2015 Scholars

Monique Baptiste-Good
Monique serves as the project director of Newark's Strong, Healthy Communities Initiative (SHCI)—a part of the Living Cities national Integration Initiative—which is focused on improving the health and wellness of low-income children in Newark in order to improve student educational outcomes and readiness to learn.

With a background in urban policy and economics, Monique has worked in community development for the last decade.  In 2008, Monique was named Executive Director of St. Paul's Community Development Corporation in Paterson, NJ, where she oversaw the organization's daily operations, the construction of affordable housing, and managed Passaic County's largest workforce development program.   Prior to this, Monique served as the Deputy Director of Community Economic Development of La Casa De Don Pedro—a comprehensive non-profit in Newark, NJ.  At La Casa, she managed a variety of efforts in urban planning, affordable housing and economic development, and managed a portfolio of commercial and open space development properties within Newark's Lower Broadway neighborhood.  Monique has also served as a consultant to a number of local city governments and public officials to assist them with securing resources to complete school reform initiatives, improve human services, and execute infrastructure projects throughout their cities.

Monique has an undergraduate degree in economics and political science and a graduate degree in public policy from Rutgers University. 

Jaye Clement, M.P.H., M.P.P.
Jaye is the Director of Community Health Programs and Strategies with the Office of Community Health, Equity and Wellness at Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, Michigan. She is responsible for aligning the System's commitment to its communities by engaging new partners around issues of community health, maintaining existing partnerships, and managing metrics and data sets to monitor and continuously improve engagement and outreach strategies that contribute to community benefit. She serves as a health care advocate and liaison to external audiences, including community, civic and faith-based organizations, volunteers and other key publics. In this role, Jaye also staffs the Detroit Regional Infant Mortality Reduction Task Force and holds administrative oversight for their Women-Inspired Neighborhood Network: Detroit program.

Jaye earned her MPH in health behavior and health education from the University of Michigan School of Public Health and her MPP from the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, both in 2005. Her experiences range from working in major health systems, nonprofits and local government as her career is dedicated to community health and advocacy. She also works closely with the Detroit Community-Academic Urban Research Center (URC) as a Community Policy Advocacy Trainer for the Neighborhoods Working in Partnership: Building Capacity for Policy Change Project and serves on the board of directors for local non-profit, Teen HYPE (Helping Youth by Providing Education). Jaye is a life-long Detroiter. 

Chelsea Kuiper, M.A.
For three years, Chelsea has served as the Program Coordinator for Hermosa Vida, a Community Health program out of North Country HealthCare in Flagstaff, Arizona.  She works with multiple stakeholders from governmental agencies, community organizations, educational institutions and health entities in an effort to address the social determinants of health in Flagstaff, Arizona.  Ms. Kuiper's work focuses on developing and maintaining models of collaborative leadership, multi-sector partnerships, and community engagement that support the reduction of social and environmental inequities and improve population health. Ms. Kuiper has also worked as a Community-based Research Associate for Northern Arizona University, focusing her efforts around understanding the impacts of Arizona's immigration policies on Flagstaff residents. Ms. Kuiper volunteers her time with community organizations that support the health and well-being of children and families in Arizona. She is a Board Member of the Coconino Coalition for Children and Youth and a Steering Committee member of Northern Arizona Institutions for Community Leadership. Ms. Kuiper received her B.A. in Anthropology from Colorado College in 2007 and her M.A. in Applied Anthropology from Northern Arizona University in 2010. 

Matt VanWormer, J.D.
Matt is a Staff Attorney with DNA-People's Legal Services, Inc. and Director of the Diné Bí ts'íís báá Ah'jiteí (DBA) Program, a medical-legal partnership that brings free legal assistance to low-income patients in two hospitals and three health centers on the Navajo Nation.  With its creation in 2009, the DBA Program became the first medical-legal partnership to focus on serving rural Native American communities.  By documenting positive outcomes from successful legal interventions, the DBA Program strives to become a model for new partnerships in Indian Health Service hospitals and tribally-operated health care facilities.

Matt received his J.D. from the University of Virginia.  He started the DBA Program with a public interest fellowship from the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. 

Sacoby Wilson, Ph.D., M.S.
Dr. Wilson is an assistant professor with the Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health (MIAEH) and Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of Maryland-College Park. Dr. Wilson is an environmental health scientist with over ten years of experience working in community-university partnerships on environmental health and justice issues. He has expertise in exposure science and applied environmental health including community-based exposure assessment, environmental justice science, social epidemiology, environmental health disparities, built environment, air pollution monitoring, and community-based participatory research (CBPR). For the past two years, he has been building a program on community engagement, environmental justice, and health (CEEJH) to engage impacted communities, advocacy groups, and policymakers in Maryland and the Washington, DC region on environmental justice issues and environmental health disparities. As part of his CEEJH efforts, he is leading projects to assess exposure and health risks for residential populations, urban fisherfolk, and recreational users of the Anacostia Watershed (Project CAESARR and Project RECREATE). He is also a Co-Investigator on project that uses community engagement approaches and Geographic Information Systems to assess different sustainable practices that can be used to reduce stormwater inputs into the Chesapeake Bay. In addition, he is working with a research team in Baltimore to understand the role that the built environment plays in producing conditions conducive to for pests particularly mosquitoes and how impacted residents can engage in citizen science to improve environmental conditions, reduce pests, and enhance quality of life.

