• Chad Boult, MD, MPH, MBA
  
• Kelly D. Horton, MS, RD
  
• Diane E. Meier, MD, FACP
• Kathleen Negri, JD

• Steven R. Counsell, MD
• Richard A. Marottoli, MD, MPH
• Kathleen Tschantz Unroe, MD, MHA
• Heidi Wald, MD, MSPH
• Margaret I. Wallhagen, PhD, GNP-BC, AGSF, FAAN

Chad Boult, MD, MPH, MBA

Eugene and Mildred Lipitz Professor
Director of the Roger C. Lipitz Center for Integrated Health Care
Department of Health Policy and Management
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Fellowship Placement: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)

Chad Boult, MD, MPH, is the Lipitz Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He directs the Lipitz Center for Integrated Health Care and holds joint appointments on the faculties of the Johns Hopkins University Schools of Medicine and Nursing. A geriatrician for more than 20 years, Dr. Boult has extensive experience in developing, testing, evaluating, and diffusing new models of health care for older persons. His current focus is on “Guided Care,” an interdisciplinary model of comprehensive care for older people with several chronic conditions. As an expert on chronic care, Dr. Boult has spoken at meetings and conferences throughout the world. He has published two books and more than 75 articles in scientific journals. He also created the first validated instrument for identifying high-risk older persons (the “Pra”). In 2000, he received the “Excellence in Research Award” from the American Geriatrics Society.  In 2008, he received the “Archstone Foundation Award for Excellence in Program Innovation” (for Guided Care) from the American Public Health Association. Additional information is available at www.jhsph.edu/LipitzCenter and www.GuidedCare.org.

Kelly D. Horton, MS, RD

Director, Health Policy
Center for Healthy Aging

National Council on Aging

Fellowship Placement: USDA, Food and Nutrition Services' Office of Strategic Initiatives and Partnerships and Office of Congresswoman Louise M. Slaughter

Passionate about ending global hunger, malnutrition, obesity, and food insecurity, Kelly has worked in the United States, Bangladesh, and South Africa. She has focused on nutrition and healthy aging at both community, programmatic, and public policy levels for several organizations. Kelly is the current Past Chair of the American Dietetic Association's Hunger and Environmental Dietetic Practice Group. She is an expert on the global double burden of malnutrition and obesity. She has contributed to food security and health and hygiene research projects and has been published and quoted in numerous professional publications including the Journal of Hunger and Environmental Nutrition and the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, as well as in the popular press including Martha Stewart’s Body + Soul and Dietitian Today magazines. Kelly was a founding member of the Seattle/King County Food Policy Council and was a Trustee for PCC Natural Markets, the largest natural and organic food co-op in the nation. Kelly possesses a passion for strengthening science and policy intersections between food, agriculture, nutrition and health so that public policy meets the changing needs of our society. She is an avid gardener, farmers’ market customer, and home cook.

Diane E. Meier, MD, FACP

Director, Center to Advance Palliative Care
Director, Hertzberg Palliative Care Institute
Mount Sinai School of Medicine

Fellowship Placement: US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) and Office of the HHS Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE)

Diane E. Meier, MD, FACP, is Director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC), a national organization devoted to increasing the number and quality of palliative care programs in the United States. Under her leadership the number of palliative care programs in U.S. hospitals has more than doubled in the last 5 years. She is also Director of the Lilian and Benjamin Hertzberg Palliative Care Institute; Professor of Geriatrics and Internal Medicine; and Catherine Gaisman Professor of Medical Ethics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.

Dr. Meier is the recipient of numerous awards. She received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in September of 2008. Other honors include the Open Society Institute Faculty Scholar’s Award of the Project on Death in America, the Alexander Richman Commemorative Award for Humanism in Medicine, the Founders Award of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization 2007, AARP’s 50^th Anniversary Social Impact Award 2008, Gold Humanism Honor Society National Honoree 2008, Castle Connelly’s Physician of the Year Award 2009, and the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine Lifetime Achievement Award 2009. She is currently Principal Investigator of an NCI-funded five-year multisite study on the outcomes of hospital palliative care services in cancer patients. 

Dr. Meier has published extensively in all major peer-reviewed medical journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association. She edited the first textbook on geriatric palliative care, as well as four editions of Geriatric Medicine, and has contributed to more than 20 books on the subject of geriatrics and palliative care. As one of the leading figures in the field of palliative medicine, Dr. Meier has appeared numerous times on television and in print, including ABC World News Tonight, Open Mind with Richard Hefner, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the New York Daily News, Newsday, the New Yorker, AARP, and Newsweek. She figured prominently in the Bill Moyers series On Our Own Terms: Dying in America, a four-part documentary aired on PBS.

Dr. Meier received her BA from Oberlin College and her MD from Northwestern University Medical School. She completed her residency and fellowship training at Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland. She has been on the faculty of the Department of Geriatrics and Adult Development and Department of Medicine at Mount Sinai since 1983.

