Committee for Tactical
Emergency Casualty Care

Mika is the Director of Government Relations for Tyson Foods, Inc. in Washington, D.C. Mika has been with Tyson foods for over eight years working on issues pertaining to the House and Senate Agriculture and Appropriations Committees, along with House specific issues and letters, agriculture, transportation, environment, energy, and ethanol issues.

Before Tyson Foods, Mika has worked for the American Meat Institute now the North American Meat Institute, and for three Members of the Michigan Delegation, Rep. Nick Smith (R-MI-07), Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI-04), and Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI-07). Mika spent six years working in the Michigan state legislature for former Lieutenant Governor Dick Posthumus, former State Representative David Palsrok (110th). He has run several successful state representatives, statewide, and congressional campaigns; and worked on the Advance team for President George W. Bush.

Born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and raised in Southfield, MI just north of Detroit, Mika has lived in Washington, DC since 2004. Mika is an avid sports fan and involved in many sports from baseball, softball, golf, hockey, basketball, and others. Mr. Mika is a commissioner of The United States House Softball League (USHSL). He is a volunteer staff coach for the Republican team for the annual bipartisan Congressional Baseball Game. Mika is one of five survivors who was shot at a Congressional Baseball practice in 2017.

Mika received his Bachelor of Arts in Criminal Justice with a Political Science/Pre-law Minor from Adrian College, in 2001 in Adrian, MI and played on both the football and baseball teams. In 2010, he was awarded the Young Alumni Achievement Award from Adrian College. The 1997 Football Team which Mr. Mika was a member was inducted into the Adrian College Athletic Hall of Fame in 2014. Mr. Mika is the president of the Agribusiness Club of Washington, D.C. and a member of Toastmasters.

Dr. Peter Taillac is a Clinical Professor of Surgery in the Division of Emergency Medicine at the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City, UT. For the last 10 years, he has served as the State EMS Medical Director for the Bureau of EMS and Preparedness, Utah Department of Health. In this position, Dr. Taillac chairs multiple statewide committees, including stroke, cardiac, and trauma registry and performance improvement, state EMS protocol guidelines, and others. He is a member of the Utah Crisis Standards of Care Committee and helped develop the State’s emergency response guidelines for disasters.

Dr. Taillac serves as the EMS Medical Director representative on the National EMS Advisory Council for the National Highway Traffic Administration. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the National Association of EMS Physicians and the immediate past-chair of the Medical Directors Council for the National Association of State EMS Officials. He has been involved in the development of multiple national prehospital clinical guidelines, including leading the trauma section of the NASEMSO Model EMS Clinical Guidelines, the American College of Surgeons hemorrhage control guidelines, the PEGASUS pediatric clinical guidelines project, and the recently-completed naloxone prehospital guideline project. In addition, he co-chaired the 2019 National Model Scope of Practice Update Subject Matter Expert Panel.

Dr. Taillac recently retired after 38 years of military service as an Army physician, serving on Active Duty, Reserve, and the National Guard, with the rank of Colonel. He served as the State Surgeon for the Utah Army National Guard for 12 years and provided combat medical care during tours of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Dr. Taillac is Board Certified in both Emergency Medicine and Emergency Medical Services. His academic and professional areas of interest are in prehospital and combat medical care, hemorrhage control, cardiac arrest, stroke, disaster medical preparedness, and EMS systems of care. He has extensive experience in teaching emergency skills and EMS development overseas, particularly in India and Morocco.

Dr. Smith is currently the Operational Medical Director for the Arlington County (VA) Fire Department, an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine, and an attending physician at the Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, VA. He attended medical school at the Georgetown University, completed his residency training in Emergency Medicine at the George Washington University, and has spent the last 12 years developing training and programs to address regional emergency preparedness and operational gaps in the National Capital Region.

As faculty, he was the Program Director for the George Washington University Emergency Health Services program and then led the Division of Special Operations Medicine where he oversaw the development of unique custom educational programs and medical operations for civilian and military special operations teams. He was the operational medical director for the former National Medical Response Team - National Capitol Region where he helped to develop new medical response models to atypical disasters in the NCR, and was a medical team manager for the Virginia Task Force-1 Urban Search and Rescue team. Additionally, he has served as the Medical Director for large scale events such as the National Marathon, the Nations Triathlon, the AT&T National Golf Tournament, and most recently the 2011 USGA US Open Championship.

In his current position as OMD for Arlington County, he oversees all medical operations, provider education, QA and medical protocols, and has developed new programs including unique operational EMS sub-specialty teams and Rescue Task Force, an innovative pre-hospital response to active violence and explosive scenarios,. Dr. Smith frequently presents at national and international medical conferences and delivers training to many groups ranging from tactical to operational to hospital-based. Most recently, he co-founded and now co-chairs the non-profit Committee for Tactical Emergency Casualty Care to facilitate medical knowledge transfer from combat to civilian use, and is co-developing the Arlington County High Threat program. Reed is a former EMS provider and Navy Corpsman and has strong interests in Operational & Tactical Medicine.