COMMITTEE MEMBERS

Mary K. Wakefield (Co-Chair) is a visiting professor at The University of Texas at Austin. Previously, she served as the acting deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in the Obama administration, where she led strategic department-wide initiatives in key health policy areas, with a particular focus on health and human services programs for vulnerable populations. Her domestic policy work largely focused on improving the health status for underserved populations, including strengthening health programs for Native Americans and Alaska Natives and improving data analysis to better understand the health needs of rural populations. She also previously initiated and led program improvements as the administrator of the Health Resources and Services Administration to further strengthen the health care workforce, build healthier communities, increase health equity, and provide health care services to people who are geographically isolated or economically or medically vulnerable. Her public service career also includes work as a legislative assistant and later as the chief of staff to two North Dakota senators. Her extensive academic experience includes serving as the associate dean for rural health at the School of Medicine and Health Sciences and as a faculty member and area chair in the College of Nursing, both at the University of North Dakota, and as the director of the Center for Health Policy, Research and Ethics at George Mason University. She has also worked onsite as a consultant to the World Health Organization’s Global Programme on AIDS in Geneva, Switzerland. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. She has served on a number of public and not-for-profit boards and committees, bringing expertise in nursing, health care quality, access to care, and the health workforce. She was a member of the committees that produced the landmark reports To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System and Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century. She co-chaired the committee that produced Health Professions Education: A Bridge to Quality and chaired the committee that produced Quality Through Collaboration: Health Care in Rural America. She has a B.S. in nursing from the University of Mary in Bismarck and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in nursing from The University of Texas at Austin. She also completed the Program for Senior Managers in Government at the Harvard Kennedy School.

David R. Williams (Co-Chair) is the Florence and Laura Norman Professor of Public Health and the chair of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University, where he is also a professor of African and African American studies and sociology. His prior academic appointments were at Yale University and the University of Michigan. He is an internationally recognized authority on social influences on health and the author of more than 450 scientific papers focusing on the complex ways in which race, socioeconomic status, stress, racism, health behavior, and religious involvement can affect health. He has played a visible, national leadership role in raising awareness levels of the problem of health inequalities and identifying interventions to address them. This role includes his service as the staff director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Commission to Build a Healthier America and as a key scientific advisor to the award-winning PBS film series Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? The Everyday Discrimination Scale that he developed is one of the most widely used measures of discrimination in health studies. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He has received distinguished contributions awards from the American Sociological Association, the American Psychological Association, and The New York Academy of Medicine. He has been ranked as one of the top 10 most-cited social scientists in the world and as the most-cited Black scholar in the social sciences. Thomson Reuters, a media company, ranked him as one of the world’s most influential scientific minds. His research has been featured by some of America’s top print and television news organizations and in a recent TED talk. He holds an M.P.H. from Loma Linda University and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan.

Maureen Bisognano is the president emerita and a senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), where she previously served as the president and the chief executive officer (CEO) for 5 years, and, before that, as the executive vice president and the chief operating officer (COO) for 15 years. She is also an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a research associate in the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities. Prior to joining IHI, she served as the CEO of the Massachusetts Respiratory Hospital and as the senior vice president of the Juran Institute. As a prominent authority on improving health care systems, she advises health care leaders around the world, is a frequent speaker at major health care conferences on quality improvement, and works as a tireless advocate for change. She chairs the advisory board of the Well Being Trust, co-chairs the Massachusetts Coalition for Serious Illness Care (with Dr. Atul Gawande), and serves on the boards of The Commonwealth Fund, Indiana University Health, and Nursing Now. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. She began her career in health care as a staff nurse at Quincy Hospital in Quincy, Massachusetts, and subsequently served there as the director of nursing, the director of patient services, and as the COO. She holds a B.S. from the University of the State of New York and an M.S. from Boston University.

