Notes on Contributors

Mary T. Bassett joined the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in 2002 as the founding deputy commissioner for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, a new division established to address noncommunicable disease and maternal and child health under then health commissioner Thomas Frieden. The division pioneered novel and at times controversial strategies, including the A1C reporting mandate. Bassett is presently the associate director of the African Health Initiative for the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Diana K. Berger is the diabetes medical specialist of the Diabetes Prevention and Control Program at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. She is on the faculty at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in the Division of General and Preventive Medicine and chair of the Residency Advisory Board for Mount Sinai’s General Preventive Medicine Residency. Berger completed a Preventive Medicine Residency with a Master of Science in community medicine at Mount Sinai and a research fellowship at the Joslin Diabetes Center. She attended Dartmouth Medical School and Dartmouth College. Berger’s interests in diabetes include the emerging epidemic of type 2 diabetes in children, coaching school nurses about diabetes in youth, diabetes camping, diabetes registries, physical activity and healthy eating for diabetes prevention, and insulin pump therapy.

Kalipso Chalkidou is director of the international program at the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in the United Kingdom. She was a Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and the Center for Medical Technology Policy between 2007 and 2008. She holds an MD (Hons) and a PhD. Prior to joining NICE, she worked as a surgical trainee in National Health Service hospitals in England.

Shadi Chamany is the director of the Diabetes Prevention and Control Program at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH). After completing her internal medicine residency at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, Chamany completed training in the Epidemic Intelligence Service and Preventive Medicine Residency programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Chamany joined the DOHMH in 2005 as a chronic disease epidemiologist and subsequently assumed her current role leading the programmatic and epidemiology activities of the Diabetes Prevention and Control Program, including the New York City A1C Registry. She has an MD and an MPH.

Alessandra Colaianni graduated magna cum laude from Duke University in 2007 with degrees in biology and philosophy. In her senior thesis, she analyzed Stanford and Columbia Universities’ licensing strategies for the Cohen-Boyer and Axel patents, respectively. She currently works as an analyst for the Advisory Board Company, a health care best-practices research and consulting firm located in Washington, DC.

Robert Cook-Deegan is director of the Center for Genome Ethics, Law and Policy at the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy of Duke University. He is also a research professor of public policy studies, biology, and medicine.

Irfan A. Dhalla is a practicing general internist, a scientist at the Keenan Research Centre of the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute at St. Michael’s Hospital, and a lecturer in the Departments of Medicine and Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on pharmaceutical policy and the organization and delivery of post-hospital care.

David Dranove is the Walter McNerney Distinguished Professor of Health Industry Management at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, where he is also professor of management and strategy and director of the Health Enterprise Management Program and the Center for Health Industry Market Economics. He has a PhD in economics from Stanford University. Dranove’s research focuses on problems in industrial organization and business strategy with an emphasis on the health care industry.

Cynthia R. Driver holds a doctoral degree in public health epidemiology from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. She worked in the field of tuberculosis from 1992 to 2006 at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH). She has authored peer-reviewed publications on tuberculosis recurrence and relapse, tuberculosis in children, the prevalence of drug resistance, and tuberculosis transmission associated with air travel. Since 2006, Driver has worked in chronic disease prevention and management as director of epidemiology and surveillance in the Diabetes Prevention and Control Program at the DOHMH and most recently as a consultant on the development of a diabetes registry in Ontario, Canada.

Brian Elbel is an assistant professor of medicine and health policy with a joint appointment at the New York University (NYU) School of Medicine and the NYU Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. His training is in health policy and health economics. The focus of his work is on how people make decisions about their health and health care. He utilizes the tools and concepts of behavioral economics, with a strong focus on public policy and vulnerable populations. He has worked to understand how individuals make choices that influence the market for health plans, hospitals, and physicians. In addition, he studies public policies that have a more direct influence on health, including food choice. He holds a PhD and an MPH.

Amy L. Fairchild is associate professor and chair of the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, where she is also assistant director for scholarly and academic affairs at the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health. Her work’s central intellectual theme has been to explore the functions and limits of the state, particularly when it seeks to address health issues that touch on groups marginalized by virtue of disease, class, and race. Her publications include Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force (Johns Hopkins University Press 2003) and Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America (University of California Press and Milbank Memorial Fund 2007). Fairchild holds a PhD and an MPH.

Jonathan E. Fielding is director of the Department of Public Health and health officer for Los Angeles County and professor of health services and pediatrics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is chair of the Task Force on Community Preventive Services and of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary’s Advisory Committee on National Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Objectives for 2020. He was formerly the Massachusetts public health commissioner and a founding member of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. He has written extensively on evidence-based prevention methods and interventions, cost-effectiveness, and public health innovative practices and quality improvement. Fielding is also editor of the Annual Review of Public Health. He holds an MD, an MPH, and an MBA.

