Amy Acton, MD, MPH, is a physician and community leader who has spent over 30 years pursuing her passion for public health and wellness.

Whether as director of the Ohio Department of Health during early days of the COVID pandemic or as vice president of Human:Kind at the Columbus Foundation, Acton has worked to create community conditions that encourage people to flourish toward their full potential.

Acton now carries her unique ability to inspire people to live their best lives as director of a new nonprofit being created to champion RAPID 5, a movement dedicated to connecting central Ohioans to nature and one another through the region’s five major waterways and the parks and trails along them.

Acton’s widely acclaimed leadership and inspiring guidance was seen in daily news conferences as COVID exploded in the spring of 2020, earning her a Profile in COVID Courage Award from the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation in 2021. In 2022 she was named Woman of the Year for Ohio by USA Today for the significant impact she has had.

A native of Youngstown in northeast Ohio, Acton received her master’s degree in public health from Ohio State University and her medical degree from Northeastern Ohio University College of Medicine. She completed internships in pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City and at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and residency in preventive medicine at OSU.

Acton has taught in the OSU College of Medicine and Public Health and the Center for Injury Research and Policy at the Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. She previously directed Project L.O.V.E. in Columbus, an initiative of local hospitals to Love Our Kids, Vaccinate Early. She also worked for the Columbus Foundation as a community research and grants management officer.

Under her leadership as  state health director, Ohio created the first ODH deputy director position focused on mobilizing federal and state resources to promote health equity, inclusion and opportunity for all Ohioans.

Acton lives in Bexley with her husband, Eric, who has coached and taught in Bexley City Schools since 1987. 

Keith Myers is an acclaimed urban planner and landscape architect who is retiring June 30 as vice president of planning, architecture and real estate from the Ohio State University following a 30-year career in private practice and 10 years at the University. He is the past chair of the Urban Land Institute (ULI) Columbus and is credited with helping to create the vision for RAPID 5. RAPID 5 is a movement to connect people of central Ohio with nature and one another across five major waterways and adjacent parks and trails.

Among Myers’ signature accomplishments are the restoration of Mirror Lake at OSU to its more natural state, design of the Scioto Mile and Scioto Greenways in Downtown Columbus and master planning of the Nationwide Arena District. His leadership at Ohio State also includes development of its Innovation District and University Square at intersection of 15^th Avenue and High Street in Columbus.

Myers received a bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture from OSU and has served its Knowlton School of Architecture as an adjunct faculty member. He founded the landscape architecture and urban planning firm MKSK in 1984 and helped grow it into the largest such firm in the Midwest.

Myers is a fellow in the American Society of Landscape Architects. His community leadership has included work on the Neighborhood Design Center, Brewery District Commission, and numerous other boards and commissions. He served as planning consultant to New Albany for more than two decades as it grew from a sleepy rural village to a national model for a health-focused suburban lifestyle.

As a governance committee member at ULI, Myers has been involved in a collaboration with the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission (MORPC) to predict central Ohio will attract one million new residents by 2050.

As an outgrowth of that work, Myers helped ULI and MORPC to recognize an urgency to enliven the five major north-south waterways distributed evenly across Franklin County in imaginative ways to use the rivers and creeks and surrounding parks and trials to connect central Ohioans to nature and each other to the benefit of all.

Myers was instrumental in engaging Neighborhood Design Center and five local design firms in the midst of the COVID pandemic to each study one of the natural corridors, gather ideas for improvements from their communities and residents and present enhancement plans in July 2021 to further develop the vision of RAPID 5, which stands for Rivers and Parks Imagination Design.

The firms and the water courses they focused on are: REALM Collaborative and Big Darby Creek, NBBJ and the Scioto River, MKSK and the Olentangy River, AECOM and Alum Creek, and EDGE and Big Walnut Creek.