Jeffrey Brenner is the co-founder and the chief medical officer for a new primary care start-up, JunaCare, located outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Previously, he served as the senior vice president at United Healthcare, where he developed a national model, used in more than 20 states, for providing housing and support services to Medicaid members experiencing homelessness. His career has been focused on improving care for vulnerable populations, beginning as a family physician in Camden, New Jersey, where he owned and operated a solo-practice, urban family medicine office providing full-spectrum family health services for a Medicaid-enrolled population. Recognizing the need for a new way for hospitals, providers, and community residents to collaborate, he founded what would become the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers and served as its executive director from its incorporation. Under his leadership, the Camden Coalition launched the National Center for Complex Health and Social Needs. His innovative use of data to identify high-need, high-cost patients in a fragmented system and improve their care was profiled in the 2011 The New Yorker article “The Hot-Spotters” (by writer and surgeon Dr. Atul Gawande) and on PBS’s Frontline. He is a recipient of the MacArthur “genius” fellowship for his work, and he is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. He holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from Vassar College and an M.D. from the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.

Peter I. Buerhaus is a professor in the College of Nursing and the director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Health Workforce Studies at Montana State University. As a nurse and a health care economist, he is well known for his studies and publications focused on the nursing and physician workforces in the United States. Previously, he was the Valere Potter Distinguished Professor of Nursing and a professor of health policy at Vanderbilt University and an assistant professor of health policy and management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He maintains an active research program involving studies on the economics of the nursing workforce, forecasting nurse and physician supply, developing and testing measures of hospital quality of care, determining public and provider opinions on issues involving the delivery of health care, and assessing the quantity and quality of health care provided by nurse practitioners. Five of his more than 150 publications are designated as “classics” by the Patient Safety Network of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and he is the co-author of The Future of the Nursing Workforce in the United States: Data, Trends, and Implications. He has editorial responsibilities with many peer-reviewed health services research and nursing journals, and he has advised policy makers and legislators on nursing workforce policy. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. He has served on the Advisory Council of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Nursing Research, the National Quality Forum’s Steering Committee on Nursing Quality Performance Measures, the board of directors of Sigma Theta Tau International, The Joint Commission’s Nursing Advisory Committee, AcademyHealth, and the Bozeman Deaconess Health System. He was an advisor for the Bipartisan Policy Center’s health care workforce initiative, and he served on the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Graduate Medical Education Governance and Transparency. He served as the chair of the National Health Workforce Commission that was established under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which is intended to provide advice to Congress and to the president on national health care workforce policy. He has a bachelor’s in nursing from Mankato State University, a master’s in nursing health services administration from the University of Michigan, and a master’s in community health nursing and a Ph.D. from Wayne State University. He has also been awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Maryland and Loyola University Chicago.

Marshall H. Chin is the Richard Parrillo Family Professor of Healthcare Ethics in the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago and a general internist with extensive experience improving the care of vulnerable patients with chronic disease. He is also the co-director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Advancing Health Equity: Leading Care, Payment, and Systems Transformation Program Office; the director of the Chicago Center for Diabetes Translation Research; the co-director of the Merck Foundation’s national program office of Bridging the Gap: Reducing Disparities in Diabetes Care; and the associate chief and the director of research in the Section of General Internal Medicine and the associate director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago. He co-chaired the committee that wrote A Roadmap for Promoting Health Equity and Eliminating Disparities: The 4 I’s for Health Equity. He has served on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Community Preventive Services Task Force and the National Advisory Council to the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. He is currently improving diabetes care and outcomes on the South Side of Chicago through health care system and community interventions. He is co-directing a project evaluating the value of the national federally qualified health center system. He is also leading a research project funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to improve shared decision making among clinicians and LGBTQ racial and ethnic minority patients. His work over the past decade leading RWJF’s Finding Answers program led to the widely cited The Roadmap to Reduce Disparities. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, a fellow of the American College of Physicians, and a former president of the Society of General Internal Medicine. He is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine.

Regina S. Cunningham is the chief executive officer at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and an adjunct professor and the assistant dean for clinical practice at the School of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania. She is an accomplished nurse executive, scientist, and educator who has made significant contributions to advancing nursing practice and clinical care. Her extensive experience in the organization and delivery of nursing service across the care continuum has focused particularly on the utilization of nursing resources in care delivery systems. In her former role as the chief nurse executive, she was responsible for a broad array of strategic and operational functions, including the development of professional practice standards, oversight of quality, and strengthening the integration of scholarship within the practice of nursing. Her research interests include the effect of nursing on outcomes, clinical trials, and innovative models of care delivery. She was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation executive nurse fellow and is a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. She holds an M.A. in the delivery of nursing service from New York University and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University.

