Throughout its 57-year history, the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI) has been facilitating multidisciplinary research collaboration among its hundreds of Senior and Associate Fellows. The annual LDI Fall Kickoff is one of the ways it achieves that by introducing new fellows and providing them with an opportunity to indicate the kinds of collaboration projects they are interested in. The 2024 Kickoff that took place on September 10 in Penn’s Houston Hall welcomed new Senior Fellows from the Perelman School of Medicine, Penn School of Nursing, School of Social Policy and Practice, and Penn Dental Medicine.

The event in the Hall of Flags was a social gathering featuring food tastings from local restaurants, breweries, and wineries.

Penn LDI brings together broad levels of talent and experience from across the University to address the most pressing health and health care challenges facing the country today. The new senior fellow cohort exemplifies this and the list below provides examples of LDI’s robust interdisciplinary representation.

LauraEllen Ashcraft, PhD, MSW
Assistant Professor, Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics, Perelman School of Medicine

Ashcraft is an Implementation Science Methodologist in the Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion (CHERP) at Philadelphia’s Corporal Michael J. Crescenz VA Medical Center, where she also serves as the Co-Director of the Dissemination & Implementation Science Core. Her research interests focus on implementation science and mixed methods research. She is seeking collaborators in the methods and theory advancement in implementation science. Fun Fact: She is the President of the Stateside Seagulls, an Official US Supporters’ Club of the Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club and members of the U.S. Premier League.

Heather Brom, PhD, RN
Research Assistant Professor, Biobehavioral Health Sciences, Penn Nursing

Brom’s research focuses on improving the health care for individuals with complex medical and social needs and on patient outcomes and equity in community settings. Her research interests also include the nursing and nurse practitioner workforce. She’s interested in collaborations that examine how variations in organizational factors and policies impact nurses’ scope of practice, health system practices and policies, and how interdisciplinary teams develop and implement system-level interventions. Fun Fact: She has ‘leaned into” suburban living and now crochets and plays pickleball.

Sara Handley, MD, MSCE
Assistant Professor, Pediatrics, Perelman School of Medicine

Handley is an attending physician in the Division of Neonatology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and an epidemiologist focused on evaluating the impact of the perinatal health care system, including health care structures, organizational culture, and care process variation on perinatal care quality, and geographic variation in that care. She welcomes collaborations in novel approaches for collecting organizational culture data and studying rural health care delivery. Fun Fact: A competitive dancer in college, she has recently returned to dance class after a long hiatus.

Roopali Kulkarni, DMD, MPH
Assistant Professor, Oral Medicine, Penn Dental Medicine

Kulkarni currently teaches predoctoral and postdoctoral students clinically in the Oral Medicine clinic and lectures on topics within oral medicine and interdisciplinary care. An attending physician at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, she treats patients at Penn Medicine Radnor and is also the Assistant Director of the postgraduate oral medicine program. Her research interests include oral cancer and patient access to oral health care for socially-at-risk and unhoused individuals. She seeks collaborators in statistical analysis for clinical research. Fun Fact: She attends a weekly musical theater dance class.

Hongzhe Li, PhD
Perelman Professor of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics, Perelman School of Medicine

Li is the Vice Chair for Research Integration, Director of the Center of Statistics in Big Data, Professor of Statistics and Data Science at the Wharton School, and a Professor of Applied Mathematics and Computational Science at Penn. His research interests include statistical learning and artificial intelligence (AI) in health care, and integrative genomics in population health. He welcomes collaboration in applying new statistical learning and AI methods to large, multimodal datasets in health care to improve health outcomes. Fun Fact: He walks five miles and practices yoga every day.

Marylyn Ritchie, PhD
Vice Dean, Artificial Intelligence and Computing, Perelman School of Medicine

Ritchie, who is also a Professor of Genetics at the Perelman School of Medicine, is an expert in translational bioinformatics, with a focus on developing, applying, and disseminating algorithms, methods, and tools integrating electronic health records (EHR) with genomics. She is interested in collaborations looking at the social determinants of health in the Penn Medicine BioBank and linking EHR data with insurance claims data to create a more complete dataset for phenotyping disease. Fun Fact: During the pandemic, she launched the Combining Academia and Life with Marylyn (CALM) podcast.

