Notes on Contributors

Jean Marie Abraham is an associate professor in the Division of Health Policy and Management at the University of Minnesota. She is a health economist with expertise on health insurance provision and cost, consumer use of information, and competition in insurance and hospital markets. During the academic year 2008-2009, Abraham served as the senior economist on health issues for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in Washington, DC, under both the Bush and Obama administrations.

Tumacha Agheneza is currently a PharmD candidate at Touro University College of Pharmacy in California. He completed a master of health sciences at the Robert Koch Institute, the German national public health institute, and the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences.

Kassandra I. Alcaraz is the director of health disparities research at the American Cancer Society. She obtained an MPH in biostatistics and epidemiology from the Saint Louis University School of Public Health and a PhD from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research employs novel analytic methods and communication technologies to better understand and help eliminate cancer-related disparities. Alcaraz’s research has been funded by the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, among other sources. Her work has been recognized for research excellence and innovation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Society of Behavioral Medicine, and the American Association for Cancer Research.

Fredric Blavin is a health economist and research associate in the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center with expertise in areas related to private insurance markets, health care reform, health information technology, and Medicaid/CHIP. His recent work focuses on the demand for primary care services and practitioner shortages; the impact of Express Lane Eligibility programs on Medicaid/CHIP enrollment; and the effect of health reform on coverage, expenditures, and affordability. Prior to joining the Urban Institute, Blavin was an economist in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and specialized in research related to physician and hospital adoption of electronic health records. He holds a PhD.

Linda J. Blumberg is an economist and senior fellow in the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center, where she has worked since 1992. Blumberg is an expert on private health insurance (employer and nongroup), health care financing, and health system reform. Her recent work includes a variety of projects related to the analysis of health reform as well as the provision of technical assistance to states in their efforts to implement the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This work includes coleading a large multiyear quantitative and qualitative effort monitoring and evaluating the effects of the ACA. From August 1993 through October 1994 she served as health policy advisor to the Clinton administration during its initial health care reform effort. She holds a PhD.

Charlene A. Caburnay is a research assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis and is codirector of the Health Communication Research Laboratory. She has assisted in designing, developing, and evaluating health communication programs that address a range of health issues such as cancer, childhood immunization, and chronic disease for target populations including smokers, families at inner-city public health centers, and readers of black newspapers. Her broad research experience and interests include health media interventions, health and cancer communication, and community-level chronic disease interventions. Caburnay holds a PhD and an MPH.

Christopher Casey is the director of communication at the Health Communication Research Laboratory, where he has over ten years of experience planning, developing, producing, and disseminating research and practice-based health communication materials. With training in fine arts, design, and health behavior and education, Casey is interested in combining principles of art and science to develop illuminating public health communication media for print and interactive applications.

Kerstin Denecke has a doctorate in computer science from the Technical University of Braunschweig and is scientific director of the Digital Patient Model research group at the Innovation Center for Computer Assisted Surgery, part of the Medical Faculty of Leipzig University. Her main research interests are natural language processing, and text and data mining. The specific areas she has been working on include medical language processing, information extraction, sentiment analysis, and text classification. She has published a number of research papers in several international conferences and journals.

Michael Drummond is professor of health economics and former director of the Center for Health Economics at the University of York. His particular field of interest is in the economic evaluation of health care treatments and programs. He has undertaken evaluations in a wide range of medical fields including care of the elderly, neonatal intensive care, immunization programs, services for people with AIDS, eye health care, and pharmaceuticals. He is the author of two major textbooks and more than 600 scientific papers, and has acted as a consultant to the World Health Organization and the European Union. In October 2010 he was made a member of the Institute of Medicine. He holds a BSc, an MCom, and a DPhil.

Tim Eckmanns is trained as a medical doctor and is board-certified in hygiene and environmental health. He also has a master of science from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and has a master of medical computer science from the Berlin University of Applied Science. He is the director of the Division for Healthcare- associated Infections, Antimicrobial Resistance and Consumption at the Robert Koch Institute, the German national public health institute. He has widespread expertise in infectious disease epidemiology, particularly regarding surveillance and hospital-based infections, as well as in evidence-based public health.

Katherine S. Eddens is an assistant professor in the Department of Health Behavior at the University of Kentucky College of Public Health, with a joint appointment in the Department of Communications. Her research agenda focuses on understanding how communication networks affect health outcomes among the poor, and in utilizing social network analysis, word-of-mouth communication, and marketing strategies to reach the underserved with relevant, trustworthy, and actionable information. Eddens served as coeditor for a special issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine focused on research parternships with 2-1-1 to eliminate health disparities. She received her PhD from Washington University in St. Louis and an MPH from Saint Louis University School of Public Health.

Daniel M. Fox, an author and policy adviser, is president emeritus of the Milbank Memorial Fund. His most recent book is The Convergence of Science and Governance: Research, Health Policy and American States (University of California Press, 2010).

David M. Hartley is an associate professor at the Georgetown University School of Medicine. He is trained in physics (BS, MS, PhD) and epidemiology (MPH) and has active research interests in public health surveillance, vector-borne disease, and hospital-acquired infections. His most recent work has included mathematical modeling studies of West Nile virus and Rift Valley fever virus, as well as investigations using data from the Internet to detect and monitor infectious disease outbreaks in human and agricultural populations globally.