José J. Escarce is a distinguished professor of medicine in the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he also serves as the vice chair for academic affairs in the Department of Medicine and as a distinguished professor of health policy and management in the Fielding School of Public Health. He has published extensively on a variety of topics, including physician behavior, medical technology adoption, racial and socioeconomic differences in health care, and the effects of market forces on access, costs, and quality of care. His research interests and expertise include health economics, managed care, physician behavior, racial and ethnic disparities in medical care, immigrant health, and technological change in medicine. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and has served on the Institute of Medicine committee that produced Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee that produced the three volumes of Accountingfor Social Risk Factors in Medicare Payment. He has also served on numerous federal committees and advisory boards, including the National Advisory Council for Health Care Policy, Research, and Evaluation of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and on the board of directors of AcademyHealth. He is the former co-editor-in-chief of Health Services Research, one of the leading journals in the field. He has a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, an M.S. in physics from Harvard University, and an M.D. and a Ph.D. in health economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Greer Glazer is the Schmidlapp Professor of Nursing, the dean of the College of Nursing, and the vice president for health affairs at the University of Cincinnati, combining teaching, research, practice, community service, and policy work. Previously, she served as the dean and a professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston College of Nursing, the director of parent–child nursing and a professor at Kent State University, and an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University. She has worked in large and small higher education institutions; research-intensive and not research-intensive environments; public and private universities; and colleges that are part of an academic health center. She has taught both undergraduate- and graduate-level students and has developed new programs and educational models in several institutions. Holding an established history of commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, she has created, implemented, and supported programs that promote inclusion and the success of diverse populations, whether as patients, students, faculty, or staff. She has served as the principal investigator of initiatives that advance nursing education and create opportunity for underrepresented individuals in health care professions, which is best illustrated by her co-leadership of the National Study on Holistic Review. She has authored more than 100 publications and made more than 220 presentations, in addition to abstracts and contributions to newspapers, radio, and television. She is the co-author of Nursing Leadership from the Outside In and is the co-founder and the legislative editor of the Online Journal of Issues in Nursing. She has been a Fulbright scholar, an executive nurse fellow of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the chair of the American Nurses Association Political Action Committee. She is a recipient of the Mary Adelaide Nutting Award for Outstanding Leadership in Nursing Education from the National League for Nursing and the award for diversity, inclusion, and sustainability in nursing education lectureship from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. She holds a bachelor’s in nursing from the University of Michigan and a master’s and a Ph.D. in nursing from Case Western Reserve University.

Marcus Henderson is a lecturer and a clinical instructor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, where he teaches undergraduate psychiatric and community health nursing. In his teaching, he strives to help students understand the complexities of community health, engagement, and the impact of social determinants of health. He also maintains an active clinical practice as a psychiatric-mental health nurse for adolescent services at Fairmount Behavioral Health System in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In this role, he manages a 32-bed inpatient unit and works closely with the nursing staff and multidisciplinary teams to ensure safe, comprehensive patient care. Previously, he served as the co-founder and the executive director of Up and Running Healthcare Solutions, a Philadelphia-based organization that provides nurse-led case management by community health workers and other supportive services to homeless people in the city. His work on health for homeless people and community health workers was funded by the 2017 President’s Engagement Prize from the University of Pennsylvania and has been presented at local, state, and national conferences. For his work in the Philadelphia community, he was recognized as a community champion for positive change by the Independence Blue Cross Foundation. He is a member of the board of directors of the American Nurses Association. He holds a B.S. in nursing and an M.S. in nursing health leadership from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, and he also holds a certificate in health care innovation from its Perelman School of Medicine.

