Student Profiles

Decision Sciences

G. Scott Gazelle, 1999 graduate, received his BA magna cum laude and with distinction in Philosophy from Dartmouth College, and his MD from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He completed a Radiology residency at University Hospitals of Cleveland, where he also served as Chief Resident. Following residency, he completed a fellowship in Abdominal Imaging and Interventional Radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and then he joined the faculty at MGH in the Division of Abdominal Imaging and Interventional Radiology. While continuing to serve in this capacity, as the winner of the 1995 American Roentgen Ray Society Scholarship, he completed an MPH at the Harvard School of Public Health, concentrating in Health Care Management. In 1999, he received his PhD in Health Policy.

Currently, Scott is Professor in Radiology at Harvard Medical School and Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. He serves as Director of Partners Radiology, as well as Director of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center Program in Cancer Outcomes Research Training. Scott is also Senior Scientist at the Partners Institute for Health Policy and Director of Clinical Research in the Department of Radiology at MGH. In 1997 he established and now directs The Institute for Technology Assessment at MGH.

Bruce Schackman, 2001 graduate, received an AB magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1980 and an MBA with honors from Harvard Business School in 1984. From 1984 to 1992 he worked as a management consultant with McKinsey & Company, Inc., where he became a leader of the firm's pharmaceuticals and medical products practice. On a leave of absence from McKinsey, he spent six months working as a management expert in the Office of the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. He subsequently worked as a securities analyst covering the biotechnology industry and at a venture capital company as a managing director responsible for health care investments. His dissertation research was on the cost-effectiveness of improving access to early treatment among HIV-infected individuals. Bruce is currently Associate Professor of Public Health at the Weill Cornell Medical College (New York) and Chief of the Division of Health Policy.

Jane Kim, 2005 graduate, graduated from Dartmouth College in 1995 with a BA in Psychology. For the following two years, she worked as a Research Coordinator for Massachusetts General Hospital, studying behavioral inhibition in children of anxious and depressed parents. In 1997, she joined the Research and Development group of Transkaryotic Therapies, Inc., a fledgling biotechnology company, where she focused on identifying treatment options for rare metabolic disorders. She also worked as a Research Analyst for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, surveying and analyzing trends in maternal mortality and morbidity in Massachusetts. In 2001, she received an SM in Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health and entered the PhD program. She pursued her dissertation research at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, performing cost-effectiveness analyses on cervical cancer screening strategies in the US, the results of which were published in JAMA and the Journal of Public Health Medicine. In 2002, she won the Lee B. Lusted student prize for her presentation at the Society for Medical Decision Making Annual Meeting. She defended her dissertation in June 2005 and is currently Assistant Professor of Health Decision Science in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Stephen Resch, 2007 graduate, graduated cum laude with a BS in Molecular Cell Biology from the University of Connecticut. In 2000, he received a Master in Public Health with a concentration in health policy from Yale School of Public Health. While at Yale, he conducted an evaluation of prenatal care delivery at public clinics for the US Virgin Island’s Department of Health. His master's thesis research was on the cost-effectiveness of HIV testing policies for incarcerated women. He also worked for Jasperon.com, a for-profit internet venture that partnered with several not-for-profit organizations such as RAND Health's Center to Improve the Care of the Dying, to provide quality content and services to families of people needing or receiving end-of-life care.

As a PhD student in Health Policy, Stephen was a teaching fellow for seven courses at the University. He won the Seth Bonder Scholarship for Applied Operations Research in Health Services from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). His dissertation, “Economic Evaluation of Tuberculosis Control Policy,” applied mathematical modeling techniques to evaluate alternative treatment strategies in settings with significant levels of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis. Stephen is currently a scientist at Abt Associates.

