Notes on Contributors

Jerry Avorn, MD, is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. An internist, geriatrician, and drug epidemiologist, he studies the intended and adverse effects of prescription drugs, physician prescribing practices, and medication policy. Avorn did his undergraduate training at Columbia University in 1969, received his MD from Harvard Medical School in 1974, and completed a residency in internal medicine at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. He has served as president of the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology and is a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Standards for Developing Trustworthy Clinical Practice Guidelines. Avorn is the author or coauthor of more than 275 papers in the medical literature on medication use and its outcomes.

Donald M. Berwick, MD, MPP, FRCP, is president emeritus and senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, an organization that Berwick cofounded and led as president and CEO for 18 years. In July, 2010, President Obama appointed Berwick to the position of administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which he held until December 2011. A pediatrician by background, Berwick has served as clinical professor of pediatrics and health care policy at the Harvard Medical School and professor of health policy and management at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine. Berwick is the author or coauthor of more than 160 scientific articles and 6 books. He is now a lecturer in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School.

Sigrun Danielsdottir, Cand.Psych, MSc, is a clinical psychologist and project manager for mental health promotion at the Directorate of Health in Iceland. She is president of the Icelandic Association for Body Respect and founding president of the Icelandic Eating Disorders Association. She sits on the management committee and leads a task group on social activism within a European research collaboration network—the COST Action IS1210: Appearance Matters—which focuses on the physical and psychosocial consequences of appearance dissatisfaction. Her work and research focuses on mental health promotion, eating disorders, body image, and weight bias.

Carole Doherty, PhD, MSc, is a senior lecturer in health care management in the Health Care Management and Policy Centre at the University of Surrey. Prior to joining the University of Surrey in 2007, she held nursing and management positions in the UK National Health Service. She holds an MSc and a PhD from King’s College, London. Her specific research interests are patient safety and the role of first-line managers.

Dave Durenberger, JD, is the only Minnesota Republican elected to 3 terms in the US Senate, starting in 1978 with his election to replace Muriel and Hubert Humphrey. He played a key role in authoring reform of health, education, welfare, civil rights, environment, tax, intergovernmental relations, and campaign finance policy and served a term as chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He is the author of books on national security and on health policy and recently retired from the Opus College of Business at the University of St. Thomas (MN) where he founded and chaired the National Institute of Health Policy.

Aaron S. Kesselheim, MD, JD, MPH, is an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a faculty member in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Kesselheim leads the Program on Regulation, Therapeutics, and Law, an interdisciplinary research core focusing on intersections among prescription drugs and medical devices, patient health outcomes, and regulatory practices and the law. His research focuses on the effects of intellectual property laws and regulatory policies on pharmaceutical development, the drug approval process, and the costs, availability, and use of prescription drugs both domestically and in resource-poor settings. Kesselheim’s work on this study was supported by the Greenwall Faculty Scholar in Bioethics.

Kathryn G. Kietzman, PhD, MSW, is a research scientist at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the Department of Community Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Her research focuses primarily on the health and social care needs of the most physically, socially, and financially vulnerable of older adults who live at home and depend on public programs and other informal supports to maintain their independence. She was a Health and Aging Policy Fellow in the United States Senate (2008-2010) and a Hartford Doctoral Fellow in Geriatric Social Work (2006-2008), and she earned her doctorate from the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. She completed both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social welfare at the University of California, Berkeley.

Janet D. Latner, PhD, is a professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her research areas include understanding and ameliorating weight bias, obesity, eating disorders, and binge eating among adults and children. She has published extensively in these areas and serves on several editorial boards. Latner’s background is in clinical psychology. She received her bachelor’s degree from Yale University and completed her doctoral training at Rutgers University and Montefiore Medical Center.

John N. Lavis, MD, PhD, holds the Canada Research Chair in Evidence-Informed Health Systems. He is the director of the McMaster Health Forum, codirector of the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre on Evidence-Informed Policy, associate director of the Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis, professor in the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and associate member of the Department of Political Science at McMaster University. He is also adjunct professor of global health in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is cochair of the WHO-sponsored Evidence-Informed Policy Network Global Steering Group and oversees the Policy Liaison Office of the Canadian Cochrane Centre.

Joerg Luedicke, MS, is a senior social scientist and statistician at Stata- Corp in College Station, Texas. He was previously a statistical consultant at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. He received his MA at the Free University of Berlin, Germany.

Kerry S. O’Brien, PhD, is an associate professor in the School of Social Science at Monash University in Australia. He is a health and social scientist who trained in psychology at the University of Otago, New Zealand, before taking up a position at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, and then Monash University. His research examines the interplay between health and social policy and is designed to inform associated policy debates and policy measures. The majority of his research falls within two areas: stigma and discrimination based on race and weight status; and the influence of alcohol advertising and sponsorship in sport on young people’s drinking.

Rebecca M. Puhl, PhD, is deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity and professor of human development and family studies at the University of Connecticut. She received her PhD in clinical psychology from Yale University. Her research addresses weight-based bullying in youth, obesity stigma in health care and the media, the impact of weight stigma on health, and policy strategies to reduce weight bias and discrimination. Puhl routinely provides expertise on weight bias to policymakers, state departments of health, and national health organizations, and has developed evidence-based trainings to reduce weight bias that have been implemented in medical facilities across the country.