Abby Ross, PhD, MSW
Associate Professor, Social Policy and Practice, School of Social Policy & Practice

Ross, who is also an Associate Professor in Psychiatry at the Perelman School of Medicine, focuses her research on developing and implementing evidence-based interventions that both improve youth and family well-being and advance equity within youth-serving health systems. Her research interests include youth suicide prevention, clinical intervention research, and leveraging EHR technology to address social drivers of health within pediatric health systems. She seeks a health economics or health informatics collaborator interested in working with EHR data. Fun Fact: She is a SCUBA diving enthusiast.

Anna Jo Smith, MD, MPH
Assistant Professor, Gynecologic Oncology, Perelman School of Medicine

Smith is a gynecologic oncologist who focuses on how to improve equitable delivery of evidence-based cancer care. Her current work focuses on interventions that reduce health disparities for patients with gynecologic cancer, including rural women. She is passionate about research mentoring and has guided several medical students and residents through projects while in clinical training herself. She seeks collaborators interested in patient-reported outcomes and causal inference in non-randomized studies. Fun Fact: She is the only one in her family that hasn’t been bitten by a snake.

Shana Stites, PsyD, MA
Assistant Professor, Psychiatry, Perelman School of Medicine

Stites’ work focuses on advancing diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease dementia. This includes understanding the impacts of the disease on individuals who may be directly affected by pathology as well as their family members. Her research interests include the social and psychological experiences of preclinical Alzheimer’s disease and understanding how social and structural characteristics, including aspects of identity, such as age, gender, and race, operate as determinants of the disease experience. She is seeking a strong collaborative writer to co-author with. Fun Fact: She has three children and backyard chickens.

Additional New LDI Senior Fellows

Millan AbiNader, PhD, MSW
Assistant Professor, Social Work & Social Policy, School of Social Policy & Practice
Carmen Alvarez, PhD, CRNP
Associate Professor, Department of Family and Community Health, Penn Nursing
Ron Berman, PhD
Associate Professor, Marketing, Wharton School
Molly Davis, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Perelman School of Medicine
Assistant Professor, Psychiatry, Perelman School of Medicine
Irma Elo, PhD, MPA
Tamsen and Michael Brown Presidential Professor, Sociology, School of Arts and Sciences
Daniel Herman, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor, Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine
Sophia Hua, PhD, MPH
Assistant Professor, Medical Ethics and Health Policy, Perelman School of Medicine
Marissa King, PhD
Professor, Health Care Management, Wharton School
Professor, Management, Wharton School
Anireddy Reddy, MD, MSHP
Assistant Professor, Department of Anesthesiology & Critical Care, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
Aaron Richterman, MD, MPH
Assistant Professor, Infectious Disease, Perelman School of Medicine
Assistant Professor, Medical Ethics and Health Policy, Perelman School of Medicine
Eric Roberts, PhD
Associate Professor, General Internal Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine
Michael Stawnychy, PhD, CRNP
Assistant Professor, Biobehavioral Health Sciences, Penn Nursing
Ashish Thakrar, MD, MSHP
Assistant Professor, Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine
Aditi Vasan, MD, MSHP
Assistant Professor, Pediatrics, Perelman School of Medicine
Pediatric Hospitalist, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
J. Deanna Wilson, MD, MPH
Assistant Professor, Family Medicine and Community Health, Perelman School of Medicine
Assistant Professor, Adolescent Medicine, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
Christopher Chesley, MD, MSCE
Assistant Professor of Medicine, Pulmonary and Critical Care, Perelman School of Medicine
Jessica Fishman, PhD
Director, Message Effects Lab, Annenberg School for Communication

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