Jeremy Goldhaber-Fiebert, 5th year, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1997, with an AB in History and Literature of America. After graduation, he worked as a software engineer for Sapient Corporation and then at Corex Technologies as a senior software engineer, using Bayesian networks to classify and categorize information. He left Corex to conduct a randomized control trial of a public health intervention for type 2 diabetic patients in Grecia, Costa Rica. This work was published in the January 2003 issue of Diabetes Care. In 2002-03, he worked at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, focusing on prevention strategies for cervical cancer in the developing world. He also returned to Grecia, Costa Rica to conduct one year follow-up research on a cohort of study participants from his initial study of diabetic patients. In 2004, he completed his first year of course work in the Health Policy PhD program with the support of the National Library of Medicine's doctoral traineeship and received the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship. For the summer of 2004, he conducted research in South Africa and Tanzania, focusing on the costs and effects of reducing loss to follow-up in cervical cancer screening, the potential benefits of packaging other STD services among women attending cervical cancer screening, and modeling a hypothetical, type-specific human papillomavirus vaccine. In the summer of 2005, he returned to South Africa to collect a second year of data on the costs and effects of reducing loss to follow-up, and to begin to study (a) risk factors for loss to follow-up and (b) predictors of response to efforts to reduce loss to follow-up. He used an individual-based Monte Carlo simulation model of type-specific human papillomavirus infections to examine US cervical cancer screening and vaccination policy. For this work, he received the Lee B. Lusted Award for Outstanding Student Research from the Society of Medical Decision Making in 2006. He received an Epidemiology of Infectious Disease and Biodefense traineeship from the National Institutes for Health (2007-2008) and was named a Radcliffe Graduate Fellow for 2007-2008. He is currently using dynamic transmission models to examine the relationship of health system and socio-demographic modifiers of vaccine program effectiveness for childhood infectious diseases.

Joseph Ladapo, 4th year, graduated magna cum laude from Wake Forest University in 2000 with a BA in Chemistry. While at Wake Forest, he mentored and tutored financially disadvantaged high school students in science and mathematics, and he was a Decathlete and Captain of the Men’s Track and Field Team. In the fall following graduation, he entered medical school at Harvard and has served as a mentor and tutor for the Mission Hill After-School Program, and volunteered at the Dimock Early Head Start Center in Roxbury, where he helped quantify the incidence of obesity amongst toddlers in one of Boston’s most impoverished neighborhoods. He has spent his summers conducting laboratory research with the North Carolina State Chemical Engineering Department in a project directed at identifying environmentally friendly solvents for industrial deposits, and at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, where his research addressed DNA repair efficiency and led to a publication. During his second year of medical school, his passion for the environment fueled a project that resulted in the renovation of the recycling program in a residential medical school building. In this vein, he worked with administrators at both the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Faulkner Hospital to improve their recycling infrastructure. He also conducted research with the Center for Biopreparedness at Children's Hospital Boston, where he used Bayesian methods to classify emergency room chief complaints into syndrome classes for AEGIS (Automated Epidemiologic Geotemporal Integrated Surveillance), a system designed to detect emerging infections, epidemics, and bioterrorism. After his third year of medical school, Joseph entered the joint degree MD-Master of Public Policy Program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government where he spent one year in the MPP program before entering the PhD Program in Health Policy.

Now in the dissertation phase of his PhD, Joseph is focusing on medical technology evaluation, hospital decision-making regarding the acquisition of medical technologies, and institutional willingness to trade health gains for profit. He will also be developing a cost-effectiveness model to evaluate walking and jogging modalities of exercise as general health promoting activities. In the aggregate, this work reflects his commitment to preventive health decision-making, especially in segments of the population whose health needs have been underserved. He is a former recipient of traineeships from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the National Library of Medicine, and has also been awarded the Helmut Schumann Fellowship from the Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention at HMS, along with second cycle funding for medical school through the MD/PhD Social Sciences Track and the Medical Sciences Training Program (MSTP). Joseph is also a regular columnist for the Harvard Focus and Harvard WebWeekly publications, where he discusses current health policy issues.

Economics

Haiden Huskamp, 1997 graduate, received a BA in Public Policy with a concentration in health policy from Duke University in 1989. Before enrolling in the PhD program, Haiden served as an Associate for the Alpha Center in Washington, DC from 1990-1992. From 1989-1990, she was a Program Analyst for the Advisory Council on Social Security, Department of Health and Human Services, and in 1989, she served as a Research Assistant for the Health Program of the National Governor's Association. As a student in the PhD Program in Health Policy, Haiden was a National Institute of Mental Health trainee, and she worked on various research projects related to the financing and organization of MHSA services, pharmaceutical pricing, and health spending trends. Her dissertation was entitled “The Economics of Managed Behavioral Health Care Benefit Carve-Outs.” Haiden received her PhD in 1997 and is currently Associate Professor of Health Economics in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School.

Melinda Beeuwkes Buntin, 2000 graduate, graduated magna cum laude from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1993. She then worked for two years at The Lewin Group, a health care policy consulting firm, in their managed care practice. Melinda was a recipient of a two-year traineeship from the Agency for Healthcare Policy and Research, and the winner of a Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences summer dissertation fellowship. Melinda was a research assistant for Joseph Newhouse on a project related to risk adjustment and care for those at the end-of-life, and published a paper with Dr. Newhouse about risk adjustment in the Medicare program. She was also a participant in the Harvard/Sloan Center for the study of the Managed Care Industry from which she received funding. Melinda's dissertation was titled “Risk Selection in the Medicare Program” and consisted of papers on risk adjustment, financing of care for those at the end-of-life, and competition between HMOs serving Medicare beneficiaries. She received her PhD in June 2000, and is currently Health Economist and Co-Director of the Center for Health Care Organizations, Economics, and Financing at RAND Corporation.

