LDI 2016 Fall Kickoff
Event for Senior Fellows and Fellows
Join us for the LDI 2016 Fall Kickoff, where we bring all LDI Senior Fellows and Fellows together to kick off the school year and to welcome new Senior Fellows into the LDI community. The program showcases our new Senior Fellows and their research interests through a series of 4 minute presentations by each of our new fellows. The program will be followed by a reception when you can catch up with friends and fellows, new and old. See previous year’s Kickoffs: 2014 | 2015
Senior Fellows Presenting at Fall Kickoff
Abby Alpert, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Health Care Management at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests are in health economics and public finance. Her recent work has focused on pharmaceuticals and, specifically, the consequences of Medicare and Medicaid policies for prescription drugs. In this area of research, she has studied Medicaid reimbursement policies, Medicaid managed care, Medicare Part D, direct-to-consumer advertising, opioid abuse, and drug shortages. Her research also examines the impacts of Medicare and Medicaid payment policies for other health care services.
Prior to joining Wharton, she was an Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Policy at The Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California in Irvine and she was an Associate Economist at the RAND Corporation. She received her PhD in Economics from the University of Maryland and BS in Mathematics and Economics from the University of Chicago.
Amy Bleakley, PhD, MPH, is a senior research scientist with a teaching appointment at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research investigates the intersection of youth, media, and health, particularly how media affect various health risk behaviors and cognitions. Additionally, she also conducts research using behavioral theory to develop and test health-oriented media communications. Dr. Bleakley has methodological and statistical expertise in survey research, content analysis, and structural equation modeling. She is currently investigating the behavioral effects of adolescents’ exposure to combinations of risky behavior (sex, violence, drinking) in entertainment media popular among youth, with an emphasis on Black-oriented media. Dr. Bleakley is also involved on two projects focused on creating and testing culturally sensitive and theory based media communications to promote sun protection behaviors for indoor and outdoor tanning, and health care seeking around cognitive health for aging parents. Dr. Bleakley’s research has been funded by NICHD, CDC, and RWJF, and she has published in numerous journals including the American Journal of Public Health, Pediatrics, Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine (now JAMA Pediatrics), Media Psychology, Journal of Health Communication, Health Education & Behavior, Journal of Sex Research, Preventive Medicine and the Journal of Adolescent Health. She received her MPH and PhD in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University.
Kathleen G. Burke, PhD, RN, CENP, FAAN, is the Corporate Director, Nursing Professional Development and Innovation University of Pennsylvania Health System. In this role, Dr. Burke provides oversight and strategic leadership for Nursing Professional Development, Education and Innovation for the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, Pennsylvania Hospital, the Clinical Practices of the University of Pennsylvania, Home Care & Hospice Services and Rehab at Good Shepherd Penn Partners, Chester County Healthsystem and Lancaster General Hospitals. Dr. Burke also holds an appointment as Assistant Dean for Clinical Nurse Learning and Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania, School of Nursing and is an Advanced Senior Lecturer in the Nursing Administration and Health Leadership graduate nursing programs where she is co-director for the quality improvement in healthcare and patient safety interprofessional graduate courses.
She received her BSN from Pennsylvania State University, MSN from Widener University and a PhD from University of Pennsylvania, School of Nursing with an emphasis on the history of the Diffusion and Innovation of Healthcare Technology. She is certified by the American Organization of Nurse Executives in Executive Leadership (CENP), is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and is on the Board of the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE).
Dr Burke’s research interests are in the areas of Adoption and Diffusion of Innovations, Professional Healthcare Workforce Development, Interprofessional Education and Practice, Nursing, and Healthcare Quality and Safety.
Margo Brooks Carthon, PhD, RN, FAAN, received her BSN from North Carolina A & T State University in 1995. She earned her MSN in Psychiatric and Adult Health from the University of Pittsburgh in 1998, and her PhD in Nursing in 2008, from the University of Pennsylvania. Immediately after earning her PhD, she entered a joint Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Penn in the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of History and the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research, which she completed in June 2010. Dr. Brooks Carthon joined the standing faculty of the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing in July 2010 and is a core faculty member in the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research.
Dr. Brooks Carthon’s scholarship includes work on nursing outcomes research focused on the relationship between the organization of nursing services and health disparities among vulnerable patient populations. She is among the first to provide evidence that racial disparities in hospital-based outcomes are associated with poor nursing quality. This pathbreaking work shows that targeted investments in nursing in minority-serving hospitals have the potential to reduce health disparities in the areas of hospital readmissions, patient satisfaction and post-surgical mortality. Dr. Brooks Carthon is equally regarded as a thought leader in the area of nursing workforce diversity. Leveraging years of work locally and nationally in the areas of recruitment and retention of underrepresented minorities, Dr. Brooks Carthon has been instrumental in the creation of national policies to address diversity and inclusion in nursing education. Her study findings may be found in interdisciplinary journals including JAMA, BMJ Quality & Safety, the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society and Medical Care. She is a Robert Wood Johnson Nurse Faculty Scholar, and a board member of the Diversity Strategic Action Group for the National League of Nursing.