Angelica Millan was the director of children’s medical services in the County of Los Angeles Department of Public Health, where she administered the nursing programs for California children’s services, child, health and disability prevention, and health care for children in foster care, overseeing close to 350 nurses. She currently continues as a clinical nursing instructor at the Los Angeles Community College. She is a commissioner of the California Healthcare Workforce Policy Commission, a member of the board of trustees for the Chamberlain College of Nursing, a board member of the Case Management Society Association, and a board member of the National Association of Hispanic Nurses (NAHN). She served as the president of NAHN. She has been a recipient of NAHN’s Nurse of the Year Award, its Janie Menchaca Wilson Leadership Award, its Outstanding Latina of the Year, and the Leadership Network Award of the National Hispanic Medical Association. She has also been recognized by a California Legislature Assembly Resolution and is the recipient of the 22nd District, Senate Woman of the Year award. She is a fellow of the American Nursing Academy. The first in her family to graduate college, she has been a dedicated nurse for more than 25 years in Los Angeles. She has a B.S. and an M.S. in nursing from California State University and a doctorate of nursing practice from Western University of Health Sciences. She is also a graduate of the Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner Program of the University of California, Los Angeles.

John W. Rowe is the Julius B. Richmond Professor of Health Policy and Aging at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Previously, he served as the chairman and the chief executive officer (CEO) of Aetna Inc. He also previously served as the president and CEO of Mount Sinai New York University Health, one of the nation’s largest academic health care organizations, and as the president of the Mount Sinai Hospital and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. Before joining Mount Sinai, he was a professor of medicine and the founding director of the Division on Aging at Harvard Medical School, as well as the chief of gerontology at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital. He was the director of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Aging and is the co-author of Successful Aging. He currently leads the foundation’s Research Network on an Aging Society. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. He serves on the boards of trustees of The Rockefeller Foundation and the Urban Institute and is the past chairman of the board of overseers of the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, the board of fellows of Harvard Medical School, and the boards of trustees of the University of Connecticut and the Marine Biological Laboratory. He has a B.S. from Canisius College and an M.D. from the School of Medicine and Dentistry of the University of Rochester.

William M. Sage is the James R. Dougherty Chair for Faculty Excellence in the School of Law and a professor of surgery and perioperative care in the Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin. He previously served as the university’s first vice provost for health affairs. He was previously a tenured professor of law at Columbia Law School and has been a visiting law professor at Yale University, Harvard University, Duke University, and Emory University. Before entering law teaching, he practiced corporate and securities law in Los Angeles and headed four working groups for the White House Task Force on Health Care Reform in the Clinton administration. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and serves on the Board on Health Care Services of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. He is an elected fellow of the Hastings Center, a research institute on bioethics, and serves on the editorial board of the journal Health Affairs. He has written more than 200 articles and has edited 3 books, including the Oxford Handbook of U.S. Health Law. His research has been supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Commonwealth Fund, and The Pew Charitable Trusts. He holds an A.B. from Harvard College, medical and law degrees from Stanford University, and an honorary doctorate from Universite Paris Descartes. He completed his internship at Mercy Hospital and Medical Center in San Diego and served as a resident in anesthesiology and critical care medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Victoria L. Tiase is the director of research science and informatics strategy at NewYork-Presbyterian (NYP) Hospital. She has more than 20 years of experience in giving clinical input to technology projects in all areas, especially regarding the implementation of the NYP Hospital electronic medical record. She is responsible for supporting a range of clinical information technology projects related to patient engagement, alarm management, and care coordination. She was the nursing lead for the design, implementation, and rollout of an institution-developed personal health record, myNYP.org. In national informatics roles, she serves on the board of directors for the American Medical Informatics Association, the executive board of NODE.Health (Network of Digital Evidence in Health), the steering committee for the Alliance for Nursing Informatics, and the chair of the North American Nursing Informatics Committee of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society. She is a lecturer in the Division of Health Informatics of the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. She has a bachelor’s in nursing from the University of Virginia, a master’s in nursing informatics from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from The University of Utah with a focus on the integration of patient-generated health data related to the social and behavioral determinants of health into clinical workflows.