Kathleen Negri, JD

Elder Law Attorney

Denver, CO

Fellowship Placement: US House Democratic Caucus and Aging Policy Organizations

Steven R. Counsell, MD

Mary Elizabeth Mitchell Professor
Director, Indiana University Geriatrics Program
Scientist, Indiana University Center for Aging Research
Indiana University School of Medicine

Steven R. Counsell, MD is the Mary Elizabeth Mitchell Professor and Chair in Geriatrics at Indiana University (IU) School of Medicine and Founding Director of IU Geriatrics, a John A. Hartford Foundation Center of Excellence in Geriatric Medicine. Dr. Counsell recently returned from Australia where as a 2008-2009 Packer Policy Fellow he studied “Innovative Models of Coordinating Care for Older Adults.” Prior to his sabbatical, he served as Geriatrician Consultant to the Indiana Medicaid Office of Policy and Planning. Dr. Counsell is a fellow of the American Geriatrics Society (AGS), immediate past Chair of the AGS Public Policy Committee, and current member of the AGS Board of Directors. Dr. Counsell has conducted large-scale clinical trials testing system level interventions aimed at improving quality, outcomes, and cost-effectiveness of healthcare for older adults.  He was the PI for the NIH funded trial of the Geriatric Resources for Assessment and Care of Elders (GRACE) care management intervention shown to improve quality and outcomes of care in low-income seniors, and reduce hospital utilization and costs in a high risk group. Dr. Counsell is currently leading GRACE dissemination initiatives and working to influence health policy to improve integration of medical and social care for vulnerable elders.

Richard A. Marottoli, MD, MPH

Associate Professor of Medicine
Yale University School of Medicine,
Medical Director
Adler Geriatric Assessment Center at Yale-New Haven Hospital,
Staff Physician
VA Connecticut Healthcare System

Fellowship Placement: US Department of Transportation

Kathleen Tschantz Unroe, MD, MHA

Geriatric Medicine Fellow
Duke University Medical Center and Durham VA Geriatric Research, Education and Clinical Center

Fellowship Placement: Office of the HHS Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE)

Heidi Wald, MD, MSPH

Associate Professor of Medicine
Division of Health Care Policy Research

Vice Chair of Quality

Department of Medicine
University of Colorado Denver

Heidi Wald, MD, MSPH is an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Health Care Policy Research and the Vice Chair of Quality in the Department of Medicine at the University of Colorado Denver. Dr. Wald's interests include patient safety and quality of care for the geriatric patient in the hospital setting. Her recent work has examined process-outcome relationships for this population, with a particular interest in urinary catheter use patterns and catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs). In 2009 she was awarded a Paul Beeson Career Development Award in Aging from the National Institutes of Health to study the prevention of CAUTIs.  In addition, Dr. Wald serves as the Director of Research for the University of Colorado Hospitalist Group and the co-Director of the Acute Care for Elders Service. She is also a Medical Director for the Oklahoma Foundation for Medical Quality in developing quality measures for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Dr. Wald’s fellowship work will explore the impact of CMS’s value-based purchasing initiatives on patient safety outcomes for older inpatients. Dr. Wald’s other recent projects have explored the role of hospitalists in delivering acute care to older patients, and functional outcomes of stroke survivors. She has published in the areas of postoperative infections, sentinel event reporting, and root cause analysis. She was the recipient of the 2007 Founders Award from the Society of General Internal Medicine for a junior faculty member with research promise.

Prior to joining the faculty at UCHSC, Dr Wald was a founding member and director of the Hospitalist Group at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Wald received her MD from Harvard Medical School, and her MSPH from the University of Colorado Denver. She completed her residency in Internal Medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and subsequently completed both a Geriatrics Fellowship and a NRSA Primary Care Research Fellowship at the University of Colorado Denver.

Margaret I. Wallhagen, PhD, GNP-BC, AGSF, FAAN

Professor, Department of Physiological Nursing
Director, John A. Hartford Center of Geriatric Nursing Excellence
University of California, San Francisco

Margaret I. Wallhagen, PhD, GNP-BC, AGSF, FAAN, is a Professor of Gerontological Nursing and a Geriatric Nurse Practitioner in the School of Nursing, University of California San Francisco (UCSF).  She received her initial nursing degree from St. Luke's Hospital School of Nursing in New York, her Baccalaureate and Master’s degrees from UCSF, and her doctoral degree in nursing from the University of Washington in Seattle.  Her prior clinical nursing experience has included critical care nursing and precepting undergraduate nursing students. Since joining the faculty at UCSF in 1988, she has taught gerontological nursing at both the masters and doctoral level, and works as a Geriatric Nurse Practitioner. Dr. Wallhagen has conducted a number of research projects in gerontology and chronic care management.  Her research and publications focus on studies of: the experience of control in caregivers and in persons with diabetes; education and self management in diabetes; successful aging for persons with chronic conditions; self care and symptom management; cross cultural interventions to support family caregivers with dementia; family conflict and coping; and the impact of hearing impairment on older adults. She recently completed a four year longitudinal study of the experience of hearing impairment in older adults and their partners. In January 2006, Dr. Wallhagen became the Director of the UCSF/John A. Hartford Center of Geriatric Nursing Excellence as it entered its second five years of funding. The HCGNE has the mission to prepare a cadre of nurses who have the research, leadership, and educational expertise necessary to facilitate the preparation of future nurse leaders and to meet the needs of the growing population of older adults.

For community service, Dr. Wallhagen is involved with and has served on the Board of Family Caregiver Alliance, a non-profit organization that supports family caregivers, and Bread for the World, an organization that works for policies to eliminate hunger worldwide.