Emphasizing the unprecedented challenges facing the health services research field, AcademyHealth President and CEO Aaron Carroll welcomed attendees to the 2025 Annual Research Meeting at the Minneapolis Convention Center on June 8. (Photos: Hoag Levins)
The collective angst and anguish permeating the first AcademyHealth Research Meeting (ARM) in President Donald Trump’s second term were summed up in the June 8 remarks of ARM Program Chair Bianca Frogner, PhD, as she opened the event in the Minneapolis Convention Center.
“It’s an understatement to say these are difficult times for our profession,” said Frogner, a health economist and Professor at the University of Washington. “Many of our colleagues are not able to join us because they’ve lost their funding or their jobs. Those who still have jobs are constantly worried about their future. Others worry about whether their area of research is even going to exist in the future.”
“So, how do we move forward to help the most vulnerable people in our society when we feel that we’re barely hanging on ourselves?” asked Frogner, raising the unanswered question that hung over this four-day meeting like a grim emotional fog.
Missing Data
Speaking next, AcademyHealth President and CEO Aaron Carroll, MD, MS, noted: “This has been a rough few months with a lot of polarization, misinformation, and declining trust in science in general. We’ve seen grants and contracts canceled. We’ve seen whole areas of research shunned, not because they lack merit, but because they confront hard truths about inequality, racism, and systemic barriers to health. And we’ve also seen barriers to reliable, timely health data. We’ve all been affected.”
Among the list of aggressive actions Carroll said AcademyHealth has taken in response to the Trump administration’s policy changes is the organization’s participation in a federal lawsuit to restore access to key public health data sets because transparency and accountability save lives.
“Credible evidence matters,” Carroll continued. “We must ensure that government data stays accessible — and that isn’t just about evidence. It’s about equity. Credible data must inform policy, and that starts with making sure that no group is erased from the picture.”
Censoring Science
Throughout the conference, the talk everywhere was about terminated grants. In the first poster session, the board that was supposed to hold poster A-317 instead had an 8.5-by-11-inch piece of paper stuck in its middle. It said, “As of June 3, 2025, VA withheld approval for this presentation due to the theme of the research.”
One of the issues triggering some of the most emotional discussions during the event was that of new federal policies censoring what could be published or said in scientific papers, as well as scientists self-censoring out of fear. In the Monday plenary panel discussion on “Strategies for Shifting Research Climates,” University of Pennsylvania Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy and LDI Senior Fellow Aaron Schwartz, MD, PhD, addressed that subject head on.
Pushing Back
“Censorship is a much bigger problem than the funding situation because censorship and enforced ideological conformity is antithetical to scientific work,” he said. “It’s not that it doesn’t just make it harder in the way that scarce funding makes it harder. It’s just not consistent with the core activity. It is incredibly important that we as researchers push back against those limits. We can’t have a productive scientific community in the absence of intellectual freedom and the ability to publish the things that we think are true.”
At the previous day’s plenary session, Schwartz had received the AcademyHealth 2025 Alice S. Hersh Emerging Leader Award, one of the health services research field’s most prestigious honors.
Here is what the conference looked like for fellows, staff, and students of Penn’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI):
Aaron Schwartz, MD, PhD, LDI Senior Fellow and Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, has won the 2025 AcademyHealth Alice S. Hersh Emerging Leader Award. His acceptance speech paused for a teary moment when he mentioned the two mentors he credits most with his success: the late J. Sanford (Sandy) Schwartz, MD, and Kevin Volpp, MD, PhD, Director of Penn’s Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics (CHIBE).
Penn’s Summer Undergraduate Mentored Research (SUMR) program was awarded the 2025 AcademyHealth Mosaic Award for its 25 years of work and commitment to creating a more representative and welcoming experience for undergraduates interested in joining the health services research community. SUMR Founding Director and LDI Director of Student Initiatives Joanne Levy, MBA, MPC, accepted the award from AcademyHealth President and CEO Aaron Carroll, MD, MS. (Read about her acceptance speech).
Manning the LDI booth in the AcademyHealth Expo Hall is Traci Chupik, MSEd, LDI Director of Operations. The Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI) is the University of Pennsylvania’s hub for research on health care delivery, health policy, and population health, and its more than 500 Senior and Associate Fellows constitute a thriving community across the Penn campus. Many play leading roles in the AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting.
