Faculty and Staff
Use the directory to the right to quickly access staff bios.You may contact all faculty and staff through the main Institute number at 202-687-0880.
Joan Alker - See Center on Children and Families
Liz Arjun - See Center on Children and Families
Eliza Navarro Bangit - E-mail
Eliza Navarro Bangit, J.D., is a Senior Research Associate at Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute. Her research focuses on federal and state laws governing the private insurance market that affect those with chronic illness. Her current duties include interpreting and analyzing various health insurance contracts. Other areas of focus include: research on subsidies for private coverage, state programs to promote health coverage, regulation of association health plans, and medical debt and bankruptcy; and the analysis of federal and state health insurance market reforms, state external review programs, and managed care consumer protections.
Prior to joining the Institute, Ms. Bangit served as Program Associate at the Institute for Health Policy Solutions, where she conducted a wide array of data research and analysis involving issues related to employer-based health insurance coverage and initiatives to expand health insurance coverage to children and families. She also provided assistance and established collaborative relationships with numerous sites and organizations developing consumer-choice purchasing alliances and cooperatives.
Ms. Bangit received her J.D. from the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law, and her M.A. and B.A. from the College of Notre Dame of Maryland.
Chris Bender - E-mail
Shay Bilchik - See Center for Juvenile Justice Reform
Erin Bongard (Produce Safety Project) - E-mail
Erin Bongard is Senior Associate for Policy and Research at the Produce Safety Project (PSP) at Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute. Prior to joining PSP Ms. Bongard worked in the President's Office at Population Action International. She has ten years of public policy advocacy and campaign experience. She is a former Midwestern regional director for Communities United to Strengthen America, a national non-partisan advocacy group that educated voters about healthcare, education and economic security. As regional director, Erin supervised five district offices and a staff of 20 and was a member of the national senior policy team designing and implementing national and regional organizational strategy. In addition, Ms. Bongard worked in the Executive Office for the Connecticut Secretary of the State and for the majority leadership in the Connecticut General Assembly, where she researched and advised legislators on social and health policy issues.
Ms. Bongard received her Master of Social Work with a concentration in Policy and Research from the University of Connecticut, and her BSW from Saint Joseph College. She also serves on the board of advisors at the Nancy A. Humphreys Institute for Political Social Work at the University of Connecticut.
Macon
Susan Broderick - See Center for Juvenile Justice Reform
Doreen Cavanaugh - E-mail
Jeffrey S. Crowley, M.P.H. is a Project Director at the Health Policy Institute at Georgetown University. He joined the Institute in October 2000, and is currently conducting research projects related to access to care for people with AIDS and other disabilities, with an emphasis on public health care programs.
Mr. Crowley worked for more than six years at the National Association of People with AIDS (NAPWA). For the last three years of his tenure there, he was the Deputy Executive Director for Programs, overseeing the organization’s public education, community development and training activities. Additionally, he conducted policy analysis and advocacy related to protecting and expanding access to health care for people living with HIV. In this capacity, he represented NAPWA as a Board Member and Health Task Force Co-Chair of the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities (CCD), a coalition of more than 100 national disability organizations.
Mr. Crowley holds a master of public health (M.P.H.) from the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health and a bachelor of arts from Kalamazoo College.
Sandra Eskin (Produce Safety Project) - E-mail
Sandra B. Eskin is the Deputy Director for Policy and Research, at the Produce Safety Project(PSP) at Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute. Ms. Eskin has spent nearly twenty years as a legal and public-policy consultant to numerous consumer and public-interest organizations, providing strategic and policy advice on a broad range of consumer-protection issues, in particular food and drug safety, labeling, and advertising. She served as a member of the National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection from 2000-2006, and participated on the Congressionally-mandated Steering Committee for the Development of Useful Prescription Medicine Information. Ms. Eskin previously worked as a staff attorney at a government agency and as a legislative representative for the Consumer Federation of America. She has written numerous reports and articles on food-safety topics.
Ms. Eskin received her J.D. from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, and her B.A. from Brown University. She is a senior scholar with the O'Neil Institute for National and Global Health Law.