M. Kit Delgado, MD, MS, is an emergency physician investigator committed to discovering innovative approaches to improve the outcomes of acutely ill and injured patients and also reduce the occurrence of injuries and risky substance abuse in the first place. He has two complementary lines of research. First, he analyses large existing datasets and uses decision analytic modeling to guide policy aimed at improving trauma and emergency care. Currently funded work includes: 1) state dataset analyses to better understand the benefit of trauma center triage for seriously injured older adults and children; 2) insurance claims analyses examining the impact of reducing excessive variation in opioid prescribing for acute injuries; and 3) and collaborative work to develop regional geographic units for measuring and benchmarking variation in population-level outcomes for emergency care sensitive conditions. Second, he is developing a novel research program leveraging smartphones, connected devices, and insights from behavioral economics for injury prevention. He is currently leading pilot randomized trials testing interventions to reduce cellphone use and drinking and driving. Prior to joining the faculty, he completed an NHLBI K12 Career Development Award at Penn with a focus on clinical epidemiology and an AHRQ T32 post-doctoral fellowship in health services research at Stanford.
Hanming Fang, PhD, is Class of 1965 Term Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) where he is also the Director of its Chinese Economy Working Group.
Dr. Fang is an applied microeconomist with broad theoretical and empirical interests focusing on public economics. His research covers topics ranging from discrimination, social economics, welfare reform, psychology and economics, to public good provision mechanisms, auctions, health insurance markets, and population aging.
He is currently working on issues related to insurance markets, particularly the interaction between the labor market and US health insurance reform as well as the interaction between insurance markets and population aging. He also studies issues related to discrimination and affirmative action. He served as a coeditor of the International Economic Review.
His research paper “Sources of advantageous selection: Evidence from the Medigap insurance market” received the 2008 Kenneth Arrow Award by the International Health Economist Association (iHEA). His current research projects on the racial disparities in health care, and the effects of the Affordable Care Act on the labor market have been awarded National Science Foundation research grants. He is also studying the detection of upcoding in Medicare billing and the dynamics of health plan offerings in the health insurance exchange.
Professor Fang received his PhD in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. Before joining the Penn faculty, he held positions at Yale University and Duke University.
John Patrick Fischer, MD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor of Surgery in the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. Prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania faculty, Dr. Fischer completed his undergraduate studies at Hamilton College and medical school at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, NY graduating AOA. Dr. Fischer completed his general surgery and plastic surgery training at the University of Pennsylvania and an MPH at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Fischer has appointments at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, and Pennsylvania Hospital. His practice focuses on both reconstructive and cosmetic surgery with a special interest in abdominal wall and hernia repair and aesthetic surgery of the trunk and breasts. In addition to focusing on clinical and patient care, Dr. Fischer is engaged in patient-centered outcomes and health services research, overseeing the Clinic Research Program within the Division of Plastic Surgery.
Daniel Holena, MD, FACS, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Surgery, Division of Traumatology, Surgical Critical Care, and Emergency Surgery. He is currently on K12 training grant while in the MSCE program at the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics. His research interests include systems of trauma and emergency surgical care delivery, telemedicine, and time sensitive surgical disease states.
Daniel Hopkins, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and has a courtesy appointment at the Annenberg School of Communication. Professor Hopkins’ research addresses a variety of questions related to American political behavior and policymaking. He is the author of 26 academic articles and is currently completing a book manuscript on the nationalization of American politics. Among other topics, his research has examined the role of media framing in shaping attitudes toward the Affordable Care Act. In 2015, he served on the U.S. federal government’s Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, where he assisted in the analysis of an experiment testing different messages to shoppers on the federal health insurance exchange. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2007, and is an occasional writer for FiveThirtyEight.com and for The Monkey Cage at the Washington Post.