Gö̈ran Kirchner is the deputy director of the Division for Data Management at the Robert Koch Institute, the German national public health institute. He has a doctorate in mathematics from Humboldt University of Berlin and a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Paris VII.

Matthew W. Kreuter is professor and associate dean for public health at the Brown School of Washington University in St. Louis. He is founder of the Health Communication Research Laboratory, and served as its director from 1996 to 2013. His research explores communication-based strategies for eliminating health disparities, specifically by increasing the reach and effectiveness of health information to vulnerable populations, and using information and technologies to connect people to needed health services. He earned his PhD and MPH in health behavior and health education from the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Timothy D. McBride is currently a professor in the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. McBride, who received his PhD in economics from the University of Wisconsin, focuses his research in the areas of health economics, health policy, and aging, specifically on Medicare policy, health reform, the uninsured and insurance markets, rural health, Medicaid, and long-term care. McBride served as the first associate dean for public health at Washington University from 2009 to 2012. McBride serves on several national, state, and local committees in areas of health policy and economics: the Methods Council at Academy Health, the Rural Health Panel at the Rural Policy Research Institute, and as chair of the MOHealthNet Oversight Committee for Missouri (providing oversight and advice on Medicaid).

Hannah Perkins is a behavioral research scientist in the Division of Public Health Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, where she conducts research activities related to bioethics and informed decision making. Previously, she was involved in FDA-sponsored research related to graphic warning labels, tobacco cessation, and behavioral change. She holds a master of science in public policy and administration.

Timothy Poor is publications editor at the Health Communication Research Laboratory at the Brown School of Washington University in St. Louis. He has written and edited material for a variety of health communication research projects, including as editor-in-chief of the Ozioma News Service, a cancer news service for African American newspapers. Trained as a journalist, he was a national reporter and editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch before joining Washington University. He received his BA from Bowdoin College.

Suchitra Rath has been with the Health Communication Research Laboratory as the data manager/analyst since 2005 and is currently in charge of the data management of the CECCR II and FDA studies. She has more than twelve years of experience in managing national cross-site research databases for longitudinal studies. Rath holds an MA.

Jeremy Roth was a research assistant in the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center from 2010 to 2013. He worked with the Urban Institute’s Health Insurance Policy Simulation Model to provide health reform implementation technical assistance for several states. He is pursuing a PhD in biostatistics at the University of Washington.

Vetta L. Sanders Thompson is an associate professor at the Brown School and is a faculty affiliate of the Interdisciplinary Program in Urban Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her MA and PhD in psychology from Duke University. Thompson is a licensed psychologist and health service provider in Missouri. Her research examines racial identity, psychosocial implications of race and ethnicity in health communications, mental health service use and access to health services, and the determinants of health and mental health disparities.

Corinna Sorenson is a research fellow in health policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Prior to joining LSE, she was a senior policy and planning analyst for the US Food and Drug Administration and was a senior associate at The Lewin Group, a health policy and research consulting firm. Sorenson has also held research positions at the University of Michigan Health System and Stanford University. Sorenson’s research focuses on health technology policy, governance and regulation, comparative health policy, health politics, and public health policy and law. She holds a master’s degree in public health and a master’s degree in health services administration from the University of Michigan.

Edward Velasco is a senior scientist at the Robert Koch Institute, the German national public health institute. He provides scientific advising and technical support for healthcare-associated infections, including outbreak management and research on clinical and social risk factors for antimicrobial resistance. He has widespread experience in infectious disease epidemiology and has consulted the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control on quality evaluation for surveillance systems in EU member states. He has held positions in evaluation at the Open Society Foundations and the Social Science Research Center Berlin. He has a doctorate in medical sciences from Charité University Hospital, the joint medical school of the Humboldt and Free Universities of Berlin, and a master of science in social epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Timothy A. Waidmann is an economist and senior fellow in the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center, where he has worked since 1996. His research focuses on disability and health among the elderly, Medicare and Medicaid policy, disability and employment, public health and prevention, and health status and access to health care in vulnerable populations. His recent work includes studies of the health and health care use of Medicare and Medicaid enrollees and state reform efforts to improve health care quality and control costs. Waidmann holds a PhD.

Diana M. Zuckerman is president of the National Research Center for Women & Families and founder of its Cancer Prevention and Treatment Fund. She obtained her PhD at Ohio State University and did her post- doctoral training in epidemiology at Yale University. She was on the faculty at Vassar College and Yale University and conducted research at Harvard University before working on health policy issues in the US Congress and the Clinton administration. She frequently testifies before Congress, the FDA, and state legislators. She is the first non-physician inducted into the Women in Medicine International Hall of Fame, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Reagan-Udall Foundation and the Alliance for a Stronger FDA. She is the author of five books, several book chapters, and dozens of articles in academic journals.

Read on Wiley Online Library

Volume 92, Issue 1 (pages 160–166)
DOI: 10.1111/1468-0009.12045
Published in 2014