Grant Miller, 2005 graduate, graduated cum laude from Yale College in 1995 with a BA in Psychology. After completing his undergraduate studies, he was a pre-doctoral fellow at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a research assistant at the University of California, San Francisco’s Institute for Health Policy Studies, and a research associate at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC. He also received an MPP from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government before enrolling in the Health Policy Program. Grant’s research was at the intersection of international health and economic development and included 1) the impact of health improvement and population change on economic development, 2) the consequences of health care reforms in poor countries, and 3) approaches to stimulating private R&D on neglected tropical diseases. He was an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality trainee, a pre-doctoral fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a graduate student fellow at Harvard’s Center for International Development. Grant is currently Assistant Professor of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Ben Sommers, 2005 graduate, received a BA from Princeton University in 2000, graduating with highest honors and Phi Beta Kappa. At Princeton, he majored in English with a minor in Jewish Studies. As a PhD student, Ben focused his research on the uninsured, Medicaid, and insurance markets. Ben won the Rose Seegal award at Harvard Medical School graduation (2007) for the outstanding paper on the relation of the Medical Profession to the Community for his articles on Medicaid retention in HSR. In 2006, Ben received the AcademyHealth Dissertation Award for his dissertation entitled, “The Dynamics of Public and Private Health Insurance Coverage in the United States.” He is currently a Resident in Internal Medicine/Primary Care at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Melitta Jakab, 2007 graduate, graduated with distinction with a BA in Economics and Political Science from McGill University in 1995. Following graduation, she worked at the World Bank Resident Mission in Budapest. (Melitta is originally from Hungary and is fluent in four languages.) Melitta won a Fulbright Scholarship in 1997 and entered the SM program in Health Policy and Management at Harvard School of Public Health. While at HSPH, she worked for the Health Care Financing Group as a research assistant. In 1999 Melitta was awarded the Charles F. Wilinsky Award for Academic Achievement during the course of her MS work. After graduation, she returned to the World Bank as a Health Economist, where she wrote several publications on health financing. Melitta entered the PhD program in 2001 and defended her dissertation entitled, “An Empirical Evaluation of the Kyrgyz Health Reform: Does it Work for the Poor?” in spring 2007. She is currently Health Financing Specialist, Central Eastern Europe and Central Asia, World Health Organization EURO.

Alison Comfort, 2nd year, graduated magna cum laude from Amherst College in 2001, with a BA in Economics and Spanish. Alison then worked for two years at Abt Associates on USAID’s flagship project for health systems strengthening. Her work on HIV/AIDS involved designing and testing a software system used to cost anti-retroviral treatment programs in resource-poor countries. While at Abt, she also focused on assessing the impact of community-based health financing (CBHF) schemes on the use of maternal health services in Mali. In 2003, Alison joined the US Peace Corps and served in Madagascar as a health sector expert. She founded an association of health educators to produce radio programs focused on HIV/AIDS and family planning, led interactive “listening groups” for women in remote villages, and implemented community-based sales of health products. In Madagascar, Alison also collaborated with Chemonics International to provide technical assistance with CBHF schemes throughout the country. She also worked with Abt Associates to implement a training program for the Ministry of Health, donors, and collaborating agencies on the methodology for National Health Accounts. Upon returning from the Peace Corps in 2005, Alison worked with Medical Care Development International to assess the cost of care at different levels of the health care system in Madagascar for the Malagasy President’s initiative to provide free care to the indigent population. Alison’s current research interests focus on health care financing in developing countries as well as the potential impact of community-based health financing schemes in promoting access to care and reducing financial vulnerability. Alison received the Tata Study Grant from Harvard’s South Asia Initiative for her work in summer 2007 as a research assistant at the Center for Micro Finance in Hyderabad, India to evaluate the impact of CBHI on financial vulnerability and consumption smoothing for poor populations. Alison is fluent in English, French, Spanish and Malagasy.