Judy Feder is Professor and Dean of the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. She is one of the nation's leaders in health policy--most particularly, in efforts to understand and improve the nation's health insurance system. A widely published scholar, her three decades of policy research began at the Brookings Institution, continued at the Urban Institute, and, since 1984, has flourished at Georgetown University. Her expertise on the uninsured, Medicare, Medicaid, and long-term care is regularly drawn upon by members of Congress, Executive officials, and the national media.
Feder has also held leadership policy positions, both in the Congress and in the Executive Branch. As staff director of the congressional Pepper Commission (chaired by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV), Feder is widely credited with setting the stage for the health reform debate of the 1990s. She became a key actor in that debate, as a senior official in the Clinton Administration. In her three years as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary at Health and Human Services, Feder helped shape the Administration's health care policy, working intensively with members of Congress and with the national media to promote the expansion of health care coverage.
Feder today pursues her policy leadership first and foremost by educating future policy leaders at Georgetown’s Public Policy Institute. She continues her research as co-director (with Sheila Burke) of the Georgetown University Long-term Care Financing Project and as senior advisor to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured and a member of the Commonwealth Task Force on the Uninsured.
Feder is past-President and board member of AcademyHealth; a Policy Council Member of the Academy of Public Policy and Management; an elected member of the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Public Administration and the National Academy of Social Insurance
Feder is a political scientist, with a B.A. from Brandeis University (1968) and a Master's (1970) and Ph.D. (1977) from Harvard University.
Sandra Fournier - E-mail
Administrator
Robert Friedland - E-mail
Robert Friedland is Associate Research Professor at the Health Policy Institute at Georgetown University and the Director of the Center on an Aging Society. Friedland has had a wide range of research and public policy experience, including Chief Economist for Maryland's Medicaid program; Senior Research Associate at the Employee Benefit Research Institute; Director of the American Association of Retired Person's Public Policy Institute; Research Director, National Academy of Social Insurance; and Economist on the staff of the U.S. Bipartisan Commission on Comprehensive Health Care, better known as the Pepper Commission.
Friedland has written on issues pertaining to the financing and delivery of health care and long-term care and retirement income security. His book, Facing the Costs of Long-Term Care, was awarded the 1992 Elizur Wright Award by the American Risk and Insurance Association.
Friedland is on the board of the National Academy for State Health Policy, the Long-Term Care Education Foundation, and the Editorial Board of Aging Today. Friedland received his Doctorate in Economics from the George Washington University in 1983.
Tete Guemadji - See Center for Juvenile Justice Reform
Jocelyn Guyer - See Center on Children and Families
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Martha Heberlein - See Center on Children and Families
Jack Hoadley - E-mail
Jack Hoadley is a health policy analyst and political scientist with over 20 years experience in the health policy field. He joined Georgetown University=s Health Policy Institute in January 2002, where he is conducting research projects on health financing topics, including Medicare and Medicaid, with a particular focus on prescription drug issues. Prior to arriving at Georgetown, Dr. Hoadley held positions at the Department of Health and Human Services in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE); the Physician Payment Review Commission (PPRC) and its successor, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC); the National Health Policy Forum at George Washington University; and in the office of U.S. Representative Barbara Kennelly.
While at Georgetown, Dr. Hoadley has undertaken projects for a variety of government and foundation clients, including MedPAC, DHHS/ASPE, the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Some projects completed for foundation sponsors have included a study of retiree health coverage for state government employees, a review of cost containment approaches for prescription drugs, the use of formularies in the Medicare drug benefit, approaches taken by state pharmaceutical assistance programs in adapting to the Medicare drug benefit, and the use of evidence-based medicine to manage pharmacy costs in Medicaid. His recent report on Medicare Part D formularies, published by the Kaiser Family Foundation, received considerable attention from both media and policymakers. He is currently working on several projects, including a study of the potential for standardizing benefits in Medicare Advantage and the Medicare drug benefit for the Commonwealth Fund and an evaluation of the new Florida Medicaid waiver for the Jessie Ball duPont Fund.
