Lawrence Casalino is chief of the Division of Outcomes and Effectiveness Research in the Department of Public Health at Weill Cornell Medical College and New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. His background includes 20 years as a family physician in private practice. He holds a doctoral degree in health services research, with a focus on organizational and institutional sociology and economics. Previously, he was an associate professor with the department of health studies at the University of Chicago.

Dr. Casalino's research focuses on the organization of physician practice, and, in particular, the kinds of organized processes physicians use to improve the quality and control the costs of medical care. He is also exploring questions around the forms of relationships that physicians have with hospitals and health plans; the effects on quality and cost of the varying types of physician practice organization; and the influence of public and private policies on the ways that physician practice is organized. Dr. Casalino is currently studying disease management, outpatient medical errors, physician views on quality measurement and pay for performance, and clinical integration in relation to federal anti-trust regulation.

Paul D. Cleary is Dean of Public Health, Anna M.R. Lauder Professor of Public Health, and chair of the department of epidemiology and public health at Yale University. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. His research interests include developing better methods for using patient reports about their care and health status to evaluate the quality of medical care and studying the relationships between clinician and organizational characteristics and the quality of medical care. He has published over 250 research articles on these topics.

Dr. Cleary's recent research includes a study of how organizational characteristics affect the costs and quality of care for persons with AIDS, a national evaluation of a continuous quality improvement initiative in clinics providing care to HIV infected individuals, and a statewide effort to improve cancer care in Massachusetts. He also is Principal Investigator of one of the Consumer Assessment of Health Plans Studies (CAHPS III) funded by the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHRQ) to develop survey protocols for collecting information from consumers about their health plans and services and to use that information for quality improvement.

Susan Dentzer is the Editor-in-Chief of Health Affairs, the nation's leading journal of health policy, and an on-air analyst on health with The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Dentzer assumed the job of Editor-in-Chief on May 1, 2008, after a decade as the on-air health correspondent for The NewsHour.

At The NewsHour, Dentzer led a unit dedicated to providing in-depth coverage of health care and health policy and Social Security. The unit, begun in 1998, was funded by grants from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and, beginning in 2005, from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Dentzer was the recipient of multiple awards. In 2007, she received the American Society on Aging National Media Award for a two-part series on our current understanding of the causes of Alzheimer's disease, efforts under way to speed treatments to patients, and the enormous burden faced by caregivers of Alzheimer's patients. The unit's December 2005 and April 2005 pieces, "Wounded Soldier" and "Wounded Warrior," about a paralyzed and brain damaged soldier who was severely wounded in Iraq, won the 2005 Award for Excellence in Health Care Journalism from the Association of Health Care Journalists. The same pieces also earned both a CINE Golden Eagle and New York Festival award.

Prior to joining The NewsHour in 1998, Dentzer was chief economics correspondent and economics columnist for U.S. News & World Report, where she served from 1987 to 1997. In a series of columns and stories for U.S. News, she reported extensively on the debate over reforming and partially "privatizing" Social Security and over such health policy issues as regulation of managed care. Before joining U.S. News, Dentzer was at Newsweek, where she was a senior writer covering business news until 1987. Dentzer's work in television has included appearances as a regular analyst or commentator on CNN and The McLaughlin Group.

Dentzer is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the International Rescue Committee, the nonprofit organization that works in relief, rehabilitation, protection, post-conflict development and resettlement services for those uprooted or affected by violent conflict and oppression worldwide. At IRC, Dentzer heads the Board's Health Committee, which oversees the organization's health programs in 25 countries. In February 2008, she traveled to Syria and Jordan as part of an IRC delegation reviewing the situation of Iraqi refugees who have fled to these countries as a result of the ongoing war in Iraq.

Dentzer is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Global Health Council, the world's largest membership organization of groups involved in global health, serving as Secretary on the Board and head of the board's Nominating Committee. She serves on the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured as well as the advisory board of the California Health Benefits Review Committee and is a member of the National Advisory Committee for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research. Dentzer is also on the board of directors of the Friends of the National Institute for Nursing Research.

Judy Feder is professor of the Georgetown Public Policy Institute and from 1999-2008 she served as Dean. She was a nominee for Congress in Virginia's 10th Congressional District in 2006 and 2008. She is one of the nation's leaders in health policy--most particularly, in efforts to understand and improve the nation's health insurance system. A widely published scholar, her three decades of policy research began at the Brookings Institution, continued at the Urban Institute, and, since 1984, has flourished at Georgetown University. Her expertise on the uninsured, Medicare, Medicaid, and long-term care is regularly drawn upon by members of Congress, Executive officials, and the national media.