Ethics

Jill Horwitz, 2002 graduate, holds a BA in History with honors from Northwestern University (1988), and an MPP (1994) and a JD magna cum laude (1997) from Harvard University. From 1997-98, she clerked for Judge Norman Stahl, US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. During her graduate studies, she worked as a summer associate and law clerk in the health care departments of Ropes & Gray and McDermott, Will & Emery. While at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, she was a summer associate in municipal finance at J.P. Morgan Securities. Prior to graduate school, Jill was Director of Public Affairs at Planned Parenthood of San Mateo County, and a Teaching Fellow in History at Phillips Academy. During the 2000-01 academic year she concurrently served as a Graduate Fellow at the Center for Ethics and the Professions and as a Hauser Center Fellow for Doctoral Studies in the Nonprofit Sector. Jill’s dissertation, for which she was awarded the 2003 AcademyHealth Dissertation Award, explored the behavioral, ethical, and legal implications of corporate organizational form of American hospitals. In addition, she has published on hospital conversions, medical malpractice tort reform, and Medicaid managed-care contracting. She is now Assistant Professor of Law at University of Michigan Law School.

David Stevenson, 2004 graduate, received a BA in religion from Oberlin College in 1991 and an SM in Health Policy and Management from the Harvard School of Public Health in 1997. David’s primary research interests are aging, disability, and long-term care. In particular, he is interested in the ethical implications of long-term care policy choices. David has conducted health policy and health services research in various settings, including the US Public Health Service, the University of Washington School of Public Health, the Urban Institute, the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, and the MEDSTAT Group. His work has focused on state long-term care policy reform, access to health care for people with disabilities, and the use of cost-effectiveness research in setting policy priorities. His current work is focused on nursing home quality, and he recently completed a national survey of attorneys involved in nursing home malpractice. David was the recipient of a two-year training grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and a National Institute on Aging Pre-Doctoral Fellowship in Aging and Health Economics. He is now Assistant Professor of Health Care Policy in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School.

Susannah Rose, 2nd year, graduated from Furman University in 1996 with a BA in Philosophy and Psychology. In 1998, she graduated with an MS in Social Work from Columbia University, and she received an MS in Bioethics from Albany Medical Center/Union College in 2006. Susannah worked at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York City providing clinical services and conducting research for approximately eight years. She specialized in clinical interventions for people with gastrointestinal cancers and their family members and was a Psychosocial Care Team Leader. She served on the Ethics Committee and was the founder and chair of the Social Work Research Group at MSKCC. During her first two years at MSKCC, while working in the Behavioral Sciences Department, she coordinated an NCI-funded longitudinal study assessing tobacco use among cancer patients. While in the Social Work Department, she was the principal investigator of a descriptive, retrospective study assessing the relationship between domestic abuse and access to cancer treatment, and she collaborated on other research projects within the institution.

Susannah is the primary author on a book for family and friends of people with cancer and co-author of another book about colorectal cancer. She has also published several journal articles and book chapters, including a literature review detailing the non-medical factors influencing the length of stays in ICUs which was published in the American Journal of Critical Care. Another published paper is entitled, “Reducing Family Distress and Facilitating End of Life Decision-Making.” She has been a primary author or co-author of over thirteen national and international conference presentations. She is a recipient of a predoctoral traineeship from the National Institute of Mental Health, and is currently co-writing a paper entitled, “Disability, Adaptation, and Inclusion” with Norman Daniels at Harvad School of Public Health. In summer 2007, she will be working on a research project with Steve Joffe, MD at Dana Farber. The project will involve analyzing data from the General Social Survey to assess for sociodemographic differences in confidence in the institutions of science and of medicine among members of the American public. She will also collaborate on a project with Tom McGuire, Harvard Medical School, on the Institute of Medicine’s definition of health care disparities.

Evaluative Sciences and Statistics

Alyce Adams, 1999 graduate, received a BA from the University of Texas at Austin where she majored in Government. In 1994, she earned an MPP at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government where she wrote her master’s thesis entitled, “The Impact of the American Health Security Act on American Indians.” Following graduation from the Kennedy School and before entering the PhD Program in Health Policy, Alyce worked for one year as a health policy analyst for the Massachusetts Department of Health Care Finance and Policy. As a PhD student, she was the recipient of a three-year Graduate Prize Fellowship and an Agency for Healthcare Policy and Research training grant. She received a Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Summer Fellowship for her preliminary dissertation research regarding the transfer of health care management responsibility from the Indian Health Service to American Indian tribal government. In addition to her academic life, Alyce volunteered as a consultant for the North American Indian Center of Boston on their diabetes initiative. She was also a mentor to interns in the AHCPR Health Policy Summer Program for Minority Undergraduates in the summer of 1998.

