2026 Speaker Information
Nicholas Comninellis, MD
INMED President
Nicholas Comninellis is President and Professor of INMED, the Institute for International Medicine. He is also part-time faculty at Research Medical Center Family Medicine Residency. Over a two-year period Dr. Comninellis served inner-city citizens at Shanghai Charity Hospital. Over another two years, he led a healthcare ministry in the war-besieged nation of Angola in southern Africa. Dr. Comninellis next served for six years in the Kansas City public hospital before launching INMED in 2003.
He graduated from the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) School of Medicine and Saint Louis University School of Public Health and was a family medicine resident at John Peter Smith Hospital. Dr. Comninellis also earned a professional diploma in tropical medicine from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and became board certified in both public health and family medicine. Among his authored books are Shanghai Doctor, Where Do I Go From Here, and INMED International Medicine & Public Health. Dr. Comninellis is a classical guitarist and faculty co-advisor for UMKC Cru. He was recognized as the 2009 United Nations Association of the United States World Citizen and the 2015 University of Missouri-Kansas City Alumni of the Year.
Dale Agner, MD
Dr. Agner has served for over 30 years in rural and underserved areas, often with limited resources and on four different continents. This includes serving in governmental and non-governmental faith-based capacities. He served as an Air Force physician for 25 years, including time in Turkey, the Middle East, Africa and as the Chief of Clinical Quality and Family Medicine consultant to the Air Force Surgeon General. Additional experience includes over 10 years of academic teaching, and a history of being able to coordinate medical services between governmental and private organizations. The past six years has seen the development of an urban-underserved gospel-rescue mission free clinic that is able to coordinate follow-on care with The Nebraska Medical Center, in Omaha, Nebraska.
Pedro David Espinoza
Pedro David Espinoza is a TED speaker, entrepreneur, AI investor, and author. In 2014, Pedro became the Founder & CEO of SmileyGo, an app that helped companies invest smarter. SmileyGo indexed the data of 1.3 million NGOs in addition to having users in 30 countries. Incubated at SkyDeck, his software startup gained funding from 1517 Fund, Frank Baxter, Jack Larson, and Berkeley Haas Seed Fund. In 2017, Janet Napolitano awarded Pedro The University of California Entrepreneur Winner. In 2018, Pedro founded Pan Peru USA, a venture that empowers women to become entrepreneurs. With the support from Fortune 500s, Pan Peru has scaled from empowering 1 to 100 women. In 2019, Pedro wrote a book with Jorge Titinger with contributions from Eric Schmidt, Reed Hastings, and Dan Schulman. Pedro's book – Differences That Make A Difference – attracted 100 CEOs as contributors such as Pat Gelsinger who wrote the foreword. His book received the 2020 Best Business Book Award by Latino International.
Bill Fuller
Bill Fuller is the Placement Coordinator and Recruiter for Crossworld, a global mission agency and a formative community of disciple-makers from all professions with the goal of bringing God’s love to life among the least-reached. Bill spent six formative months in Ethiopia where he witnessed a great shortage of workers. Bill has 15 years of business experience and has spent over 35 years mobilizing churches in the US and overseas to be sending communities. Bill’s objective is to leverage his persuasion, coaching skills and experiences to mobilize churches to be all-professions sending communities to bring God's love to life in the world's least reached marketplaces.
Michelle Kwok, MD
Dr. Michelle Kwok is an allergist and immunologist practicing in Montréal, Canada. She completed medical school at University of Sydney and her residency at McGill University. Dr. Kwok is passionate about medical outreach to resource poor areas both locally and internationally. She co-founded Connexion Nordique, a quality improvement initiative to provide allergy care to Indigenous peoples of northern Québec through virtual consultation, education, and in-person trips. In addition, she has participated in service trips to Rwanda, Angola, Ghana, Mongolia, and China. Dr. Kwok is a classically trained singer and co-writes contemporary music and co-organizes events with local artists. She also speaks Cantonese with working medical proficiency in Mandarin and French.
Nicholas Maxwell, MD
Dr. Maxwell is a chief emergency medicine resident at Washington University in St. Louis as well as Director of US Partnerships for the Friends of Joseph Ukpo Hospitals and Research Institutes. He got his start in healthcare through EMT training in high school and then earned his B.S. in Emergency Medical Services at Creighton University. Afterwards, he worked as a paramedic before going on to medical school at the University of Rochester in New York. Along the way, he taught prehospital emergency care in the Dominican Republic and Nigeria. Additionally, he serves as Medical Education Coordinator for Techies Without Borders.
Vicki Penwell, CPM
Vicki Penwell and her late husband Scott founded the ministry that became Mercy In Action over 40 years ago. Vicki has spent her life as a licensed midwife, health educator, missionary and humanitarian aide and disaster response organizer. Vicki now divides her time between the Philippines and the USA, where she teaches for Mercy in Action’s College of Midwifery. Vicki has been honored to have a chapter in two different books edited by Robbie Davis Floyd: "Birth Models That Work", and chapters in two books published by Midwifery Today.
Diane Petrie, FNP-BC
Diane Petrie received her BSN from Cedarville University and MSN from The University of Central Missouri. She has worked as a Family Nurse Practitioner at Children’s Mercy Kansas City for the past 10 years including 6 years in the Infectious Diseases Clinic treating patients living with HIV. She is a graduate of the MATEC HIV Clinician Scholars Program which she completed while working in HIV Primary Care at the KC CARE Health Center in Kansas City. She is certified in HIV Medicine through the American Academy of HIV Medicine. She has special interests in HIV, travel medicine, global health, refugee care, and care of adolescent sexually transmitted infections. She lives in Raymore, Missouri with her husband of 15 years and her 3 young kids.