Feder has also held leadership policy positions, both in the Congress and in the Executive Branch. As staff director of the congressional Pepper Commission (chaired by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV), Feder is widely credited with setting the stage for the health reform debate of the 1990s. In 1993, she was appointed to the Department of Health and Human Services, where she worked to expand health insurance coverage, effectively manage Medicare and Medicaid, and assure the safety of food and drugs.

Feder today pursues her policy leadership first and foremost by educating future policy leaders at Georgetown's Public Policy Institute. She continues her research as co-director (with Sheila Burke) of the Georgetown University Long-term Care Financing Project and as senior advisor to the Kaiser Family Foundation's Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured.

Feder is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Public Administration, and the National Academy of Social Insurance; a former chair and board member of AcademyHealth; a board member of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy and the Center for American Progress Action Fund Committee. She is also a member of the National Research Council's Standing Committee on Research and Evidentiary Standards, the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellowships Program Advisory Board, and the Hamilton Project's Advisory Council.

Senior fellow Catherine McLaughlin is a nationally recognized expert in managed care, market competition, and employer and employee benefit choice. She is the director of Health Research for Mathematica’s office in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

McLaughlin spearheaded the Economic Research Initiative on the Uninsured (ERIU), a seven-year initiative funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to initiate and disseminate research to spark new policy discussions of health coverage issues. She has directed many large-scale studies involving complex surveys on health care issues as well as evaluations of national programs and is a professor in the Department of Health Management and Policy at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

McLaughlin is an elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and the Institute of Medicine, a member of the Council of Health Care Economics and Policy and the Health Research and Educational Trust Board of Trustees, and serves on the editorial board of the journal Health Services Research. She publishes widely in peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Health and Social Policy, Health Affairs, Journal of the American Medical Association, and others and is the author of chapters in Frontiers in Health Policy Research, The Political Economy of Health Care Reforms, and International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences. She has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Mark A. Peterson is professor of public policy and political science at the UCLA School of Public Affairs, and former chair of the department of public policy. He previously held faculty appointments at Harvard University, including as the Henry LaBarre Jayne Associate Professor of Government, and the University of Pittsburgh, with joint appointments in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, Department of Political Science, and Graduate School of Public Health.

Professor Peterson received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan. His scholarship on American national institutions, which focuses on the interactions among the president, Congress, and organized interests, includes Legislating Together: The White House and Capitol Hill from Eisenhower to Reagan (Harvard, 1990) and the edited volume (with Joel Aberbach), Institutions of American Democracy: The Executive Branch (Oxford, 2005; recipient of the 2006 Richard E. Neustadt Award for the Best Reference on the Presidency, Presidential Studies Section, American Political Science Association). In the domain of health care policy, Professor Peterson's contributions include the edited volumes, Healthy Markets? The New Competition in Medical Care (Duke, 1998) and (with Peter J. Hammer, Deborah Haas-Wilson, and William M. Sage), Uncertain Times: Kenneth Arrow and the Changing Economics of Health Care (Duke, 2003). A past recipient of an RWJF Investigator Award in Health Policy Research, he is completing a book manuscript entitled, "Stalemate: Opportunities, Gambles, and Miscalculations in Health Policy Innovation." From 1993 to 2002, he was the editor of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law. He is also a member of the "Blue Sky" team, which is leading an initiative for the transformative reform of the U.S. health and health care system.

An internationally recognized expert on aging and public policy, Jill Quadagno is a professor of sociology at Florida State University, where she holds the Mildred and Claude Pepper Eminent Scholar Chair in Social Gerontology. She served as senior policy advisor on the President's Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform in 1994, and as president of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 1998.

Much of Quadagno's research has focused on aging policy and Social Security reform, her experiences working on the President's Bipartisan Commission and watching the rise and fall of universal health care in 1994 inspired her to turn her attention to the history of health reform efforts in the U.S. Four years of research laid the foundation for her book, One Nation, Uninsured: Why the U.S. Has No National Health Insurance. Quadagno is the author of 11 other books and more than 50 articles, including The Transformation of Old Age Security: Class and Politics in the American Welfare State and States, and Labor Markets and the Future of Old Age Policy. Her book, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty, was named Outstanding Book on the Subject of Human Rights in North America by the Gustavos Meyers Center for the Study of Human Rights. She also has served on the editorial boards of the American Sociological Review, Contemporary Sociology, The Gerontologist, and the Journal of Aging Studies.