Winston Wong is a scholar in residence at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Equity at the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. His career has encompassed leadership roles at community health centers and in federal service, most recently at Kaiser Permanente, where he served as the medical director for community benefit. At Kaiser Permanente, he was responsible for its national philanthropic strategies to support clinical and population management initiatives with the safety net and for its quality initiatives to address disparities among its 12 million members. His commitment to addressing health equity is anchored by his experience as a bilingual primary care community health center physician for the Asian immigrant community in the Oakland, California, Chinatown neighborhood. That experience led him to leadership roles in the U.S. Public Health Service, serving in the Health Resources and Services Administration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as the chief clinical officer for a region that spanned the Pacific and western United States. He is the current chair of the HHS Advisory Committee on Minority Health, having previously served as a member. At the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, he chairs the Roundtable on the Promotion of Health Equity, and has served on the Board of Population Health and Public Health Practice. As a leader in philanthropy, he has active board roles at The California Endowment and Grantmakers in Health. He also previously served as the board chair for the School-Based Health Alliance and is the current acting chief executive officer and the chair of the National Council of Asian Pacific Islander Physicians. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Family Practice. His work in developing programs and policies to address health equity has been recognized by awards from the California Primary Care Association, Latino Health Access, the Minority Health Foundation, Asian Health Services, and Congresswoman Barbara Lee. He has a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco. He is also the recipient of a doctor of humane letters from the A.T. Still University of Osteopathic Medicine.

PROJECT STAFF

Suzanne Le Menestrel (Study Director) is a senior program officer with the Board on Health Care Services at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, where her responsibilities have included directing four consensus studies focused on children and adolescents from birth to age 21. Prior to her tenure with the National Academies, she was the founding national program leader for youth development research at 4-H National Headquarters, U.S. Department of Agriculture; served as the research director at the Academy for Educational Development’s Center for Youth Development and Policy Research; and was a research associate at Child Trends. She was a founder of the Journal of Youth Development: Bridging Research and Practice and chaired its publications committee. She has published in numerous refereed journals and is an invited member of several advisory groups, including a research advisory group for the American Camp Association and the National Leadership Steering Committee for the Cooperative Extension System–Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Culture of Health Initiative. She holds a B.S. in psychology from St. Lawrence University and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in human development and family studies from Pennsylvania State University. She also has a nonprofit management executive certificate from Georgetown University, and she is a certified association executive.

Susan B. Hassmiller (Senior Scholar in Residence) is the senior scholar in residence and the senior advisor on nursing to the president of the National Academy of Medicine. She is also the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation senior adviser for nursing and, in partnership with AARP, she directs the foundation’s Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action. This 50-state and District of Columbia effort strives to implement the recommendations of The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health, for which she served as the report’s study director. Her work has included service in public health settings at the local, state, and national levels, including at the Health Resources and Services Administration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She taught community health nursing at the University of Nebraska and George Mason University. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. She serves on several advisory committees and boards, including the Hackensack Meridian Health System, UnitedHealth, Carrier Clinic, and the American Red Cross. She is the recipient of many awards and three honorary doctorates, most notably the Florence Nightingale Medal, the highest international honor given to a nurse by the International Committee of the Red Cross. She has a bachelor’s and a master’s in nursing from Florida State University, a master’s in community health nursing from the University of Nebraska Medical Center, and a Ph.D. in nursing administration and health policy from George Mason University.

Jennifer Lalitha Flaubert (Program Officer) is on the staff of the Board on Health Care Services at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Prior to her work on this project, she carried out research and analysis for four consensus studies sponsored by the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA). The SSA studies focused on disability benefits for children with mental disorders and speech and language disorders; assistive products and technologies in eliminating or reducing the effects of impairments for adults; and functional assessment for adults with disabilities. Prior to joining the National Academies, she worked at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, managing the Adverse Event Reporting System at the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. She has a B.S. in biology from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a master’s in health administration from the University of Maryland.

Adrienne Formentos (Research Associate) is on the staff of the Board on Health Care Services at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Previously, she worked as a research assistant with Knowledge Ecology International, focusing on advocacy for access to medication and clinical trials at the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. She served as a volunteer with the American Red Cross on the disaster action team (DAT) and case management and as the DAT administrator in San Francisco County. She also served as a volunteer with RotaCare Bay Area as a patient services navigator, assisting uninsured patients with follow-up care and applications for health care coverage. Early in her career, she served as a volunteer in Los Angeles, working at St. Vincent Medical Center as a patient advocate and community services coordinator, organizing health fairs and outreach to uninsured and underinsured populations. She has a B.A. in political science and English with a writing emphasis from Dominican University of California, where her thesis and research focused on sex trafficking and security governance, and an M.S. in global health from Georgetown University, where she co-led and authored a qualitative study on adolescents with mental and neurological disorders in Kintampo, Ghana.