Alyce completed the PhD Program in November 1999, and spent that year as an AHCPR Post-Doctoral Fellow. The three papers that formed her dissertation were “How Tribes Choose between Tribal and Indian Health Service Management of Health Care Resources,” “Drug Coverage and Drug Use by Medicare Beneficiaries,” and “Bias in Measures of Guideline Adherence.” Alyce is now Assistant Professor in the Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention at Harvard Medical School, where her research focuses on disparities in pharmaceutical access and use among people with chronic illness and disability.

John Lavis, 1997 graduate, a Canadian physician, holds a BA with distinction and an MD from Queen's University in Canada and an MSc with distinction from the London School of Economics and Political Science. John has worked as a community hospital emergency room physician, prison physician, and HIV primary care physician in Ontario, Canada (1990-91); an advisor to the World Health Organization Global Programme on AIDS in Geneva, Switzerland (1992); a visiting research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in London, England (1992); a research fellow at the Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario (1992-97); a research fellow at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto, Ontario (1993-94); and a research fellow at the Institute for Work and Health in Toronto, Ontario (1995-97).

In 1994, John entered the PhD Program in Health Policy. For his doctoral studies, he was awarded a Fullbright Scholarship, a National Health PhD Fellowship from the Government of Canada, and a Doctoral Fellowship from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. In 1997, he completed his doctoral dissertation, entitled “An Inquiry into the Links Between Labour Market Experiences and Health.” Currently, John is Associate Professor, Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics; Associate Member, Department of Political Science; Associate Research Director, Strategy, Institute for Work & Health; and Member, Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis at McMaster University. He is also Canada Research Chair in Knowledge Transfer and Uptake and Associate Professor, Department of Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation, at the University of Toronto.

Connie Mah Trinacty, 2006 graduate, received a BA in Psychology from Amherst College in 1994. Following graduation, she worked as a project coordinator for clinical trials at the Stanford Medical School and Center for Health Care Evaluation at the Palo Alto Veterans Medical Center. She evaulated a technology-based chronic disease management intervention and examined its impact on patients’ health status and health care costs in public health care systems. In 1998, Connie began working at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care (HPHC) and Harvard Medical School as a project director and analyst for two studies in drug policy. The first evaluated the impact of a triplicate prescription policy for benzodiazepines on the use of psychoactive drugs and other health services in two state Medicaid populations. The second examined the impact of coverage of home diabetes monitoring devices on blood glucose control and health services utilization in a managed care population. Connie returned to school to earn an SM in Health Policy and Management at Harvard School of Public Health in 2002. She then began the PhD Program in Health Policy and was the recipient of an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality traineeship. Her dissertation was entitled, “Evaluating Racial Differences in Quality of Diabetes Care and Self-Management Practice in an HMO,” and she is now Assistant Professor in the Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention, Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care.

Benjamin Cook, 2006 graduate, received a BA in Psychology from Swarthmore College in 1995. After graduation, he was awarded a Swarthmore College Fellowship, with which he designed and conducted a gang prevention program for recently immigrated Vietnamese youth in Northern Virginia. He then was granted a Fulbright Scholarship Teaching Assistantship in South Korea, where he taught English at a high school in the province of Chollonam-do and conducted research on Korean Buddhism. In 1999, Benjamin received an MPH in Health Behavior and Health Education at UNC-Chapel Hill, concentrating on immigrant and farmworker health access, and receiving the Kathy Kerr Memorial Award for demonstrating commitment to social justice and community health education practice. Benjamin moved to Boston to work with Health Care for All, coordinating the Covering Kids Massachusetts Initiative. His work there focused on statewide legislative advocacy and local program coordination to improve access to SCHIP and Medicaid-funded insurance programs for children in Massachusetts. As a PhD student in Health Policy, Benjamin was the recipient of an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality traineeship, a National Institute of Mental Health training grant, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship for Research in Managed Care. Benjamin was the recipient of the 2007 AcademyHealth Dissertation Award for his dissertation entitled, “Hunt for the Right Counterfactual: Non-Linear Adjustment in Minority Health Care Studies.” He is currently employed at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. as a Health Researcher.