Kris Prenger, MD
Dr. Kris Prenger has nearly 30 years’ experience serving the underserved. She graduated from The Ohio State University, completed a Family Medicine residency in Wilmington, DE, then worked from 1991-1996 on the Navajo Indian Reservation in Shiprock, NM. After Bible training, she began work in rural South Asia in 1997. She worked primarily in community health and development, with limited clinical work in Ob-Gyn (20+ years), then Med-Peds. After relocating to the US, she now serves as Midwest Area Coordinator for InterserveUSA. She received an MPH from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and completed an MA in Intercultural Studies from Fuller Theological Seminary.
Richard Randolph, MD
Dr. Randolph is the Senior Chief Medical Officer for Heart to Heart International, based in Lenexa, KS. Dr. Randolph provides technical direction and clinical supervision for medical operations for the organization. He is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and University of Kansas Medical School. He retired as a U.S. Army Colonel after serving two tours in Iraq and spending the past two decades providing primary care, public health and disaster response in the United States, the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa and the Philippines. Dr. Randolph earned a graduate certificate in public health in the developing world and served as the Chief Medical Officer for HHI’s Ebola Treatment Unit in Liberia.
Monica Rojas, MD
Dr. Rojas has more than 20 years of experience working with nonprofit organizations in at-risk communities in Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Mexico helping those most in need. She spent two years developing a free clinic in Costa Rica, coordinating and implementing Health Fairs for underdeveloped communities. Dr. Rojas currently serves as the Director of International Medicine and Cultural Education at ARCOM.
Grant Ryder
Grant is the Director of Church Mobilization at Crossworld, a missions organization that has over 300 missionaries in 35 countries around the world, primarily among the least reached people groups. Grant is a graduate of Moody Bible Institute and Denver Seminary and has been involved in church planting and mobilization of people in all professions to use their gifts and opportunities to make disciples for Christ. Grant and his wife, Leah, have three daughters and live in Kansas City.
Greg Seager, RN
Greg Seager is a Registered Nurse an extensive background in Critical Care/ Emergency nursing and nursing management. He and his wife Candi are the founders of The Christian Health Service Corps and are presently serving as its managing directors. From 2004 to 2006 they served as managers of Mercy Ships Strategic Health Initiatives, the department they designed, monitored, and evaluated Mercy Ships community health initiatives. Prior to serving with Mercy Ships they were medical mission team coordinators for a Miami based mission organization, leading six to eight medical mission teams per year for several years. They have authored one booklet on medical missions entitled “Operating Responsible Short-Term Healthcare Missions” Greg and Candi live in San Antonio TX with their daughter Corinne. They have two adult daughters Amanda who lives in San Antonio and Stephanie who lives in Ft Lauderdale.
Deepak S. Singh, MS, MCh
Dr. Singh serves as Emmanuel Hospital Association’s (EHA) Executive Director. Dr. Singh has served with EHA for over 27 years—including a decade as Managing Director of Chinchpada Christian Hospital and has also served as Regional Director for EHA’s eastern hospitals, making a lasting impact on healthcare in India’s most vulnerable communities.
Duane Spaulding, MD
Dr. Spaulding was educated in Michigan and Denver. After biomedical research at NIH and Harvard, he practiced Internal Medicine in Colorado Springs for 26 years initially in private practice and later as co-founder, CEO, and clinician with the first independent Hospitalist program in Colorado. After opting for early retirement, Dr. Spaulding was the medical director for Heart to Heart International–Haiti for 12 years overseeing 10 to 21 mobile clinics, training the Haitian medical staff, and supervising the deployment of many hundreds of expat medical volunteers. He has also trained global first responders about tropical diseases for the past seven years. Currently, Dr. Spaulding prepares medical teams on behalf of Global Care Force and Project C.U.R.E. (both have offices in the Kansas City area) prior to their deployments across five continents. In addition, he continues to enjoy opportunities to consult and teach in a dozen countries on the African continent.
Ashish Abraham Thankachan, MD
Kainey Varughese, FNP-BC
Kainey Varughese, has experience in working in LMICs, and is currently working on implementing community development programs in India.
Mark Wardle, DO
Dr. Wardle is an osteopathic family medicine physician, the Vice-Chair of Primary Care at Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine, and the Director of both Global Medicine and Medical Spanish on the Utah campus. Dr. Wardle has completed the course work for the Master’s Degree in International Health (MIH) through INMED and is slated to graduate in December 2022. He has experience working on and leading global health trips to many countries in Latin America, as well as, Kenya, and loves teaching medical students. Dr. Wardle speak Spanish proficiently, basic conversational Italian, and is now working on French.
Calvin Wilson, MD
Dr. Wilson has been involved in global community and family medicine development projects for over 20 years. He developed the first university-affiliated family medicine program in Ecuador, while at the same time directing a community health development project in northern Ecuador. He served as training advisor in a USAID project to upgrade the primary health care system in Jordan and initiated the training of the first PHC trainers in post-war Iraq. He was the founding director of the University of Colorado Hospital Family Medicine residency program and consulted with the University of Rwanda in the post-genocide re-development of several postgraduate medical residency programs. He has received several awards in global health, including the STFM Smilkstein Award in International Health, the AAFP Humanitarian of the Year, the WONCA Global Family Doctor of the Month, and the INMED International Healthcare Preceptor of the Year.