Notes on Contributors

Kim M. Blankenship is an associate research scientist in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. She is also the associate director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS. Her research and publications have focused on race, class, and gender analyses of law, public policy, and health. Her HIV-related research has focused on the social context of risk-taking among women and drug users and its implications for HIV prevention policy, as well as on developing a systematic approach to identifying and assessing structural interventions in public health generally and HIV in particular. She has conducted fieldwork and life history interviews with female sex workers in New Haven to better understand the factors (especially the social structural and contextual factors) that shape their drug-use and sexual behaviors. In analyzing this work, she has focused on how policing practices affect the risk of sex workers, and she is currently preparing a manuscript based on these materials. She has also been conducting research on structural interventions for reducing HIV incidence in drug users and communities of color. In particular, her research focuses on the relationships among drug and social welfare policy, incarceration and policing, and race disparities in HIV.

Scott Burris is the James E. Beasley Professor at Temple University School of Law and an associate director of the Center for Law and the Public’s Health at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities. His work addresses the influence of law on health and health behavior. He has focused recently on how criminal justice systems structure the “risk environment” for drug users, and how innovations in the governance of security may enhance community health.

Patricia Case is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is a behavioral scientist with ongoing research in the areas of drug use and infectious disease, HIV policy concerns with respect to injection drug users, sexual minorities and patterns of drug use, the impact of disaster on subsequent HIV risk behaviors, hidden population sampling methods, and behavioral surveillance techniques. Her most recent work examines the relationship of “club drugs” to HIV risk behaviors among men who have sex with men.

George Davey Smith is a professor of clinical epidemiology in the Department of Social Medicine at the University of Bristol in Bristol, England. His fields of interest include lifecourse epidemiology, inequalities in health, and genetic epidemiology.

Martin Donoghoe is the Public Health Officer for the Sexually Transmitted Infections and HIV/AIDS Programme of the World Health Organization’s Regional Office for Europe. He has international experience in developing, monitoring, and evaluating HIV/AIDS prevention programs and policies, particularly in the areas of harm reduction and targeted interventions for injection drug users. He has particular interest and expertise in epidemiology and rapid assessment and response methods and contributed to the development of the WHO/UNAIDS Rapid Assessment and Response Guides. He currently provides technical assistance and support to promote evidenced-based interventions for HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment, and care, particularly for injection drug users and others especially vulnerable to HIV/AIDS, in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Rebecca Dresser is a professor in the law and medical schools at Washington University in St. Louis. She writes and teaches about ethical and policy issues in end-of-life care, biomedical research, genetics, assisted reproduction, and related topics. Since 2002, she has been a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics.

Hilary Graham is a professor of social policy at the Institute for Health Research at Lancaster University in Lancaster, England. Her research focuses on how inequalities in life chances and living standards influence health over the course of people’s lives—and how policies can moderate (or amplify) these inequalities. Her research on socioeconomic inequalities in health has been enriched by serving as director of the United Kingdom’s ESRC Health Variations Programme (1996–2001) and as the co-leader of the lifecourse stream of the European Science Foundation Program on Social Variations in Health Expectancy (1999–2003). She was also a member of the Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health (Acheson Report), established by the United Kingdom in 1997 to inform its new public health policy. In 2002–2003, she was seconded to the Health Development Agency, the agency established by the United Kingdom to develop the evidence base of policies to tackle socioeconomic health inequalities.

Sam Harper is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. His research is in the area of health inequalities and their determinants across time and space.

Marianne Hillemeier is an assistant professor of health policy administration at Pennsylvania State University. She is interested in socio- economics and race and ethnic disparities in the health of infants, children, and adolescents. Recent projects have included conceptualization and measurement of contextual characteristics for community health, examination of relative versus absolute standards for child poverty, and potential interventions to reduce disparities in adverse pregnancy outcomes among urban and rural women in central Pennsylvania.

George A. Kaplan is the Thomas Francis Collegiate Professor of Public Health and the director of the Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. His work is focused on “upstream and downstream” approaches to the determinants of population health and health inequalities; the role of behavioral, social, psychosocial, geographic, and socioeconomic factors in chronic diseases and aging; and, increasingly, on the role of social and economic policy in influencing health and health inequalities.

Stephen Koester is an associate professor in the Program in Health and Behavioral Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado at Denver. Since 1989, he has been working with injection drug users and conducting research on the contextual factors that influence HIV risk behaviors. In 1994, he published an article showing how the Colorado paraphernalia statute and policing strategies combined to increase HIV risk practices among injection drug users in Denver. In 2001–2002, Koester was a visiting Senior Behavioral Scientist in the Division of Viral Hepatitis at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and in 2003 he began working on HIV and drug use in Bangladesh. In 1995 he was a Fulbright Research Scholar in St. Lucia. He received the University of Colorado at Denver’s Researcher of the Year award for 2003.

Zita Lazzarini is an assistant professor in the Department of Community Medicine and Health Care at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. She teaches health law and bioethics at the University of Connecticut Health Center and the Harvard School of Public Health, and she directs the Division of Medical Humanities at the University of Connecticut Health Center. She is currently developing projects and methods to evaluate the impact of laws and policies on health and behavior using a social epidemiology framework. This work includes rapid assessment of law and law enforcement practices related to HIV prevention, evaluation of criminal law and HIV risk behavior, and other aspects of HIV law and policy.

John Lynch is an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. His research interests include social determinants of health, health inequalities, and lifecourse processes at the individual and population levels.

Nancy Ross is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at McGill University and an associate of the Health Analysis and Measurement Group at Statistics Canada. She is also a New Investigator with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. She conducts research on the social determinants of health and the production of health inequalities in Canada and the United States.

Susan Sherman is an assistant research professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. A behavioral scientist and social epidemiologist, she is interested in the socioeconomic context that surrounds drug use and is related to infectious disease acquisition. She has worked on several HIV prevention social network–oriented peer outreach interventions in the United States and Thailand. She currently is working on designing and evaluating an overdose prevention program in Baltimore and an economic empowerment intervention program aimed at reducing HIV risk-taking behaviors among drug-using women in Baltimore.

Brenda C. Spillman is a health economist and senior research associate at the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. Her research is primarily in the areas of trends in old-age disability and use and cost of long-term care. Current projects examine the use of assistive devices, choice of residential care settings, formal and informal caregiving, and risk and amount of disability and long-term care in the older population.

Jon S. Vernick is an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and an associate director of the Center for Law and the Public’s Health at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities. His work has focused on using the law as a tool for public health. In particular, he has examined legal aspects of violence prevention efforts and ethical and legal issues associated with HIV/AIDS prevention among injection drug users. He also conducts empirical evaluations of public health laws.

Michael Wolfson is Assistant Chief Statistician for Analysis and Development at Statistics Canada, where he oversees analytical activities for general health statistics and specific modeling programs. Prior to joining Statistics Canada, he held a variety of positions in central agencies including the Treasury Board Secretariat, Department of Finance, Privy Council Office, House of Commons, and Deputy Prime Minister’s Office with responsibilities in the areas of program review and evaluation, tax policy, and pension policy. He has been a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research since 1988. His recent research interests include income distribution, tax/transfer and pension policy analysis, microsimulation approaches to socioeconomic accounting and evolutionary economic theory, design of health information systems, and analysis of the determinants of health.