Katy Backes Kozhimannil, 3rd year, graduated summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota in 1999 with a BA in International Relations and Spanish. As an undergraduate, she received the Roger Page Freshman Leadership Award and the Truman Scholarship. Katy earned an MPA and a certificate in Demography at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University in 2003. Prior to beginning the PhD program, Katy was a project manager at Ibis Reproductive Health, leading the policy and advocacy component of a Phase III HIV prevention trial in Southern Africa. Katy has worked on HIV/AIDS prevention and policy as well as education and youth development both domestically and abroad. She served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Mozambique and has worked for the World Bank, Population Services International, the American Red Cross, and the YMCA. Katy’s research interests include program and policy evaluation, longitudinal analysis, and access to medicines and health insurance, particularly in the fields of reproductive and maternal health. As a Pharmaceutical Policy Fellow, she is collaborating with faculty at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention on an evaluation of the maternal care benefits provided by the Philippine national health insurance program and is also working with the state of New Jersey to examine the impacts of recent statewide interventions on post-partum depression. Katy has published several papers on women’s health, HIV/AIDS, and contraception and has presented on these same subjects at twelve national and international conferences. She serves on the board of the Truman Scholars Association, the Cervical Barrier Advancement Society, and the Massachusetts for Microbicides Campaign. Katy is a former recipient of an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality traineeship.

Management

Darren Zinner, 2006 graduate, conducts research focusing on the various relationships between industry and academic scientists in the development of new medical technology. At one end of the spectrum, he is investigating the unique aspects of corporate-university technology transfer for extremely nascent technologies. At the other end, he is studying how well academic and private investigators manage the recruitment, screening, and enrollment of subjects within clinical trials for medical products very close to market. Darren graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Duke University in 1992 with majors in Mechanical Engineering and Psychology. Upon graduation, he worked as a biomedical engineer designing and developing laparoscopic instruments for United States Surgical Corporation. He then earned a Master of Science in Technology and Policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996. For the next three years, Darren worked for Covance Health Economics and Outcomes Services, where he led multiple reimbursement- and strategy-focused consulting engagements with biotech, pharmaceutical, and medical device firms. In this capacity, he surveyed clinicians, hospital administrators, and insurers to help early-stage firms determine the proper measures to collect during clinical trials and to help late-stage firms launch their new products. Immediately before enrolling as one of the first students in the Health Policy–Management concentration, Darren completed a one-year assignment with Partners HealthCare System, assisting the departments within the Brigham and Women's Hospital to formulate and implement their financial and clinical budgets. Darren has served as the teaching assistant for several courses, including “Managing Health Care Technology and Operations” at the Harvard Business School and “Introduction to Technology Development in the Biomedical Industry” within the Harvard Division of Engineering and Applied Science. He has authored and co-authored several peer-reviewed publications and is the inventor on two patents. Darren graduated in 2006 and is currently Lecturer in Health, Science, Society, and Policy at Brandeis University.

Ingrid Nembhard, 2007 graduate, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University in 1997, with a BA in Ethics, Politics and Economics (EP&E) and in Psychology. Following graduation, she worked in the physician contracting department of a not-for-profit HMO in Florida, where she was involved in the development and implementation of a hospital admitting panel program, renegotiation of chemotherapy drug contracts, capitation programs and other projects. In 1999, she entered the Master of Science Program at the Harvard School of Public Health, Department of Health Policy and Management. While completing her degree, Ingrid staffed Boston Mayor Menino’s Health Care Finance Task Force, and served as Director of Elderly Outreach Programs at East Boston Neighborhood Health Center. In the latter capacity, she designed and supervised a campaign to enroll low-income Medicare beneficiaries in Medicaid, Medicare Buy-in, and pharmacy programs. She presented her enrollment framework to representatives from the US Department of Health and Human Services and the Boston Public Health Commission, and at the National Conference of Community Health Centers 2001 Policy and Issues Forum (Washington, DC). At her graduation from Harvard School of Public Health in 2001, she was awarded the Gareth M. Green Award for Excellence in Public Health Practice and the Charles F. Wilinsky Award for Academic Achievement. Ingrid defended her dissertation entitled, “Organizational Learning in Health Care: Insights from a Multi-Method Study of Quality Improvement Collaboratives,” in 2007. Her paper was chosen as Best Paper Based on a Dissertation for the 2007 Health Care Management Division of the Academy of Management. Ingrid is now Assistant Professor at Yale School of Medicine and School of Public Health, as well as Yale School of Management.