Tochi Ogbu-Mbadiugha (Senior Program Assistant) is on the staff of the Board on Health Care Services at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Prior to joining the National Academies, she assisted the legislative practice at Powers, Pyles, Sutter & Verville, PC, tracking legislation relevant to the firm’s health care, disability, and rehabilitation clients. She holds a B.S. in kinesiology from the University of Maryland, College Park, where she completed research on the correlation between built environments and chronic disease rates among adults in urban settings.

Ashley Darcy-Mahoney (Distinguished Nurse Scholar-in-Residence) is a neonatal nurse practitioner and an associate professor at the George Washington University School of Nursing. She has worked throughout her career to advance nursing research, education, and practice, with a focus on neonatology, infant health, and developmental pediatrics. Her research has led to the creation of programs that improve infant health and developmental outcomes for at-risk and pre-term infants. As the director of infant research at the George Washington University Autism and Neurodevelopmental Institute, she advances the body of research in infant health and developmental outcomes in high-risk infants with a focus on understanding the early brain and development trajectories in this population. Her program of research leverages her background in neonatal nursing, behavioral and cognitive assessment, and training in neuroimaging to inform an understanding of multimodal social learning and social perception among high-risk infants and toddlers. Her work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Office of Minority Health, and the Health Resources and Services Administration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; United Way; and the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, among others. She has published in peer-reviewed interprofessional journals. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Nurses and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation nurse faculty scholar alumna, and she has recently been named a modern health care rising star in nursing. She has a B.S. in nursing from Georgetown University and an M.S. in nursing in the field of neonatal nurse practitioner and a Ph.D. in nursing from the University of Pennsylvania.

Allison Squires (Distinguished Nurse Scholar-in-Residence) is an associate professor and the director of the Florence S. Downs Ph.D. Program in Nursing Research & Theory Development at the Rory Meyers College of Nursing at New York University (NYU). In addition to her primary appointment at the College of Nursing, she holds affiliated faculty appointments with the Grossman School of Medicine, the Center for Latin American Studies, and the Center for Drug Use and HIV Research, all at NYU. Her work on this study was part of her service as the distinguished nurse scholar-in-residence for the National Academy of Medicine. An internationally recognized health services researcher, she has led or participated in studies covering 38 countries, with current active projects in the European Union, Ghana, and Mexico. She is also leading the international arm of a COVID-19 study that examines how the global pandemic has affected clinical nursing practice on the front lines. Domestically, her research focuses on improving immigrant and refugee health outcomes with a special interest in breaking down language barriers during health care encounters. Most recently, she completed a study, funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, that analyzed how language barriers influence the risk for hospital readmission from home health care. She has authored more than 150 publications, including more than 100 in peer-reviewed journals. She serves as an associate editor of the International Journal of Nursing Studies (the top-ranked nursing journal in the world), a research editor for the Journal of Nursing Regulation, and an associate editor for BMC Health Services Research. Prior to entering academia full time, she worked as a staff nurse in solid organ transplant and as a staff educator in the U.S. health care system. She has a B.S. in nursing from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.S. in nursing from Duquesne University, and a Ph.D. from Yale University. She also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in health outcomes research at the University of Pennsylvania.

Sharyl Nass (Senior Board Director) serves as the senior director of the Board on Health Care Services and the co-director of the National Cancer Policy Forum at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. To enable the best possible care for all patients, the board undertakes scholarly analysis of the organization, financing, effectiveness, workforce, and delivery of health care, with emphasis on quality, cost, and accessibility. For more than two decades, she has worked on a broad range of health and science policy topics that includes the quality, safety, and equity of health care and clinical trials; developing technologies for precision medicine; and strategies for large-scale biomedical science. She has been the recipient of the Cecil Medal for Excellence in Health Policy Research, a Distinguished Service Award from the National Academies, the mentor award from the Health and Medicine Division of the National Academies, and the Institute of Medicine staff team achievement award (as team leader). She holds a B.S. and an M.S. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a Ph.D. in cell biology from Georgetown University. She also undertook postdoctoral training at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, as well as a research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute in Germany.