Science Team
Brian S. Hooker, Ph.D.
Chief Scientific Officer
Brian S. Hooker, Ph.D., P.E., is the chief scientific officer of Science and Research at Children’s Health Defense, an organization committed to the best health for children in the U.S. and worldwide. He is also a former Frances P. Owen Distinguished Professor of Biology at Simpson University in Redding, California, where he specializes in microbiology and biotechnology.
In 1985, Dr. Hooker earned his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He earned his master’s degree in 1988 and his doctorate in 1990, both in biochemical engineering, from Washington State University in Pullman, Washington.
Brian Hooker has many accomplishments to his credit, including co-inventor for five patents, recipient of the Battelle Entrepreneurial Award in 2001 and a Federal Laboratory Consortium Recognition Award in 1999, for his work on “Reactive Transport in 3-Dimensions.” Many of Dr. Hooker’s 65+ science and engineering papers have been published in internationally recognized and peer-reviewed journals.
Dr. Hooker has been active in vaccine safety since 2001 and has an adult son with autism. In 2013 and 2014, Dr. Hooker worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention whistleblower Dr. William Thompson to expose fraud and corruption within vaccine safety research in the CDC, which led to the release of over 10,000 pages of documents.
Heather Ray
Science and Research Analyst / Administrator
Heather Ray joined the Science and Research Department at Children’s Health Defense in January 2022. She is a science and research analyst and also manages the department’s administrative duties.
Heather contributes to the CHD science department through research, analysis, writing, editing and administrative assistance. She is honored to collaborate with remarkable CHD colleagues, partnering on published scientific research and writing projects on vaccine safety, childhood health, and medical freedom.
Prior to her employment at CHD, Heather was a licensed massage therapist for over 15 years, focusing on therapeutic massage, pain management and palliative care for patients suffering from debilitating medical conditions. She also holds a B.A. in sociology from the University of Florida.
Heather is passionate about being a voice for those who cannot speak for themselves. She has been a strong advocate for children in her community, promoting freedom against medical mandates within the public school system. She has also advocated in public forums for her son, who has Down syndrome, and his rights under the Americans with Disability Act (ADA), Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and the Fair Housing Act (FHA).
Heather is a devoted mother of five amazing children and the wife of a wonderful husband.
Karl Jablonowski
Senior Research Scientist
Dr. Jablonowski earned a Ph.D. in Biomedical and Health Informatics from the University of Washington and was honored with three fellowships from the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, and Children’s Health Defense.
He believes “scientific integrity” has lately become an oxymoron, but it ought to be a redundant phrase. There is no science without integrity, which is why he has joined Children’s Health Defense as a senior research scientist. To put it succinctly, he practices data science by writing programs that ask questions about databases. These questions can reveal population-based adverse outcomes of medical interventions.
He has designed and worked with terabyte-sized databases (both biological and electronic medical record systems) and has published two book chapters and 13 peer-reviewed journal articles related to data mining and analysis for scientific investigation. His more recent peer-reviewed articles highlight the CDC/FDA participation in the COVID vaccine-related myocarditis disaster.
Thomas Yengst
Science and Research Sr. Fellow
With a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s degree in aerospace engineering, Thomas Yengst spent the majority of his career building optical systems (telescopes) for the Earth’s remote sensing community, having designed, built, deployed and operated six unique spacecraft. The remote sensing field naturally requires a deep understanding of systems integration and algorithmic data processing in order to translate subtle optical signals into meaningful observations.
His many hobbies and entrepreneurial propensity led him to work on technology startups over the years, combining expertise in remote environmental sensing with communications infrastructure. Filling a need for higher bandwidth communications with satellites led to developing and patenting gimbal-less optical communications arrays with 10 times the transmission capacity and 10 times smaller size and power requirements than their radio counterparts.
An opportune encounter with friends in the medical freedom movement led Mr. Yengst to revamp the OpenVAERS project backend data system, allowing the site to continue serving a greater number of requests for insight into the U.S. government’s vaccine tracking system.
Mr. Yengst has applied the same techniques to extract insights from Medicaid records obtained by CHD spanning 22 years, documenting a connection between vaccination and poorer health outcomes amongst Florida Medicaid recipients. While at CHD, Mr. Yengst has also collaborated on a project to tie the personal stories captured by the React19 project with the publicly available VAERS records, seeking to answer the critical and often-cited question of reporting rate by VAERS.
In his spare time, Mr. Yengst is actively engaged in a startup medical practice based on the old principle of connecting patients and healthcare providers at an individual level to bring about healthy outcomes instead of the treatment of sickness.
Jeet Varia
Science and Research Fellow
Jeet Varia, Ph.D., is a fellow in Science and Research at Children’s Health Defense. He has over 15 years of professional experience in academia, science, and innovation. Jeet started as a chemical engineer, obtaining a master’s degree from Bath University (UK) in 2006 and completing a Ph.D. in 2012 at Newcastle University (UK).
His doctorate work developed novel environmental technologies for wastewater treatment by inter-disciplinary application of electrochemistry and applied microbiology. Following his doctorate, Jeet’s employment in academia (six postdocs over six years) was cross-disciplinary. He traversed fields related to resource recovery and critical raw materials, material science, corrosion, synthetic biology, biosensors, and electrocatalysis.
After his tenure in academia, Jeet spent two years as a consultant to some of the brightest and boldest entrepreneurs in the EU, supporting the development, commercialization, and funding of breakthrough innovation. Jeet has been active in circular economy, regenerative agriculture, and (preclinical) botanical drug development for the last three years.