Joseph D. Restuccia, DrPH, MPH, is professor and dean’s research fellow at the Questrom School of Business, Boston University and senior investigator at the VA Center for Healthcare Organization and Implementation Research. His research has focused on issues related to health care quality measurement and improvement, cost containment, information technology, organizational transformation, and evaluation of interventions to improve effectiveness of health care delivery. Restuccia is currently principal investigator of a study of the impact of organizational factors on cost and quality of inpatient medical services at the Veterans Health Administration’s 129 medical centers and has been principal investigator on studies supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Commonwealth Fund, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, among other funding organizations.

Amy Rosen, PhD, is a senior research career scientist in the Veterans Administration (VA) and a senior researcher at the VA Center for Healthcare Organization and Implementation Research. She is also professor of surgery at the Boston University School of Medicine. Her research interests include risk adjustment methodologies, health care outcomes, quality measurement and assessment, patient safety, and provider profiling. Much of her current work focuses on the development of measures to assess patient safety and quality and the impact of those measures on provider profiling. She is currently director of the Patient Safety Center of Inquiry at the VA Boston Healthcare System on “Measurement to Advance Patient Safety.”

Ximena Ramos Salas, MSc, is managing director of the Canadian Obesity Network (CON), a nonprofit organization with a mission to improve the well-being of people with obesity. Her role with CON entails managing research and knowledge translation initiatives. Prior to working with CON, she worked with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research implementing research initiatives on obesity and health inequities. Currently, as a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health, she is exploring the unintended consequences of public health obesity prevention strategies on weight bias and obesity stigma. Her recent publications have focused on obesity myths and public health narratives that may perpetuate weight bias and ultimately lead to health inequities for people with obesity.

Michael Shwartz, PhD, MBA, is the Richard D. Cohen Professor in Management at the Questrom School of Business, Boston University and is a senior investigator at the VA Center for Healthcare Organization and Implementation Research. He has done work in disease screening, risk adjustment, health care costs and outcomes, quality of care, small area variations, substance abuse, organizational analyses, and provider profiling. Much of his current work focuses on quality and patient safety measurement and the role and potential of composite measures. He is currently the principal investigator of a large grant evaluating the impact on quality and safety culture and measures in 12 Veterans Administration hospitals of actively engaging senior leadership with front-line staff in order to identify and prioritize quality improvement interventions.

Charitini Stavropoulou, PhD, MSc, is a senior lecturer in health management in the School of Health Sciences at City University London. Prior to joining City University Stavropoulou held teaching and research positions at the University of Surrey and Imperial College Business School. She has an MSc from the University of Edinburgh and a PhD from the London School of Economics. She works in the area of health economics and policy with applications to health services research both in the UK and in other European countries.

Jacqueline M. Torres, PhD, MPH, is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at the University of California, San Francisco and the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the social and policy determinants of health and health care among immigrants and older adults. She earned her doctorate in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles and was a graduate research assistant at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

Paul Tosey, PhD, MSc, is a senior lecturer in management at the Surrey Business School, University of Surrey. He holds an MSc and a PhD from the University of Bath. Having joined Surrey in 1991 after career experience that includes consultancy and line management in the public sector, for many years he directed the MSc Change Agent Skills and Strategies, an advanced training for consultants and facilitators. His research interests include organizational learning, enquiry-based learning, and Clean Language, an innovative coaching practice that is based on metaphor, on which he has published widely. He is coeditor with Mark Saunders of the Handbook of Research Methods on HRD (Edward Elgar 2015).

Carolyn L. Treasure is a fourth-year medical student at Harvard Medical School. For the past 3 years, she has worked with the Program on Regulation, Therapeutic, and Law under the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Peter Tugwell, MBBS, MD, MSc, is professor of medicine, epidemiology, and community medicine at the University of Ottawa, holds the Canada Research Chair in Health Equity, and is a staff physician and practicing internist/rheumatologist at the Ottawa Hospital. He is past chair of the McMaster University Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, founding director of the International Clinical Epidemiology Network Training Centre at McMaster University, and secretary-general to the International Clinical Epidemiology Network’s North American group (CanUSAClen). He is a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (Canada and UK) and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. Tugwell is codirector of a World Health Organization Collaborating Center, coordinating editor of the Cochrane Collaboration Musculoskeletal Review Group, co-convenor of the Campbell/Cochrane Equity Methods Group, cochair of the Campbell International Development Coordinating Group, and coeditor-in-chief of the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. He is an officer of the Order of Canada.

Steven P. Wallace, PhD, is professor and chair of the Department of Community Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and associate director at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. A leading scholar in the United States in the area of aging in communities of color, he has published research on access to long-term care by diverse elderly, inequities in the consequences of health policy changes for racial/ethnic minority elderly, and the politics of aging. He is a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, is the recipient of the American Public Health Association Aging and Public Health Section’s leadership award, and received the Birren Senior Scholar Award from the California Council on Gerontology and Geriatrics.

Volume 93, Issue 4 (pages 871–877)
Published in 2015