2006

Michael D. Cabana, M.D., M.P.P.
University of California, San Francisco

Michael Cabana is an associate professor of pediatrics and the director of the division of general pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He is a core faculty member at the Institute for Health Policy Studies at UCSF. Dr. Cabana's health services research interests include understanding variation in physician practice as it relates to quality of care, particularly in asthma. His work has focused on physician use of clinical practice guidelines, primary care referrals to subspecialists, as well as the primary prevention of asthma.

Dr. Cabana completed his undergraduate medical training through the combined program at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the Wharton School of Business, where he earned a master's degree in public policy and management. Dr. Cabana trained in pediatrics at the Harriet Lane Service at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center. He continued at Johns Hopkins as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, where he completed his Masters in Public Health at the same institution. In 2005, Dr. Cabana joined the faculty at UCSF.

Dr. Cabana is former co-director of the Physician Asthma Care Education (PACE) Project, which was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to improve the quality of physician asthma education. Dr. Cabana is currently the principal investigator for the Enhancing Pediatric Asthma Management Study (R-01 HL70771) and the Trial of Infant Probiotic Supplementation (R-01 HL80074), both funded by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute.

2005

Cynthia S. Minkovitz, M.D., M.P.P.
Johns Hopkins University

Cynthia Minkovitz is an associate professor of population and family health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She holds a joint appointment in the Department of Pediatrics in the School of Medicine. Dr. Minkovitz received her undergraduate, medical, and public policy degrees from Harvard University. She completed a pediatrics residency and chief residency at St. Louis Children’s Hospital at Washington University and a general pediatrics academic fellowship at Johns Hopkins.

Dr. Minkovitz’s research activities focus on: enhancing the quality of preventive services for children; impacting health care provider behavior; and understanding how women’s health and multiple roles in society impact their children’s receipt of health care services. Dr. Minkovitz leads the long-term follow up of families who participated in the Healthy Steps for Young Children national evaluation. Healthy Steps is a pediatric practice-based intervention that provides enhanced developmental services to families with young children. As a co-investigator on the national evaluation of the Dyson Initiative Community Pediatrics Training Initiative, she is examining the national context of efforts to enhance training in community pediatrics and prospectively evaluating whether interventions in residency programs alter the career trajectories of pediatricians. In addition to her research and public health teaching and advising activities, Dr. Minkovitz attends in the Harriet Lane Pediatric Primary Care Clinic.

2004

Christopher B. Forrest, M.D., Ph.D.
Johns Hopkins University

Christopher Forrest is an associate professor of health policy and management in the Division of Health Services Research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Pediatrics in the School of Medicine. Dr. Forrest received his bachelor’s and medical degrees from Boston University as part of a joint degree program. He was trained in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where he also served as a chief resident and a staff pediatrician. He completed a Ph.D. program in health services research at Johns Hopkins University under the guidance of Dr. Barbara Starfield.

Dr. Forrest has conducted numerous studies on the effectiveness and efficiency of primary care, the interactions between generalists and specialists, primary care gatekeeping, development, and validation of health status measures for children, and, more broadly, the field of child health services and outcomes research. He is a general pediatrician with methodologic expertise in health status assessment of children and adolescents, evaluations of population-based health care, primary care services research, and applications of statistical methods to health and health services research. He has authored more than 50 articles in peer-reviewed journals.

Dr. Forrest is the scientific director of the Sentinel Center Network, which includes 65 community health centers serving one million low-income and uninsured individuals throughout the nation. The network is dedicated to using health and health care information to improve the quality and efficiency of the nation’s health center safety-net. In his work on understanding how health evolves over the life course, he is currently investigating the longitudinal relationships between health and school performance during the transition from middle childhood into adolescence.

2003

Mark A. Schuster, M.D., Ph.D.

Mark Schuster is associate professor of pediatrics and public health at the University of California, Los Angeles, senior natural scientist at RAND, and co-director of the RAND Center for Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health Research. He is the founder and director of the UCLA/RAND Center for Adolescent Health Promotion and is currently is leading an NIMH-funded project to develop and evaluate a worksite-based parenting program for parents of adolescents to learn communication skills and foster healthy sexual development and sexual risk prevention. He is head of the Los Angeles site of the CDC-funded “Healthy Passages,” which seeks to identify the etiologies of and influences on health and behavioral outcomes by studying 5,250 ten-year olds in three cities annually to age 20. As associate director of the UCLA Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, Dr. Schuster oversees pediatric fellows and is developing a new community-based participatory research curriculum. He also practices pediatrics at Mattel Children’s Hospital at UCLA. Dr. Schuster is co-author of Everything You Never Wanted Your Kids to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid They’d Ask): The Secrets to Surviving Your Child’s Sexual Development from Birth to the Teens (Crown; 2003) and co-editor of Child Rearing in America: Challenges Facing Parents of Young Children (Cambridge University Press; 2002). Dr. Schuster received a B.A. from Yale University, an M.D. and M.P.P. from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in policy analysis from the RAND Graduate School.

2002

Karen Kuhlthau, Ph.D.

Dr. Karen Kuhlthau is Associate Director of the Center for Child and Adolescent Policy at MassGeneral Hospital for Children. Trained as a sociologist and demographer, her research has examined the predictors and patterns of health services utilization for children and adolescents. This work includes studies of specialized therapies, high cost children, and use of subspecialists and has led to several publications on aspects of managed care for children with chronic conditions, patterns of care for Medicaid-insured children with chronic conditions, and clinical characteristics of high-cost children insured by Medicaid. Most recently, Dr Kuhlthau's work has focused on understanding how children, especially children with chronic conditions, affect families including examining the employment and well-being of parents and how public and employment policies assist families.

2001

William Cooper, M.D., M.P.H.

Dr. William Cooper is Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Vanderbilt University. Since his first publication in the area of Child Health Services Research in November 1995, Dr. Cooper has conducted nationally recognized work in the area of health care services for low-income children. His first two child health services research studies were conducted while he was a resident and chief resident at Cincinnati's Children's Hospital Medical Center. He published two papers in Pediatrics in November 1995 and October 1996. In his first study, Dr. Cooper described an increased incidence of severe breastfeeding malnutrition and hypernatremia in infants in the Cincinnati area. This led to heightened awareness of the need to provide close follow-up for breast-fed babies following early birth hospital discharge. Dr. Cooper extended his interest in early discharge of infants in a study of inner-city infants receiving home visitation after birth. He described earlier use of primary care services and decreased use of emergency department services among infants enrolled in a coordinated early discharge program.