Notes on Contributors

Karen Davis is president of the Commonwealth Fund, a national philanthropy engaged in independent research on health and social issues. Davis has had a distinguished career in public policy and research. The first woman to head a U.S. public health service agency, she served as deputy assistant secretary for health policy in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from 1977 to 1980. Prior to that, she was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a visiting scholar at Harvard University, and an assistant professor of economics at Rice University. She has written extensively on health and social policy issues, including the books Health and the War on Poverty: A Ten Year Appraisal (Brookings, 1978) and National Health Insurance: Benefits, Costs, and Consequences (Brookings, 1976). Davis received the Baxter Health Services Research Award in 2000, an honorary doctorate in humane letters from Johns Hopkins University in 2001, and the AcademyHealth Distinguished Investigator Award in 2006. Davis holds a PhD from Rice University.

Rachel Delavan works as a part-time researcher for the University of Rochester and as a program analyst for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Delavan has a BA in economics and international studies from LaSalle University and an MS in agricultural, environmental, and regional economics from Penn State University.

Pierre-Gerlier Forest is president of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan organization that supports and promotes outstanding research in the humanities and the social sciences. Forest was previously an assistant deputy minister with Health Canada, where he was first G.D.W. Cameron Chair (2003) before becoming chief scientist (2004–2006). Known for his work in the areas of health policy and the governance of health care organizations, Forest also held the position of director of research at the Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada. He has spent most of his career at Laval University, where he is professor of policy analysis and public management in the Department of Political Science. Forest obtained a master’s degree in political science at Laval University (1984) and a PhD in history and socio-politics of science at the University of Montreal (1989).

Diane Gross received her doctorate in anthropology from North-western University in 2001 and subsequently pursued postdoctoral studies at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. She has focused her ethnographic research in the anthropology of work, studying health care in workplaces, as well as temporary office workers. She currently resides in Washington, D.C.

Stuart Guterman is senior program director for the Commonwealth Fund’s Program on Medicare’s Future, based at AcademyHealth in Washington, D.C., where he is responsible for the fund’s research agenda on Medicare issues. He was director of the Office of Research, Development, and Information at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services from 2002 to 2005. Prior to that, Guterman was a senior analyst with the Congressional Budget Office and a principal research associate with the Urban Institute. From 1988 to 1999, he was deputy director of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (and its predecessor, the Prospective Payment Assessment Commission), and from 1984 to 1988 he was chief of institutional studies in the Health Care Financing Administration’s Office of Research.

Stephen J. Kunitz is a professor in the Division of Social and Behavioral Medicine in the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. His areas of interest include the social determinants of health and disease, and population and medical history. His most recent book is The Health of Populations: General Theories and Particular Realities (Oxford University Press, 2006). Kunitz has an MD and a PhD.

Elisabeth Martin is a PhD candidate in community health in the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine at Laval University, where she also completed a master’s degree in political science. She is a research coordinator at the Centre for the Analysis of Public Policies, which is interested in health services organization, health policy analysis, governance issues, and health care reforms in Canada. She is supported by a doctoral research award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and by the joint research initiative from the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture.

David Mechanic is the René Dubos Professor of Behavioral Sciences and director of the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research at Rutgers University. His most recent book is The Truth about Health Care: Why Reform Is Not Working in America(Rutgers, 2006). The fifth edition of his Mental Health and Social Policy, first published in 1969, will appear later this year. Mechanic is also national director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research program. Mechanic holds a PhD.

Dana B. Mukamel is a professor in the Department of Medicine and a senior fellow at the Center for Health Policy Research at the University of California, Irvine. Trained in health economics, Mukamel studies market and organizational characteristics that contribute to provision of high-quality care. In addition to her work on the Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly, her research focuses on nursing homes and cardiac care. Mukamel has studied the impact of quality report cards on selection of providers by patients and by insurers and the response of providers to publication of these reports. She is also evaluating how report cards affect quality and has studied the quality of care that racial minorities receive. Mukamel holds a PhD.

Howard A. Palley is a professor of social policy at the School of Social Work and a distinguished fellow at the Institute for Human Services Policy of the University of Maryland, Baltimore. He has authored or coauthored a number of studies on health service delivery policies and long-term care policies in the United States, Canada, Sweden, the Republic of Korea, Ukraine, and Israel. His publications have appeared in the International Journal of Health Services, the Journal of Health and Social Policy, Inquiry, Health and Social Work,Publius, Social Service Review, Social Policy and Administration, and the Journal of Aging and Social Policy. He currently serves on the Science Advisory Board of Health Canada. He has received Fulbright Awards to the Republic of Korea, Taiwan, and Ukraine. Palley holds a PhD.

Derick R. Peterson is associate professor of biostatistics and computational biology and director of the Biostatistics Shared Resource for the James P. Wilmot Cancer Center at the University of Rochester Medical Center. He received his PhD in biostatistics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1998. His methodological research topics include the construction of prognostic gene expression profiles from high-dimensional microarray data, model selection, nonparametric estimation and inference, data-driven smoothing methods, and the analysis of censored survival data. His experience in applied medical and epidemiological research includes collaborative work on long QT syndrome (heart research), the Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (community and preventive medicine), respiratory syncytial virus (infectious diseases), HIV and cognitive functioning (neurology), bioterrorism detection (Monroe County Health Department), and cancer research.

Marie-Pascale Pomey is a physician and public health specialist trained in France. She completed her PhD in public health with a focus on health care organization at the University of Montreal in conjunction with a French university (Paris V). She is assistant professor in the Health Administration Department at the University of Montreal and researcher at the Groupe de recherche interdisciplinaire en santé. She is a CIHR research scholarship recipient. Pomey’s research interests include the comparison of health care systems, particularly European, Canadian, and U.S. systems; and quality management and public policy in health care.

Helena Temkin-Greener is associate professor in the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. Her research focuses on issues related to quality of care, long-term care, and end of life. Recent work includes studies of the Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly and nursing homes, measures of team performance, and the association between organizational characteristics and quality of care.

Joseph White is Luxenberg Family Professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at Case Western Reserve University. He received his AB from the University of Chicago before earning his MA and PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining Case Western, he was a research associate and then senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and associate professor of health systems management at Tulane University. His publications include Competing Solutions: American Health Care Proposals and International Experience (Brookings, 1995), False Alarm: Why the Greatest Threat to Social Security and Medicare Is the Campaign to “Save” Them (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), and “Protecting Medicare: The Best Defense Is a Good Offense” (Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, 2007).

T. Franklin Williams, currently Professor of Medicine Emeritus at the University of Rochester and a Veterans Administration Distinguished Physician, teaches geriatric medicine and aging research. From 1983 to 1991 he was the second director of the National Institute of Aging at the National Institutes of Health; from 1968 to 1981 he served as professor and first medical director of the University of Rochester’s program in aging and chronic diseases at the Monroe Community Hospital. His earlier positions include professor of medicine and endocrinology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.