|
2011-2012
| Residential Fellows |
Non-Residential Fellows |
|
|
|
Residential Fellows
 |
Dawn Alley, PhD
Assistant Research Professor
University of Maryland School of Medicine
|
Dawn Alley, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Gerontology Division of the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where her research examines two important determinants of disability at older ages: socioeconomic status and obesity. Her work combines an understanding of biological mechanisms of frailty with a demographic approach. In recent projects, Dr. Alley has examined the association between financial strain and health in older adults, the changing association between obesity and disability over time, and the effects of muscle weakness (sarcopenia) on disability. Her work has been published in a range of journals including Journal of the American Medical Association, American Journal of Public Health, The Gerontologist, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, and American Journal of Epidemiology. Dr. Alley holds a PhD in Gerontology from the University of Southern California. In addition, she received post-doctoral training in population health from the University of Pennsylvania as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar.
|
 |
Karon Phillips, PhD, MPH
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Scott & White Healthcare |
Karon L. Phillips, PhD, MPH, is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Program on Aging and Care at Scott & White Healthcare in Temple, Texas. During her fellowship tenure she has worked within a program of applied health research with a concentration in community-based translational research with older populations.
Dr. Phillips completed her Master of Public Health (Health Policy and Management concentration) and her PhD in Aging Studies from the University of South Florida. The work she completed for her dissertation examined multiple indicators related to cultural competence, including predictors of having a provider of the same race/ethnicity, client perceptions of the cultural competence of their health care providers, and overall satisfaction with care reported by African American/Black, Hispanic/Latino, Asian American and Non-Hispanic White adults ages 50 to 99. While in graduate school, she conducted research in behavioral health disparities and perceived cultural competence among Medicaid recipients. Dr. Phillips’ current research interest is centered on the study, and ultimate elimination, of health disparities among older minority populations through cultural competence, improving health literacy, and community-based interventions. In addition to her research experiences in graduate school, Dr. Phillips completed two internships at AARP in both the national office in Washington, DC, and in one of the state offices in Atlanta, GA. She is also an alumna of the New Ventures in Leadership Program, which is organized by the American Society on Aging.
Dr. Phillips has been very involved in several leadership positions nationally related to health issues and aging. She is currently serving as a Section Councilor in Aging and Public Health section of the American Public Health Association (APHA). Prior to that, she served as the APHA Student Assembly Representative for the same section. In addition to her service to APHA, she served as the Secretary for the Emerging Scholars and Professional Organization (ESPO) section of the Gerontological Society of America (GSA). Lastly, she recently completed service as the Senior Social Research Policy and Practice Representative to ESPO.
|
 |
Erica Solway, PhD, MSW, MPH
Program Director, Older Adult Day Support/Community Integration Services
Family Service Agency of San Francisco |
Erica Solway, PhD, MSW, MPH, was a Program Director at Family Service Agency of San Francisco where she directed a geriatric mental health program and led advocacy efforts around economic security among older adults. Dr. Solway received a Master of Social Work with a focus on aging and social policy (and a Specialist in Aging Certificate) as well as a Master of Public Health from the University of Michigan and a doctoral degree in sociology from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She has conducted research in the areas of aging, social insurance, mental health, smoking cessation, and health promotion. Previously, Dr. Solway was an instructor at San Jose State University, the Mental Health Fellow with the Smoking Cessation Leadership Center, and a researcher at the UCSF Institute for Health and Aging. Dr. Solway is the recipient of several awards including a CDC Public Health Dissertation Award, Anselm L. Strauss Dissertation Award, and Hartford Foundation Pre-Dissertation Award. She has presented her research at several national conferences, published her work in professional publications, and co-edited the book Social Insurance and Social Justice: Social Security, Medicare, and the Campaign Against Entitlements.