Sara J. Singer, 2007 graduate, holds an AB in English from Princeton University (1986) and an MBA degree with a Certificate in Public Management from Stanford University. Before coming to Harvard, Sara was Founding Executive Director of the Center for Health Policy, Stanford University’s multidisciplinary home for rigorous and innovative health care and health policy research, and a Lecturer in Stanford’s Public Policy Program and in Stanford School of Medicine’s Department of Health Research and Policy. In 1997, she was Staff Director of the California Governor’s Managed Health Care Improvement Task Force. As Senior Legislative Assistant for Health Policy to the Honorable Mike Andrews (D-TX), Sara developed legislative strategy and an alternative health system reform proposal for moderate Democrats on the US House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee during the committee’s debate of the Health Security Act of 1994. In 1992, she was a health policy analyst in the Executive Office of the President, Office of Management and Budget. Sara is currently a Senior Research Scholar at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and co-principal investigator for a Stanford-based grant entitled, “Improving Safety Culture and Outcomes in Healthcare,” funded by the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. She recently received her PhD from Harvard University, where she was a fellow at Harvard Business School and at the Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School of Government. Her dissertation paper, “Relationship of Safety Climate and Safety Performance in Hospitals,” was selected for the Best Paper Proceedings of the 2007 Academy of Management Meeting. Sara's research uses organizational safety, organizational learning, and leadership theories to understand and address the causes and consequences of errors and adverse events in health care organizations.

Medical Sociology

Cara James, 2006 graduate, received an AB in Psychology from Harvard College in 1998. As an undergraduate, she spent a year working as a research assistant at Georgetown University Medical School on spinal cord injury and recovery research, which led to publications in Advances in Neurology and the FASEB Journal. Cara returned to Harvard and received the Harvard Eating Disorders Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship to assist in the completion of her undergraduate thesis on eating disorders. After graduation, she worked as a research assistant for The Picker Institute, a non-profit survey research institute located in Boston. She worked as a summer intern for the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. Cara’s research interests include quality of care and racial and ethnic health disparities. Her dissertation research focused on improving the quality of care that patients with end-stage renal disease receive, and she was the recipient of a five-year fellowship in Health Policy and Research from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Cara was co-author of a chapter in a 2002 Institute of Medicine Report, “The Culture of Medicine and Racial, Ethnic and Class Disparities in Health Care,” Unequal treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care. She is now Senior Policy Analyst for Race/Ethnicity and Health Care and Director of the Barbara Jordan Health Policy Scholars Program at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Hector Rodriguez, 2007 graduate, holds a BA in Urban Studies and Planning from the University of California, San Diego (1996) and an MPH in Health Policy and Administration from the University of California, Berkeley (1998). Before entering Harvard's PhD program in Health Policy, he served as Senior Consultant and Information Manager for the Permanente Medical Group, Inc. in northern California. In this role, he managed several complex business redesign projects including the transition of appointment and medical advice functions from medical offices into large call centers and the integration of ancillary providers onto adult primary care teams. Hector also served as a consultant to physician leaders on improving primary care appointment accessibility and provider-patient familiarity. In addition to department and project management, he authored an internal study within the medical group that evaluated the effectiveness of several interventions to improve the cultural competencies of providers and staff. Hector has also served as a program evaluation consultant to HIV/AIDS organizations, including AIDS Project of the East Bay and the Alameda County Office of AIDS and Communicable Diseases. As a PhD student, he worked for the Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention, Harvard Medical School, where he assisted with a cost analysis for the evaluation of academic detailing interventions to improve medication prescribing among primary care physicians. He also worked with the Health Institute, Institute of Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies, Tufts-New England Medical Center, on the evaluation of various quality improvement initiatives in primary care settings. His research interests include better understanding the role of continuity of care as a predictor of health outcomes and patient ratings of their care experience, the role of trust in the PCP-patient relationship, and the impact of labor-management partnerships in improving quality and efficiency in health care environments. Hector is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Services at the University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine.

Annie Steffenson, 5th year, graduated summa cum laude from Kenyon College in 1995 with a BA in Psychology and a minor in Russian language. After graduation, she taught English in Quito, Ecuador for a year with WorldTeach. In 1999, she received an MPH from the University of Michigan. After receiving her degree, she spent a year managing a social epidemiological study at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. For the three years prior to beginning the PhD in Health Policy Program at Harvard, she worked at the Kaiser Family Foundation as a Senior Research Associate. At the Foundation, she was part of the Public Opinion and Media Research group, which works both independently and in conjunction with major media organizations to conduct surveys on various health and health-related topics. Some of her specific projects included a study conducted with the Washington Post that explored the nation’s views on the international AIDS epidemic; a study done in collaboration with a research team at the Harvard School of Public Health that examined physician and public views of and experiences with medical errors; and a large national survey of Latino Americans. In 2003, she entered the PhD Program in Health Policy, where she continues to research topics related to HIV prevention in South Africa. Previously the recipient of a traineeship from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Annie was awarded a predoctoral traineeship in clinical AIDS research for 2005-07 from the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Completion Fellowship for 2007-08.

