Katie Couric to speak at symposium at Johns Hopkins

BALTIMORE, May 8 (UPI) -- Talk-show host Katie Couric is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at Johns Hopkins Medicine's 19th annual A Woman's Journey symposium in Baltimore.

Symposium organizers said Couric would speak in November about how cancer changed her life, led to a personal commitment to advocate for colon cancer screening and to raise funds for cancer research.

Former co-anchor of NBC's "Today Show" and now host of the syndicated daytime daily talk show "Katie," Couric co-founded the National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance with the Entertainment Industry Foundation in 2000, and also helped establish the Jay Monahan Center for Gastrointestinal Health, named for her late husband, at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical College.

In 2008, Katie was one of nine co-founders of Stand Up To Cancer, an Entertainment Industry Foundation initiative uniting Hollywood and the public in the effort to raise money for accelerated cancer research.

A Woman's Journey is the creation of two women, Harriet Legum and Mollye Block, who together realized the need to provide women with a forum to gain knowledge about their health concerns.

Since its founding in 1995, A Woman's Journey annually offers 32 seminars -- all taught by Hopkins physicians and scientists on advances in medicine. The program is designed to attract mothers, daughters, grandmothers, sisters and friends who come to learn from Hopkins experts and from each other, organizers said.