Thomas R. Frieden is currently director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). When this article in the Quarterly was completed, he was commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), a position he held for more than seven years. Frieden received his MD and MPH degrees from Columbia University and did his residency in internal medicine at Columbia and an infectious diseases fellowship at Yale University. He worked for the CDC for twelve years, initially as an epidemiologic intelligence service officer and then as an assistant commissioner, running the DOHMH’s tuberculosis control program. Following that he worked in India for five years helping the government develop a tuberculosis control program.

Lawrence O. Gostin is associate dean and the Linda D. and Timothy J. O’Neill Professor of Global Health Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he directs the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. He is also professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University, director of the Centers for Law and the Public’s Health at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities, and visiting professor of public health and research fellow at Oxford University. Gostin’s latest books include Public Health Law: Power, Duty, Restrain—Revised and Expanded Second Edition (University of California Press and the Milbank Memorial Fund 2008) and Public Health Ethics: Theory, Policy and Practice (Oxford University Press 2007).

Namrata Kumar joined the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in 2006 as a project manager in the Division of Informatics and Information Technology. Having received her master’s degree in computers and management from the University of Indore and working in both the public and private sector, Kumar is well versed in the development needs of clients ranging from business and administration to public health. Kumar has been the project lead for the development and maintenance of the A1C registry since 2007.

Leslie Levin is head of the Medical Advisory Secretariat, an evidence-based analysis unit with linkages to academia that produces policy-relevant evidence-based analysis, and senior medical advisor at Ontario’s Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. He is also adjunct professor of medicine at the University of Toronto and a senior consultant in medical oncology at Princess Margaret Hospital. Levin has experience in evidence-based treatment guideline development, evidence-based analysis, and clinical and laboratory-based cancer research. He has an MD from the University of Birmingham for research in cancer immunology and holds specialty degrees in internal medicine. He has major publications on cancer research and evidence-based analysis.

Michelle M. Mello is professor of law and public health in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). Drawing on dual training in law and health services research, Mello conducts empirical research on issues at the intersection of law, ethics, and health policy. She has authored more than eighty articles on the medical malpractice system, patient safety, research ethics, mass tort litigation, the obesity epidemic, pharmaceuticals, clinical ethics, and other topics. Mello is director of the Program in Law and Public Health at HSPH and co-chair of the HSPH Human Subjects Committee. She teaches courses in public health law and public health ethics. Mello holds a JD, a PhD, and an MPhil.

Charlotte E. Neuhaus is a senior management consultant at the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation. Neuhaus earned her MHS in behavioral sciences and health education from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, after which she managed community-based cancer screening and education programs and interventions for the underserved and uninsured at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins. Prior to her current position, she was responsible for overseeing clinical outreach activities, materials development, and the design and implementation of resource distribution projects related to the A1C Registry at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Mark Schlesinger is professor of health policy and a fellow of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University; he is former editor of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law. Schlesinger’s research explores the determinants of public opinion about health and social policy, the influence of bounded rationality on medical consumers, and the consequences of for-profit organizations in American medicine. His recent research initiatives include explaining the rapid expansion in the scope of newborn screening among the American states, the extent and public perceptions of economic insecurity, and the sources of perceived legitimacy for collective responses to the spread of obesity. His favored sports include uncompetitive volleyball and unlit table tennis.

Andrew Sfekas is a research professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He received his PhD in economics from Cornell University in 2005.

Lynn D. Silver has been the assistant commissioner for the Chronic Disease Bureau at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene since 2004. She has coordinated the department’s efforts to address obesity and chronic disease, leading policy initiatives such as the city’s successful trans fat ban, calorie labeling in chain restaurants, daycare physical activity and nutrition requirements, and city food procurement guidelines, as well as the first mandatory population-based reporting for diabetes (the A1C registry), and programs to increase access to healthy food. She also chairs the board of NYCRx, a nonprofit to increase access to low-cost pharmaceuticals. She was previously Visiting Scholar in International Health at the Karolinska Institute and was a professor of public health and consumer advocate on health issues in Latin America for many years. Silver holds MD and MPH degrees and completed her pediatric residency at Johns Hopkins.

Sean Tunis is the founder and director of the Center for Medical Technology Policy in Baltimore, Maryland, where he works with health care decision makers, experts, and stakeholders to improve the value of clinical research on new and existing medical technologies. He consults with a range of domestic and international health care organizations on issues of comparative effectiveness, evidence-based medicine, clinical research, and technology policy. He holds an MD and an MSc.

Danielle M. Whicher is a project manager at the Center for Medical Technology Policy in Baltimore, Maryland, where she has been involved in a wide range of projects concerning comparative effectiveness research, health technology assessments, and alternative funding models, such as coverage with evidence development. Her current research focuses on developing evidence standards for classes of health care technologies and understanding how to apply novel study methodologies to answer comparative effectiveness research questions.