for the NEF, a Michael Bloomberg initiative to build a community of leadership around the world’s most critical issues.
Ms. Kan was previously the Managing Editor for News Deeply’s Women & Girls, launched in partnership with the Gates Foundation. Women & Girls covers important female issues in the developing world, around health, education and crisis and conflict.
Prior to joining the Journal in 2011, she was a news anchor with Reuters Insider, Thomson Reuters proprietary news channel, where she reported extensively on the 2008 global economic crisis, China’s 2009 massive economic stimulus package and regulation reform in the aftermath of the economic crisis.
Her broadcast experience also includes roles as anchor of “Star News Asia,” the award-winning newscast on Newscorp’s Star World, as well as presenter of “Talk with Deborah Kan.”
Throughout her career, Ms. Kan has conducted exclusive interviews with political leaders. She was also one of few international journalists to have interviewed Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, and was the only television journalist from Asia to accompany the New York Philharmonic on their historic 2008 performance in Pyongyang, North Korea.
She is a member of the 2008 class of the Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum. She obtained a BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and attended the Mass Media Institute at Stanford University, where she studied broadcast journalism. She has also completed Harvard University’s Global Leadership and Public Policy for the 21st Century program.
Ms. Kan was appointed to the board of directors of the Family Caregiving Alliance in January 2020. She also serves on the advisory board of Gleneagles Hospital in Hong Kong. She has also been a member of the board of managers for Hong Kong International School for the past nine years. She leads a peripatetic life dividing her time between Hong Kong and San Francisco, is the mom of three children and sees her morning run as an essential part of the daily grind.
Where are we as a nation on the path to the 2025 goal of stopping Alzheimer’s disease? Since the disease was first identified in the early 1900s, innovation has been slow, but the pace of science and discovery is dramatically increasing. This session will explore the progress made to date and the potential ahead for the development of new treatments, innovative diagnostics and means of prevention.
