About This InitiativeFounding Advisory Board
Chairman
David J. Rothman, Ph.D., is Bernard Schoenberg Professor of Social Medicine and Director of the Center for the Study of Society and Medicine at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. He has written extensively about the history of medicine, as well as current health policy and practice, ethics of human experimentation, and medical professionalism. His published works include Strangers at the Bedside; A History of how Law and Bioethics Transformed Medical Decision Making; "Medical Professionalism—Focusing on the Real Issues" in The New England Journal of Medicine, and "The Shame of Medical Research" in The New York Review of Books.
Board Members
David Blumenthal, M.D., is Director of the Institute for Health Policy and a physician at the Massachusetts General Hospital/Partners HealthCare System in Boston. He is also Professor of Medicine and Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. His research interests include the future of academic health centers under health care reform, quality management in health care, the determinants of physician behavior, access to health services, and the extent and consequences of academic-industrial relationships in the health sciences.
Norman Daniels, Ph.D. is a professor of Ethics and Population Health, in the Department of Population and International Health at Harvard University. He is currently on the National Cancer Policy Advisory Board, established by the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine with cooperation from the Centers for Science Control and the National Cancer Institute. Daniels was hired in 1969 to teach a Radical Social Philosophy course that Tufts students had demanded, shifting his philosophical work from philosophy of science into ethics and political philosophy, and most recently, into ethics and health policy.
Eli Ginzberg, Ph.D., is the Director of the Eisenhower Center for the Conservation of Human Resources, Columbia University, and the Director of the Revson Fellows Program for the Future of the City of New York, Columbia University. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a prolific author, having published more than 100 books in the fields of human resources, urban studies and health policy.
Jerome Kassirer, M.D., is the Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Tufts School of Medicine and is also Associate Research Scientist at Internal Medicine Section of Nephrology at Yale School of Medicine. Kassirer was editor of the New England Journal of Medicine from 1991 until 1999. He writes extensively on medical professionalism.
Robert Lawrence, M.D., is the associate dean for professional education and programs at the John Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, and Professor of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He is a founding member of Physicians for Human Rights and served as a member of its Board of Directors from 1985-1991. He was re-elected to the Board in 1997 and was elected President in 1998. He currently chairs the Committee on Vaccine Priorities for the 21st Century at the Institute of Medicine and serves as a consultant to the Task Force on Community Preventative Services at the Centers for Disease Control.
Wendy Levinson, M.D., is the vice chair of medicine and University of Toronto. Her research interests focus on the relationship between physicians and patients and how communication occurs. Her work includes studies of informed decision making between surgeons and patients; financial conflict of interest in the relationship; communication about sensitive topics like domestic violence; and the relationship of communication to patient outcomes.
Susana Morales, M.D., is an Attending Physician at Cornell Internal Medicine Associates and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Cornell University Medical College. She is the Director of the newly formed Center for Multiculturalism and Minority Health. She is a clinician educator who focuses on the psychosocial aspects of medicine, primary care of the underserved, medical education, faculty development, and enhancing minority representation in medicine. In 1993, she was a member of the White House Briefing Team for the National Health Task Force. She is Chair of the Minority Interest Group of the Society of General Internal Medicine, and a member of the Advisory Committees of the Commonwealth Fund's "Bettering the Health of Minority Americans" program.
Marc Rodwin, J.D., Ph.D.,, is Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Health Law Concentration at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, Massachusetts. He has written several articles on consumer protection, consumer representation, and consumer movements in health care. He is the author of Medicine, Money and Morals: Physicians' Conflicts of Interest (Oxford, 1993). With funding from a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award, he is exploring different approaches to promoting accountable health care. More generally, Rodwin's research focuses on the relation between law, ethics, and markets.
Kenneth I. Shine, M.D., is the Director of the RAND Center for Domestic and International Security. He previously served as president of the Institute of Medicine and is professor of medicine emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Medicine. He is the UCLA School of Medicine's immediate past dean and provost for medical sciences. Shine's research interests include metabolic events in the heart muscle, the relation of behavior to heart disease, and emergency medicine. He participated in efforts to prove the value of cardiopulmonary resuscitation following a heart attack, and in establishing the 911 emergency telephone number in the metropolitan Los Angeles area. Shine is the author of numerous articles and scientific papers in the area of heart physiology and clinical research.
James R. Tallon, Jr. is president of the United Hospital Fund of New York. The Fund, the nation's oldest federated charity, addresses critical issues affecting hospitals and health care in New York City through health services research and policy analysis, education and information activities, and grantmaking and voluntarism. Prior to joining the Fund in 1993, Tallon served in the New York State Assembly for nineteen years, beginning in 1975. He chaired the health committee from 1979 to 1987 and was Majority Leader from 1987 to 1993.
Gerald E. Thomson, M.D., is the Lambert & Sonneborn Professor of Medicine, Senior Associate Dean and Vice President of Columbia University College of Physician & Surgeons. In 1986, he helped found and later became president of the Association of Academic Minority Physicians. Thomson has had considerable involvement with neighborhood-based primary care. He helped initiate several centers as part of the Harlem primary care network in the 1980's, and as President of the Washington Heights-Inwood Ambulatory Care Network, established five centers from 1985-1990.