Charles E. Kahn, Jr., MD, MS, is professor and vice chairman of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin– Madison, his MD at the University of Illinois, and completed radiology residency at the University of Chicago, where he served as chief resident. He served on the faculty of the University of Chicago and the Medical College of Wisconsin before moving to his current position at Penn. He earned a Master’s degree in Computer Sciences from UW-Madison in 2003. He is a Board-certified, practicing radiologist with expertise in body CT and ultrasound. Professional interests include health services research, comparative effectiveness research, decision support, information standards, and knowledge representation. Honors include the American Roentgen Ray Society Scholarship, the AUR/Konica Visiting Scientist Award, Fellowship of the American College of Radiology, and Fellowship of the Society for Imaging Informatics in Radiology. He served two terms as Co-chair of the DICOM Standards Committee, and was 2012-2013 President of the American Roentgen Ray Society. He is author of more than 110 scientific publications, and the creator of CHORUS, ARRS GoldMiner, and the Radiology Gamuts Ontology.
Sushila Murthy, MD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care at HUP and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Murthy is interested in patient centered care of surgical patients. Her previous work focused on better understanding the decision making process for surgery in complex patients and ensuring that these patients’ goals and preferences inform treatment. Dr. Murthy is particularly interested in the care of older surgical patients, who may have varied goals, values, and concerns related to surgery. She is currently examining the possible role of early palliative or geriatric medicine in the care of older patients who fracture their hip in order to improve preoperative goals of care discussions, augment perioperative medical management, and offer more robust support services for patients postoperatively.
Dr. Murthy received her MD at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and her MPH at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She completed her residency in Anesthesiology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and then continued at MGH to pursue a fellowship in Health Services Research, during which she collaborated with the Center for Surgery and Public Health. She joined the faculty in her current position in 2015.
Robert Krouse, MD, MS, FACS, is Chief of Surgical Services at the Corporal Michael J. Crescenz Veterans Affairs Medical Center and currently Instructor of Surgery with tenure at the University of Pennsylvania. As a Surgical Oncologist, Dr. Krouse’s clinical interests include skin cancers, GI cancers, soft tissue sarcomas, and endocrine cancers. His research interests have predominantly focused on Cancer Survivorship issues, including End-of-Life Care. Dr. Krouse’s interest in issues for patients with advanced cancer began as an Immunotherapy Fellow at the National Cancer Institute (1993-1994). This interest broadened as a Surgical Oncology Fellow at the City of Hope National Medical Center (1997-2000), where he was mentored in techniques related to Surgical Oncology and Quality of Life research. Dr. Krouse expanded his research program at the University of Arizona Cancer Center and the Tucson VA, and has recently moved to his new roles in Philadelphia.
Dr. Krouse participates in many research projects, predominantly related to his major interests in gastrointestinal cancers, skin cancers, quality of life, and end of life care. He was the Principal Investigator of a Department of Veterans Affairs Health Services Research and Development Award (IIR 02-221) related to the quality of life for veterans with intestinal stomas and of NCI R01 (CA106912) quality of life study for long-term cancer survivors with intestinal stomas in a general population setting. A renewal of this grant focused on rectal cancer survivors and functional outcomes. He was also Principal Investigator of a pilot intervention study (R21 CA133337) for new ostomates to test the feasibility, efficacy, and comprehensibility of a self-management care curriculum based on the Chronic Care Model. He is recognized internationally as an expert in the palliative surgical treatment of patients with advanced cancer. This notably includes invasive procedures for symptom control. In 2004 Dr. Krouse organized and was moderator for an international conference on malignant bowel obstruction (R13 CA110771), with the goal of advancing palliative care research through development of a trial protocol using malignant bowel obstruction as a model. Dr. Krouse is Principal Investigator for a trial protocol for malignant bowel obstruction funded by AHRQ (R01 HS021491) in partnership with SWOG (S1316), as well as a recently funded patient-centered outcomes study using telehealth to empower ostomates in self-management of their ostomy care and improve their quality of life (PCORI 1507-31690).
Dr. Krouse serves on the Executive Committee of the American College of Surgeons Committee on Surgical Palliative Care, whose purpose is to help introduce the precepts and techniques of palliative care to surgical practice and education in the United States and Canada. He is Chair of the Research Subcommittee. He is also the Co-Chair of the SWOG Cancer Survivorship Committee.
Dr. Salimah Meghani received a PhD in Nursing/Master in Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania and completed her post-doctoral training in health disparities at the Center for Health Disparities Research at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. She is currently an Associate Professor at Penn Nursing. Dr. Meghani’s main research interest involves palliative care, specifically understanding and addressing sources of disparities in symptom management and outcomes among vulnerable populations. She has authored high impact work on symptom management disparities and outcomes in patients with advanced illness. Dr. Meghani is the immediate past Chair of the American Pain Society’s Pain Disparities Special Interest Group. She also serves on the editorial board of Pain Medicine, the official journal of the American Academy of Pain Medicine. Dr. Meghani also served as a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Approaching Death: Addressing Key End of Life Issues that authored Dying in America: Improving Quality and Honoring Individual Preferences Near the End of Life consensus report.
