Notes on Contributors

Lisa A. Bero is a professor in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy at the School of Pharmacy and Institute for Health Policy Studies, School of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco. She has developed and validated methods for assessing the quality of research and scientific publications, and measures influences on the quality of research, including university-industry relations. Bero also examines the dissemination and policy implications of scientific publications. She has published numerous peer-reviewed scientific articles related to her research as well as co-authored The Cigarette Papers (University of California Press, 1996). She is a member of the World Health Organization Essential Medicines Committee and an elected member of the Cochrane Collaboration Steering Group and serves on several national and international committees related to conflicts of interest and research. Bero has a PhD.

Joseph R. Betancourt is director of the Disparities Solutions Center and director of multicultural education at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a practicing internist. He has served as principal investigator on several federal and foundation grants, including grants from the National Cancer Institute, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the Commonwealth Fund, the California Endowment, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Betancourt has served on several Institute of Medicine committees, including those that produced Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Health Care (National Academies Press, 2002), Guidance for a National Health Care Disparities Report (National Academies Press, 2002), and In the Nation’s Compelling Interest: Ensuring Diversity in the Health Care Workforce (National Academies Press, 2004). He is on the Massachusetts State Disparities Committee and co-chairs MGH’s Disparities Committee. Betancourt holds an MD and an MPH.

Teresa A. Coughlin is a principal research associate in the Health Policy Center of the Urban Institute and has conducted health services research for more than twenty years. She has nationally recognized expertise in state health policy, Medicaid, and financing. Coughlin directed several studies involving in-depth case studies, including a CMS-sponsored evaluation of HIFA waiver programs in ten states. Coughlin also led a major evaluation of five state Section 1115 waivers, including New York’s 1115 waiver demonstration. She was also the principal investigator of a 2007 Kaiser Family Foundation–sponsored project that examined Illinois’s All Kids Initiative. Coughlin has an MPH.

Elizabeth J. Donahue is a program associate at the Disparities Solutions Center, housed within the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute for Health Policy. Donahue joined the center in 2005, after completing a bachelor of arts at Boston College.

Alexander R. Green is associate director of the Disparities Solutions Center and senior scientist at the Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also chair of the Cross-Cultural Care Committee at Harvard Medical School. His work focuses on programs designed to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in care, including the use of culturally competent quality improvement interventions, leadership development, and dissemination strategies. He has studied the role of unconscious biases and their impact on clinical decision making, language barriers, and patient satisfaction, and innovative approaches to cross-cultural medical education. Green holds an MD and an MPH.

Christopher J. Jewell received his JD from the University of California, Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, and his PhD from Berkeley’s Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program. He has published in a variety of policy and administration journals, including Law & Policy,Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Social Service Review, and Administration & Society. In 2007 he published the book Agents of the Welfare State: How Caseworkers Respond to Need in the United States, Germany, and Sweden (Palgrave Macmillan). Currently he works as a research analyst at a natural language technology company in San Francisco.

Jessie Kimbrough-Sugick is the inaugural fellow of the Aetna/Disparities Solution Center Health Care Disparities Fellowship Program. She recently completed an MPH program in health management and policy at the Harvard School of Public Health. Before obtaining her MPH, she spent two years at Henry Ford Health Systems, where she practiced as a primary care physician. Kimbrough-Sugick has lectured for faith-based collaboratives designed to empower racial and ethnic minorities through health education, as well as participated in community service activities that focus on mentoring disadvantaged children and introducing them to the health care profession. She attended Wayne State University School of Medicine and completed her medical training in internal medicine and pediatrics.

Roderick K. King is currently a senior faculty member at the Massachusetts General Hospital Disparities Solutions Center and an instructor in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. In addition, King was recently selected as one of two Inaugural Institute of Medicine Anniversary Fellows, in which capacity he serves on the Board on Global Health and on the study “The U.S. Commitment to Global Health.” King’s work focuses on leadership and workforce development and improving the performance of health systems as they relate to addressing health disparities and improving the health of underserved populations. He most recently served as the director for the Health Resources and Services Administration, Boston Regional Division, and as a commander in the U.S. Public Health Service, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. King holds an MD and an MPH.

David Mechanic is the René Dubos University Professor of Behavioral Sciences and director of the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. His research and writing deal with social aspects of health and health care.

David Stuckler is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Cambridge and King’s College. He holds an MPH in health policy from Yale. His research integrates political economy and public health, and his dissertation uses advanced epidemiologic and econometric methods to explain the unprecedented mortality crisis in post-communist countries that occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Starting in October 2008 he will be a junior research fellow at Christ Church in Oxford.

Aswita Tan-McGrory is the operations manager at the Disparities Solutions Center housed within the Massachusetts General Hospital’s Institute for Health Policy. Her interests are in providing equitable care to underserved populations, and she has worked in the areas of maternal/child health, elder homelessness, and HIV testing and counseling. She received her master of science in public health from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine with a concentration in tropical medicine and parasitology after she spent two years in rural Nigeria, West Africa, on water sanitation and Guinea worm eradication projects with the Peace Corps. She received a bachelor of arts degree in biology and art history from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

Stephen Zuckerman is a principal research associate in the Health Policy Center of the Urban Institute. He received his doctorate in economics from Columbia University in 1983 and has studied health economics and health policy for almost twenty-five years. Currently, he is addressing protections for Medicare’s most vulnerable beneficiaries, physician payment, the cost of practices becoming medical homes, and pay-for-performance. He has studied Medicaid financing, crowd-out of private coverage by SCHIP, state coverage expansion for adults, the health care safety net, and survey approaches for measuring insurance coverage. Zuckerman also co-directed the development of the Geographic Practice Cost Indices used in the Medicare physician fee schedule.