Rebecca Anhang Price, 4th year, graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998 with a BA in Communication. After graduation, Rebecca worked as a management consultant and advertising account executive, conducting research with physicians and consumers, developing marketing strategies, and planning and executing mass media campaigns to promote asthma, HIV, and oncology drugs. She received an SM in Health Policy and Management from the Harvard School of Public Health in 2003. Between her Masters degree and joining the PhD program, Rebecca worked at the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, supporting programs to promote maternal health and healthy lifestyles in the Middle East, and conducting systematic reviews of the effectiveness of mass media programs in reducing HIV in the developing world. Rebecca's research interests include the diffusion of new health care technologies, assessment of patient preferences, and evaluation of the effectiveness of health communication programs. Rebecca entered the Harvard PhD Program in Health Policy in 2004, and is a recipient of a Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Summer Fellowship, the George Bennett Dissertation Fellowship from the Foundation from Informed Medical Decision Making, and a Novartis Fellowship.

Political Analysis

Mollyann Brodie, 1995 graduate, is the first graduate of the PhD Program in Health Policy. In 1988 she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BS in Kinesiology from UCLA. In June 1992, she received an SM in Health Policy and Management from Harvard School of Public Health. While at HSPH, she was a 1991 and 1992 recipient of the Charles F. Wilinsky Award for Academic Excellence. Mollyann worked as a health policy and program analyst in the Inspector General Office, US Department of Health and Human Services where she won a special achievement award in 1990. She was the recipient of the Aetna Health Plan Fellowship through the PhD Program in Health Policy, and is the program's first Harvard Merit Award winner. She has co-authored numerous journal articles, and is co-editing a book, On the Brink of Reform, with Professor Robert Blendon. The title of her dissertation was “Political Institutions, Participation and Media Evaluations: Influences on Health Care Policy.” Mollyann is now Vice President and Director of Public Opinion and Media Research for the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. This position enables her to continue her research interests in exploring the relationship among public opinion, the media, and political institutions.

Sara Bleich, 2007 graduate, received a BA in Psychology from Columbia University in 2000. Following graduation she worked as a Research Associate at The Measurement Group in Los Angeles where her work focused on content analyses, data mining, and program evaluation in the areas of HIV/AIDS, substance abuse, and mental health. Sara enrolled in Harvard's PhD Program in Health Policy in fall 2002. Following her first year of graduate school, she participated in RAND's Summer Associate Program, developing a model to understand the relationship between political commitment and HIV/AIDS outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa. For two years, Sara was a Teaching Fellow for a course called “Political Analysis and Strategy for US Health Care Policy” and Head Teaching Fellow for a course called “Global Health Challenges.” She was also a Research Assistant at the Harvard Initiative for Global Heath, where she researched the responsiveness of health care systems in developed and developing countries. Her dissertation research focused on understanding the determinants of obesity in developed countries; unmet need for diabetic and hypertensive health care services in Mexico; and public trust in scientific advice related to obesity. She is the past recipient of an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality traineeship, a Harvard Graduate Prize Fellowship, and a GSAS dissertation completion fellowship. She is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She also holds a secondary appointment in the Department of International Health.

Tara Sussman, 3rd year, graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from Brown University in 1998 with an AB in political science. Her senior honors thesis examined immigrant politics in Sweden and included an analysis of interviews with national and local politicians there. Her research began during her semester of study in Stockholm, Sweden in 1997. Tara was awarded a Brown University Comparative Politics Award for her thesis. Following graduation, Tara spent two years working in Washington, DC, including one year at the Welfare Information Network doing research on welfare reform, where she published several issue papers on child care, transportation, interagency collaboration, evaluation strategies and other welfare reform issues. In 2000, Tara began the MPP program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. During her second year at the Kennedy School, Tara completed a policy analysis exercise on indicators of school readiness for the Massachusetts School Readiness Indicators Project at the Massachusetts Department of Health and Human Services. After graduating with an MPP in 2002, Tara became a Presidential Management Fellow at the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of the Secretary (OS). She worked for a year in the HHS/OS Budget Office and then spent two years in the HHS/OS Office of Global Health Affairs (OGHA) helping to coordinate the HHS International HIV/AIDS activities as part of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. While in the OGHA, Tara worked on a range of issues, including antiretroviral drug procurement, congressional communications, budget, and management. In 2004, she received a Special Service award from HHS for exemplary work. She entered the Harvard PhD Program in Health Policy in fall 2005. Tara’s research interests include the politics of health reform, in particular, the new Massachusetts Health Reform. She is the past recipient of an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality traineeship, and she received the Charles H. Farnsworth Trust Aging Policy Research Fellowship to do research on pharmacists attitudes toward Medicare Part D beginning in fall 2007.