|
 |
Sally Stearns, PhD
Professor
Department of Health Policy and Management
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
Sally C. Stearns, PhD, is Professor of Health Policy and Management, Gillings School of Global Public Health, and Senior Research Fellow at the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Trained as a health economist, Dr. Stearns’ areas of expertise include comparative effectiveness research, economic evaluation, Medicare, nursing home use, nursing home staffing, and health care use at the end of life. Her current research focuses on health outcomes and resource use for Medicare beneficiaries. She is the principal investigator for the Cardiovascular Outcomes Research Center, which is funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute as part of the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study. Her primary professional affiliations include: AcademyHealth (for which previously served as Chair of the Long-Term Care Interest Group), the International Health Economists Association, and the American Society of Health Economists.
|
Non-Residential Fellows
 |
Julie Bynum, MD, MPH
Associate Professor, Associate Director of the Center for Health Policy Research
&The Dartmouth Institute
|
Julie P.W. Bynum, MD, MPH, is Associate Professor of Medicine at Dartmouth Medical School and at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, where she is also the Associate Director of the Center for Health Policy Research. Dr. Bynum joined the faculty at Dartmouth in 2003 after completing both of her degrees and a research fellowship in Geriatrics at Johns Hopkins University. Her primary interest is in improving the delivery of health care to vulnerable elderly, especially those over the age of 80 and the cognitively impaired. Dr. Bynum’s research has focused on assessment of health system performance for the elderly using national U.S. Medicare administrative data. To support this work, Dr. Bynum has received funding from the American Geriatric Society Foundation for Health in Aging Program for Research on Health Outcomes and the Robert Wood Johnson Physician Faculty Scholar Program. She currently holds a National Institute of Aging Beeson Career Development Award in Aging (K23) to study quality and efficiency of healthcare delivery to high-risk elderly, particularly the very old or cognitively impaired. One of Dr. Bynum’s contributions is the development of “virtual” Physician-Hospital Networks using Medicare data to assess care delivery by specific provider groups that can be used to model the design and potential impact of policies related to Accountable Care Organizations.
|
 |
Michael J. Fosina, MPH, FACHE
Vice President and Executive Director
New York Presbyterian/Allen Hospital
|
Michael J. Fosina, MPH, FACHE, has spent over twenty years at the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital (NYP) and is currently a member of the senior management team as the Vice President and Executive Director of NYP/The Allen Hospital. In his eleven years in this position, he has helped make The Allen Hospital a premier community teaching hospital and trusted health care provider for the communities of Manhattan, the Bronx and beyond. He is a Fellow in the American College of Healthcare Executives and is board certified in healthcare management.
He was also instrumental in creating both a Division of Geriatric Medicine and Aging and a Division of Podiatry at Columbia University Medical Center and NYP. He has focuses a significant amount of his time working with the local nursing homes on transition of care issues. Mr. Fosina has enhanced the use information technology at the campus and uses it to leverage the clinical expertise of the academic centers of NewYork-Presbyterian. In his previous role, he helped facilitate the one of the largest hospital mergers in the country between The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center and the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. Through his efforts, the hospital achieved success through its first JCAHO survey as a newly merged entity.
Mr. Fosina received his BS from the University of Delaware and his graduate degree from Columbia University School of Public Health. Mr. Fosina has spoken in a JCAHO national broadcast on designing Environment of Care programs for hospitals. In addition, he has lectured on Patient Safety initiatives and other healthcare issues both regionally and nationally. Mr. Fosina is active on the Boards of numerous community organizations and has received several awards for both his professional accomplishments and his community work. Most recently he was honored by the ACHE as the Senior Regent Award winner for his contributions to the Advancement of Health Care Management Excellence.
|
 |
Tracie Harrison, PhD
Associate Professor
The University of Texas at Austin School of Nursing
|
Tracie Harrison, PhD, RN, is currently an Associate Professor at The University of Texas at Austin. Her policy interests surround the federal and state laws that affect the long-term health related benefits of women aging with disabilities, which include worker’s compensation, Medicare and Medicaid related legislation. These interests spring from her current mixed-method ethnographic study exploring health disparities in disablement outcomes in community residing older Mexican American and Non-Hispanic White women with mobility impairments.