He received both his M.S. and Ph.D. in Environmental Health from UNC-Chapel Hill and his B.S. degree from Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University.

2014 Scholars

Danielle Altares-Sarik is a predoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research.  Her research interests include performance measures (HCAHPS) and patient outcomes related to nursing skill mix, as well as issues surrounding nursing scope of practice and access to primary care. She practices clinically as a pediatric nurse practitioner and holds a MSN and BSN from the University of Pennsylvania School Of Nursing, and a BA from Cornell University.


 Dominique Comer is an outcomes research fellow at the Jefferson School of Population Health (JSPH) in Philadelphia, PA. She holds a PharmD from the University of Kentucky and is currently an MS candidate in health policy at JSPH. Her current research focuses on improving medication reconciliation and adherence monitoring through health information technology.
 Lauren Hughes is a family physician and current Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at the University of Michigan. She holds an MD from the University of Iowa and her MPH in health policy from The George Washington University, during which she interned for Iowa Senator Tom Harkin. Lauren served as the 2009-2010 national president of the American Medical Student Association prior to completing residency at the University of Washington. She was an AmeriCorps volunteer at a federally qualified health center, has studied medicine in Brazil, Sweden, Tanzania, and Botswana, and has been a visiting scholar at The Robert Graham Center and at ABC News Medical Unit in New York City. Her research interests focus on primary care workforce development and innovation in primary care delivery


 Justin List is a general internist and Robert Wood Johnson/VA Clinical Scholar at the University of Michigan/Ann Arbor VA. He attended Augustana College (IL), Yale Divinity School, and Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine prior to residency in the Yale Primary Care program. His previous fellowships with the NIH/Fogarty International Center and American Medical Association gave him skills in clinical research, ethics, and policy. His current research and interests look at developing stronger systems of chronic disease management, social determinants of health in chronic disease, and reducing health disparities.


 Karen Johnson is a self-employed health and benefit strategist who has held a variety of roles related to the design, planning and delivery of employer-sponsored health insurance since 1984. Current clients include health plans and large self-funded employers. She is completing her PhD in Health Policy & Management at the University of Kansas. Her research interests include the role of primary care and the Patient-Centered Medical Home in the broader delivery system, the impact of medical management interventions and workplace wellness initiatives on commercial populations, and health insurance design.


Kirstin W. Scott is a Ph.D. candidate in Health Policy at Harvard University in the political analysis track and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.  She received her MPhil in Public Health from Cambridge University and formerly served as the Public Health Advisor to a County Supervisor in her home state of California. Her research in healthcare politics and quality focuses on physician-hospital integration, the role of health policy in elections as well as the prioritization of quality on the global health agenda. She is also an avid endurance runner and volunteers for an organization in Nicaragua, where she formerly served as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar.


2013 Scholars

Reem Aly is a Health Policy Associate at the Health Policy Institute of Ohio. She holds a law degree from the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and a Masters of Health Administration from Ohio State University’s College of Public Health. Her particular interests lie in increasing access to quality health care and decreasing disparities.
 

Christopher Dy is a resident of orthopaedic surgery at the Hospital for Special Surgery of New York. He holds a Masters of Public Health, an M.D., and a Bachelor of Science all from the University of Miami. He is most interested in improving healthcare delivery systems, and believes that HSR provides the ability to both examine the system as a whole and to address individual faulty components of the healthcare infrastructure. 
 Sue McClernon has served in healthcare administration leadership roles for over 30 years. She is completing her Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota (UMN), School of Public Health, Division of Health Policy and Management. Her research interests focus on health policy and chronic disease management. She currently serves as Faculty Director for the Applied Business/HSM program at the UMN, and is adjunct faculty at the UMN & the College of St. Scholastica.


Thomas Tsai is a resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital with a clinical interest in abdominal and thoracic surgical oncology. He is currently the Program in Cancer Outcomes Research Training (PCORT) Fellow at the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute for Technology Assessment and a research fellow in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Harvard School of Public Health. His research is on the relationship between hospital quality and disparities in surgical outcomes and readmission rates. 


Namrata Uberoi is a Ph.D. candidate at the Pennsylvania State University. She has been active with research related to the Affordable Care Act and the Pennsylvania Office of Rural Health. Namrata has also worked at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the Centers for Disease Control.
 Catherine Wolff is currently working at the University of Pennsylvania as part of an emergency care policy research team. She received a master’s degree in health policy research from The University of Pennsylvania and is interested in the structure of emergency care systems and the geographic regionalization of emergency care nationwide.