The AcademyHealth exhibitors hall offers the opportunity to directly engage with executives from a wide range of health care-related academic, business, research, government, and scientific publishing institutions, including Weill Cornell Medicine, RAND Corporation, the Mayo Clinic, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), Health Affairs, and many other potentially valuable career contacts. Wandering that hall this year were 2025 SUMR Scholars: Sophia Szrek de Sousa Pereira of Case Western, Rachel Suh of Wellesley, Aditi Halpe of Penn, Sanjana Kashyap of the University of Illinois, and Shruthika Padhy of Brown University.
AcademyHealth President and CEO Aaron Carroll, MD, MS, chats with three current SUMR scholars Chinelo Osakwe of Penn, Rachael Suh of Wellesley College, and Insherah Qazi of Agnes Scott College.
Speaking on a panel about developing the next generation of the health policy research workforce, LDI Executive Director Rachel Werner, MD, PhD, recapped her organization’s broad range of training programs for Associate Fellows, Clinical Fellows, post-docs, and two pipeline programs: Get Experience in Aging Research Undergraduate Program (GEAR UP) and the Summer Undergraduate Mentored Research (SUMR) program. The latter won this year’s AcademyHealth Mosaic award for advancing equity and channeling undergraduates toward advanced degrees in the health services research field.
At the session entitled, “Partnerships are the Heart of Community-Engaged Research,” Derek Griffith, PhD, LDI Senior Fellow and Professor at both Penn Nursing and the Perelman School, noted that often researchers and their community partners fail to synchronize their goals and expectations. “Some researchers are fine with engaging with a community around an agenda that they’ve already set. But the community partners had a model that envisioned them being involved from the inception of the idea. If you’re operating from a different set of principles, that makes it very difficult to actually achieve an effective partnership.”
LDI Senior Fellow and VA Medical Center nephrologist Yuvaram Reddy, MBBS, MPH, focused on in-clinic versus home dialysis for kidney failure patients. “People tend to think about dialysis as going somewhere three times a week where someone to takes their blood out for four hours, cleans it and puts it back in their bodies. But people can also do dialysis at home either by home hemodialysis or something called peritoneal dialysis. Home dialysis tends to be more flexible, there’s no difference in mortality, and it tends to be cheaper by about $15,000 per person per year.” But he noted that only 5% of veterans with kidney failure use the home method.
LDI Senior Fellow Paula Chatterjee, MD, MPH, was the chair of a “blitz” session panel addressing health care patient social issues. Each speaker had five minutes to synopsize their project, followed by robust audience questioning. The six topics were deploying virtual care for hypertension disparities, socioeconomic disparities in childhood asthma, social risk adjustment for children with Medicaid, social risk screening in hospitalized older adults, developing a single-question screening tool to detect household food insecurity, and methadone policies associated with treatment continuity.
LDI’s annual AcademyHealth party took place in Minneapolis’ Brit’s Pub, a unique facility celebrating British culture, style, and food to the point that it boasts both a 10,000-square-foot lawn bowling green and an English Garden Park on its roof, where it holds British sporting and social events. The interior is a cozy, wood-paneled pub festooned with British memorabilia.
Celebrating the Penn LDI/Wharton Summer Undergraduate Mentored Research (SUMR) program’s win of the 2025 AcademyHealth Mosaic Award are LDI Executive Director Rachel Werner, MD, PhD, and Joanne Levy, MBA, MPC, the Founding Director of SUMR and Director of Student Initiatives at LDI.
A visiting mother-daughter team of former LDI and Penn alumni are Nora Becker, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan, and her mother, Karin Rhodes, MD, MS, a Special Advisor to the Secretary at the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services (DHS).
Stopping by the LDI party after partnering with LDI Senior Fellow Amol Navathe, MD, PhD, in the “Great Debates: Medicare Advantage and the Corporatization of Health Care” AcademyHealth session was Michael Chernew, PhD, Professor of Health Care Policy and Director of the Healthcare Markets and Regulations Lab at Harvard Medical School and also Chair of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC).
Meeting and greeting people around the LDI AcademyHealth party are current SUMR scholars Anna Lui of Johns Hopkins University, Sanya Tinaikar of Penn, Aditi Halpe of Penn, Sharon Alex of City College of New York, and Anzu Isa of Penn.
Chatting are Gilbert Gimm, PhD, Wharton School alumnus and Director of the Health Services Research PhD program at George Mason College of Public Health; Fred Blavin, PhD, another Wharton alumnus and a Principal Research Associate in the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute; and LDI Senior Fellow Aaron Schwartz, MD, PhD, of the Perelman School of Medicine.