Genevieve (Genny) Pham-Kanter, PhD, is an economist whose research focuses on physician-industry relationships and conflicts of interest in medicine. Other research interests include pharmaceutical and medical device policy, the use of taxation and subsidies in public health, physician behavior and physician labor markets, and empirical ethics. Methodologically, she specializes in statistical methods used for causal inference.
She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Management and Policy at the Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health. Prior to joining Drexel, she held Assistant Professor appointments jointly in the Colorado School of Public Health on the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, and in the Department of Economics at the University of Colorado Denver. She has also held research fellow appointments at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard University, and Princeton University. She received a PhD in Economics and in Sociology from the University of Chicago.
Graham E. Quinn, MD, received his medical degree from Duke University School of Medicine in 1973. He completed an internship in internal medicine and a year of pathology residency at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland before moving to Philadelphia to complete his residency in ophthalmology at Penn. He did his fellowship training at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and stayed on as a member of the faculty in the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Quinn completed the Master of Clinical Epidemiology degree in the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Quinn’s interest areas are retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) and visual and ocular development in children. He was a principal investigator and member of the executive and editorial committees of the landmark CRYO-ROP study and PI of the Philadelphia center and worked with Velma Dobson, PhD in the Vision Testing center for ETROP. He served as a member of the original group that developed the International Classification of ROP and recently chaired a “revisiting” of the classification. He has participated in a large number of international conferences and workshops on ROP prevention and treatment in countries with rapidly developing neonatal care systems. Recent work has concentrated on early markers identifying at risk babies and also telemedicine in ROP. Recently, Dr. Quinn served as Principal Investigator and Chair of the multicenter National Eye Institute-funded “Telemedicine Approaches to Evaluating Acute-phase ROP – e-ROP.” This project addressed the very important issue of whether remote evaluation of digital images of eyes of infants at risk for ROP could reliably be detected and referred to an ophthalmologist for an eye examination to determine whether treatment is warranted. The findings have great importance not only in the US, but also in countries where survival of premature infants is increasing, but where ophthalmic expertise may be scarce.
Joseph Rossano, MD, MS, attended medical school at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and Seattle Children’s Hospital for his pediatric residency. He moved to Houston for pediatric cardiology fellowship training and there underwent additional fellowship training in cardiac intensive care and heart failure / transplantation. While on the faculty of Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital he obtained a Masters of Science degree in clinical research. He is currently the Executive Director of the Cardiac Center, Medical Director for Heart Failure & Transplantation, and Associate Professor of Pediatrics at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
His career has been dedicated to improving the lives of children with cardiovascular diseases. His research interest involves the epidemiology and outcomes of cardiovascular disease in children and multi-institutional collaborative observational and interventional studies. He is most interested in evaluating the treatment and outcomes of pediatric cardiomyopathy, heart failure, and transplantation.
Kira L. Ryskina, MD, MSHP, is a clinician investigator interested in understanding physician practice as it relates to high-quality and high-value care. Her most recent work focused on institutional and physician-level factors that influence physicians’ attitudes, knowledge, and practice of low value care, an important problem associated with high costs and poor patient outcomes. The studies required complex linkages of survey, administrative billing, and other secondary data. Dr. Ryskina’s long term goal is to establish an independent research program to optimize physician practice to improve outcomes for adults with multiple chronic conditions.
Dominic A. Sisti, PhD, is director of the Scattergood Program for the Applied Ethics of Behavioral Health Care and assistant professor in the Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy. He holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Psychiatry, where he directs the ethics curriculum in the residency program. Dr. Sisti’s research examines the ethics of mental health care services and policies. He also studies the philosophical dimensions of the concept of mental disorder with a focus on personality disorders.
Robin Stevens, PhD, MPH, is a health communication scholar focused on achieving health equity in African American and Latino communities. Her research integrates public health and communication science to influence the individual, social and structural determinants that drive health inequity. Her area of expertise is in examining the relationship between new and traditional media and adolescent risk behavior. Her program of research is typified by two lines of inquiry: the quantification of new and traditional media effects on adolescent health behavior, and the development of media-informed HIV prevention interventions. She is the author of the recent article on “The Digital Hood”.
Dr. Stevens is an Assistant Professor in Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and the Director of the Health Equity & Media Lab. She received her AB from Harvard College, MPH from University of Michigan, and PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. She is also a Visiting Professor at the Center for AIDS Prevention Research at UC-San Francisco and a Senior Fellow at the Penn Center for Public Health Initiatives.