Sara Rosenbaum is the Harold and Jane Hirsh Professor of Health Law and Policy and chair of the department of health policy at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services. Professor Rosenbaum also directs the Hirsh Health Law and Policy Program and the Center for Health Services Research and Policy and holds appointments in the School of Medicine and Health Sciences and The Law School.

As a scholar, an educator and a national leader, Professor Rosenbaum has dedicated her career to promoting more equitable and effective health care policies in this country, particularly in the areas of Medicaid and Medicare, managed care, employee health benefits, maternal and child health, community health centers and civil rights in health care systems. Her commitment to strengthening access to care for low-income, minority and medically underserved populations has had a transforming effect on the lives of many Americans, particularly children.

In addition to her responsibilities as Chair of the Department of Health Policy, which she founded and developed, Professor Rosenbaum is Director of the Center for Health Policy Research, the institutional home for many of the Department's research activities, and Director of the Hirsh Health Law and Policy Program. As a mentor, she is drawn to young people interested in improving health care for the poor.

Alvin R. Tarlov is a professor of medicine at the University of Chicago. Prior to that, he was a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Texas, and the Sid Richardson and Taylor and Robert H. Ray Senior Fellow in Health Policy at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. Previously, he was professor of medicine at Tufts University, professor of health promotion at the Harvard School of Public Health, President of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, and professor and chairman of the department of medicine at the University of Chicago. In 1975, he began a five-year term as Chairman of the Task Force on Manpower Needs of the Association of Professors of Medicine. In 1978, the Secretary of DHEW appointed Dr. Tarlov chairman of the Graduate Medical Education National Advisory Committee to advise the Secretary on the most desirable number, specialty distribution and geographic placement of physicians in each specialty. GMENAC's report was issued in 1980.

Dr. Tarlov is a former Markle Foundation Scholar and NIH Research Career Development Awardee. He was elected to the Association of American Physicians and the Institute of Medicine and is a Master of the American College of Physicians. From 1997-2000 he served as the National Program Director of RWJF's Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research program. He is currently a member of its National Advisory Committee.

William A. Vega is provost professor and Executive Director of the Edward R. Roybal Institute of Aging in the School of Social Work at University of Southern California. Prior to joining the Roybal Institute, Vega was founding director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, which conducts world-class research on major urban issues in Los Angeles. Previously, he was Director, Behavioral Research and Training Institute at UMDNJ. Dr. Vega has conducted numerous field and clinical research projects on health, mental health, and substance abuse in various regions of the United States and Latin America. His specialty is comparative epidemiologic and services research with Latino adolescents and adults. He was elected a member of the Institute of Medicine in 2008.

Keith A. Wailoo joined the Rutgers faculty in July 2001 as professor of history jointly appointed to the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research. He was named the Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History in 2006. Before joining the Rutgers faculty, he served on the faculty of social medicine and history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He is author of several award-winning books examining how patterns of disease change over time in America, and focusing especially on the ways in which scientific and technological understandings have interacted with health care politics, racial and ethnic relations, and cultural politics to inform responses to disease in the 20th century and into the 21st century. Among them are: Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health; Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth Century America; The Troubled Dream of Genetic Medicine: Ethnicity and Innovation in Tay-Sachs, Cystic Fibrosis, and Sickle Cell Disease (co-authored); and A Death Retold: Jesica Santillan, The Bungled Transplant, and Paradoxes of Medical Citizenship (co-edited).

In 1999, Professor Wailoo received the prestigious James S. McDonnell Centennial Fellowship in the History of Science, a $1,000,000 multi-year award to examine the history of cancer, immunology, genetics, and pain in 20th century society. The McDonnell Foundation Fellowship has supported many of his research projects which explore the intersections between understandings of disease in biomedicine, in clinical practice, and in culture. The McDonnell Fellowship has given rise to numerous conferences, including 1) The Cultural Transformation of Cancer (1999); 2) The Politics of Racial Health (2001); 3) The Problem of Pain in Medicine, Culture, and Public Policy (2002); and 4) Beyond the Bungled Transplant: Jesica Santillan and High-Tech Medicine in Cultural Perspective (2004 and 2005). Professor Wailoo’s research has also been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Center for Human Genome Research (Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues Program), and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.