Notes on Contributors

Michelyn W. Bhandari is an associate professor in the Department of Health Promotion and Administration at the Eastern Kentucky University College of Health Sciences, where she is coordinator of the community health option of the Master of Public Health Program. Bhandari’s research and practice interests include community health planning and evaluation, public health systems and services research, and maternal and child health outcomes. She holds a DrPH and an MPH.

Nancy Breen has served as a health economist in the Applied Research Program at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) since 1991. Her research investigates how race, social class, gender, community factors, and health service diffusion, especially cancer screening, shape cancer outcomes. She collaborates on a multidisciplinary research team supported by NCI to improve understanding of health disparities measures and to disseminate a range of measures using the Health Disparities Calculator (HD*Calc). She has a broad interest in how economic indicators can be used to improve cancer control monitoring and how the range of socioeconomic status and access indicators are associated with cancer outcomes. Breen holds a PhD.

Michael T. Doonan is an assistant professor and director of the Master of Public Policy in Social Policy Program at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. He is executive director of the Massachusetts Health Policy Forum and director of the Council on Health Care Economics and Policy. His PhD from Brandeis is in political science and health services research. His research and publications focus on issues related to access to health care, Medicaid, SCHIP, federal/state relations, state health policy, and the economics of health system change. Previously he worked at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and for Senator John Kerry, and he was a member of President Clinton’s Health Care Taskforce.

Sam Harper is an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health at McGill University. His current research interests are in population health and demography, global health, measuring and monitoring health inequalities, and public health ethics.

Allan V. Horwitz is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research at Rutgers University, where he also serves as dean for the behavioral and social sciences. He is the author of about ninety articles and chapters and six books on various aspects of the sociology of mental health and illness, most recently, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Ordinary Misery into Depressive Disorder (Oxford University Press 2007 with Jerome Wakefield) and Diagnosis, Evidence, and Therapy: Conundrums of American Medicine (Rutgers University Press 2009 with Gerald Grob). His current work deals with the distinction between normal fears and anxiety disorders. Horwitz holds a PhD.

Nicholas B. King is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Studies in Medicine and an associate member in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health at McGill University, as well as an adjunct professor in the Department of Bioethics at Case Western Reserve University. He holds a doctorate in the history of science from Harvard University and was previously a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at the University of Michigan. His current research interests include the role of normative judgment in research on health inequalities and the aggregation of complex health information.

John Lynch is professor of epidemiology and population health at the Sansom Institute for Health Research at the University of South Australia and professor of population health at the University of Bristol (UK). His research interests include early life determinants of health, life-course processes regulating health behaviors, population health monitoring, evidence-based public health, and improving the public health research–policy nexus. In 2009 he was awarded a presitigous Australia Fellowship by the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia. Lynch holds a PhD and an MPH.

Glen P. Mays serves as professor and chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. His research focuses on the effectiveness and cost of public health services and preventive health care, with a special interest in policies to reach underserved populations. Among his current projects, Mays directs the Public Health Practice-Based Research Networks Program funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which engages networks of local and state public health agencies in research that examines the comparative effectiveness and costs of public health strategies. He holds a PhD and an MPH.

Stephen C. Meersman is a senior scientific consultant at John Snow Research and Training Institute, Inc. (JSI), in Providence, Rhode Island. He is a sociologist specializing in quantitative research methods and data analysis with a focus on health disparities. Meersman received his doctorate from the University of Maryland, College Park, with concentrations in social psychology and demography. After receiving his doctorate, he received advanced postdoctoral research experience at Brown University’s Center for Gerontology and Health Care Research in the Department of Community Health. Before joining JSI, Meersman worked in the Surveillance Research Program of the National Cancer Institute.

Rocco J. Perla is director of Innovation and Transformation and the Quality Improvement Resource Center at HealthAlliance Hospital in Leominster, Massachusetts. He is also assistant professor of family medicine and community health at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he teaches family practice residents about quality improvement. He was a 2008–2009 George W. Merck Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Perla has an undergraduate degree in health sciences and a master’s degree in biology and did his doctoral training in education and statistics at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He completed postgraduate training in biostatistics and clinical effectiveness at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Marsha E. Reichman is a senior advisor on biospecimens and bioinformatics in the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). She holds a PhD in cell and molecular biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master’s degree in mathematical statistics from the University of Maryland, and a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and biology from Barnard College. Her activities focus on uses of electronic data, distributed databases, and biomarkers in surveillance. Her current research includes trends in head and neck cancers, disparities in cancer surveillance data, cancer biomarkers, and measures of cancer survival. She has been the NCI lead on design, development, and deployment of SEER*DMS, a unified, distributed data management system used by the majority of SEER central cancer registries, and she has also led the SEER Residual Tissue Repository Program.

F. Douglas Scutchfield is the Peter P. Bosomworth Professor of Health Services Research and Policy at the University of Kentucky (UK) in the Colleges of Public Health and Medicine. He is also the director of the Center for Public Health Services and Systems Research at the UK College of Public Health. He holds an MD from the University of Kentucky and is a fellow of both the American College of Preventive Medicine and the American Academy of Family Physicians.

Sharla A. Smith is a research assistant in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. She holds an MPH and is currently pursuing her PhD in public health systems research. Smith’s research includes public health spending in local and state health departments and tobacco-related health outcomes.

Matthew C. Stiefel is a senior director in the Department of Care and Service Quality at Kaiser Permanente (KP). He was a 2008–2009 fellow with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, focusing on population health measurement. Prior to joining KP in 1981, he served as a policy analyst on the domestic policy staff of the Carter Administration and in the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare and as a local health planner in the San Francisco Bay Area. His academic background includes the Harvard School of Public Health Program in Clinical Effectiveness, coursework in the Systems Science PhD Program at Portland State University, a master’s degree in public administration from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University.

Katharine R. Tull is associate director of the Massachusetts Health Policy Forum. She holds an MPP from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University and is an Eli J. Segal Citizen Service Fellow.

Bonnie L. Zell has recently joined the National Quality Forum as senior director for population health after over five years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as lead for health care sector partnerships. In her new role, she will be supporting the development of a core set of indicators of health that will apply to the individual as well as the regional level for use in both health care and public health to drive aligned health care and community action. She holds an MD and an MPH.