Dr. Harrison is also a family nurse practitioner who brings with her training in women’s health through a pre-doctoral institutional national research service award from the National Institute of Nursing Research, and in aging with disability and qualitative methods through a pre-doctoral Building Academic Geriatric Nursing Capacity (BAGNC) Scholars Award from the John A. Hartford Foundation. She was also named a Harrington Dissertation Fellow by The University of Texas at Austin for her work on the experiences of elders aging with the effects of early onset polio. From 2005-2007 she completed a John A. Hartford-Atlantic BAGNC postdoctoral fellowship focused on aging with disability from a multi-cultural perspective. Dr. Harrison has been a co-investigator on a longitudinal study considering the impact of functional limitation on the health-promoting lifestyles of persons with multiple sclerosis, as well as a principal investigator of other disability and aging related studies. She has most recently worked with the disability and Hispanic communities, as well as the Texas Chapter of the Arthritis Foundation, to improve mobility related health disparities in Mexican American women.
|
 |
Lew Lipsitz, MD
Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Chief of Gerontology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Director of the Institute for Aging Research and
Vice President for Academic Medicine,
|
Lewis A. Lipsitz, MD, currently serves as Vice President for Academic Medicine and Director of the Institute for Aging Research at Hebrew SeniorLife in Boston, MA, where he holds the Irving and Edyth S. Usen and Family Chair in Medical Research. He is also a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Chief of the Division of Gerontology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. A graduate of Franklin and Marshall College, Dr. Lipsitz earned his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and a master’s degree from Harvard University. He completed his residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in geriatrics at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. Dr. Lipsitz’s research interests include falls, fainting, blood pressure regulation, cognitive dysfunction, and improving chronic care for elderly people. He has published more than 250 original research papers, review articles, and textbook chapters, and co-edited “Quality Care in the Nursing Home” and “Geriatric Diabetes.” In recognition of his achievements in teaching, mentoring, and clinical care he was awarded the prestigious William Silen Lifetime Achievement Award in Mentoring from Harvard Medical School and the Joseph Freeman Award from the Gerontological Society of America in 2010.
|
 |
G. Adriana Perez, PhD, ANP
Assistant Professor and Southwest Borderlands Scholar
2009-2011 John A. Hartford Foundation Claire M. Fagin Postdoctoral Fellow
College of Nursing and Health Innovation
Hartford Center of Geriatric Nursing Excellence
Arizona State University
|
Adriana Perez, PhD, ANP, is an Assistant Professor and Southwest Borderlands Scholar at Arizona State University College of Nursing and Health Innovation (ASU CONHI). A graduate of the first cohort of PhD students at ASU CONHI, she received funding to support her doctoral dissertation from the John A. Hartford Foundation Building Academic Geriatric Nursing Capacity (BAGNC) program; the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Nursing Research through an Individual Nursing Research Service Award; Beta Upsilon Chapter of Sigma Theta Tau International; and the National Coalition of Ethnic Minority Nurses. In 2009, she was awarded a John A. Hartford Foundation Claire M. Fagin Fellowship for postdoctoral training as a geriatric nurse scientist.
Dr. Perez’s program of research focuses on cardiovascular health promotion among older diverse populations. She has developed and tested a theory-based motivational intervention to promote physical activity among older Hispanic women in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Dr. Perez has used mixed-methods to address the complexities of culturally-relevant, community-based research that emphasizes cultural strengths, resources, and social networks to develop a feasible and culturally-relevant wellness motivation intervention to reduce cardiovascular health disparities among older Hispanics. In the healthcare policy area, Dr. Perez is focused on the translation of effective interventions that promote healthy aging in sustainable community programs.
Dr. Perez has clinical experience in cardiovascular nursing as a practitioner and educator. She is an active member of the National Association of Hispanic Nurses – Valle del Sol Chapter in Phoenix, Arizona, and is Chair of the BAGNC Alumni Association.
|
|