During his time in ASPE, Dr. Hoadley played a key role in the development of legislative options for Medicare modernization, especially a prescription drug benefit. He headed a Department team that released a report in April 2000, “Prescription Drug Coverage, Spending, Utilization, and Prices.” During his time at PPRC and MedPAC, Dr. Hoadley was a lead contributor to the Commission=s annual reports, including analysis of trends and developments in Medicare managed care, risk adjustment, health system reform, and Medicaid managed care
Dr. Hoadley received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1979. He taught political science at Duke University and at the State University of New York at Stony Brook before coming to Washington as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow in 1983-84. He has published one book, Origins of American Political Parties, 1789-1803, and several articles in professional journals.
Cathy Hope - See Center on Children and Families
Dawn Horner - See Center on Children and Families
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Sara Hunter - See Center for Juvenile Justice Reform
Donald Jones - E-mail
Donald Jones is the Systems Administrator/Webmaster at the Health Policy Institute. He is responsible for web design, desktop publishing, computer hardware setup and troubleshooting, purchase recommendations, Unix administration, and software support. In addition, he is a SAS and Stata programmer on projects involving long-term care, high cost Medicare recipients, and Employment Based Health Insurance. In his time at the Institute, Mr. Jones co-authored a report on Medicare+Choice with Geraldine Dallek.
Mr. Jones recieved a B.S. in Social Studies Education from The Ohio State University in 1995 and a M.A. in Communications, Culture and Technology from Georgetown University in 2007.
Nicole Johnston - E-mail
Theresa Jordan - E-mail
Executive Assistant
Harriet Komisar - E-mail
Harriet L. Komisar, Ph.D., is an Associate Research Professor at the Health Policy Institute at Georgetown University. She is an economist with more than fifteen years experience researching topics related to health care financing and policy. Since joining Georgetown University in 1996, and previously at the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, she has analyzed health sector data and prepared quantitative and qualitative evaluations of the effects, or potential effects, of policy changes. She has considerable experience communicating findings to a broad audience through journal articles, reports, chart books, and fact sheets.
Dr. Komisar’s current research focuses on assessing the needs of the long-term care population and evaluating the capacity of current and alternative politics to address those needs. She has a major role in the Georgetown University Long-Term Care Financing Project, which involves research on problems in long-term care financing and the analysis of policy options to address those problems. Her other current and recent projects examine the lifetime risk of long-term care needs and costs, unmet long-term care needs of Medicare-Medicaid dual eligibles, Medicare’s new prescription drug benefit, and the effects of changes in Medicare’s home health policy. Before joining Georgetown, Dr. Komisar was a principal analyst at the U.S. Congressional Budget Office where she worked on a range of issues related to Medicare policy. Dr. Komisar holds a B.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University.
Jennifer Libster - E-mail
Jennifer Libster is a Senior Research Associate at the Georgetown University, Health Policy Institute. Her current research focuses on the regulation of the private health insurance markets, specifically consumer protections including access, affordability and adequacy. She has also conducted research on medical discount cards and insurance fraud.
Ms. Libster holds a law degree from the George Washington University School of Law. She also holds a M.A. from Birmingham University in the UK.
Joan Lombardi - E-mail
Mr. Lucia, an Assistant Research Professor, joined the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute in June of 2001. His research interests include a wide range of issues associated with the uninsured problem. Specifically, his research focus is on consumer protections in the regulation of the health insurance sold through the private health insurance markets. Mr. Lucia has written about access, affordability, adequacy of job-based and individual health coverage, consumer protections in health insurance under federal and state law, the external review of medical decisions and regulation of the health insurance sold through associations.
Mr. Lucia holds a law degree from The George Washington School of Law. He received a BS and MHP from Northeastern University.
Cynthia Madison - See Center for Juvenile Justice Reform
Cindy Mann - See Center on Children and Families
Leyland McGann - E-mail
Toni McRae - E-mail
Administrative Assistant/Receptionist
James O'Hara (Produce Safety Project) - E-mail
Jim O'Hara is the director of the Produce Safety Project(PSP) at Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute. Mr. O'Hara has more than a decade of experience in the development of public health policy. As Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health from 1997 to 1999, he represented the Department of Health and Human Services on an inter-agency committee, coordinating food safety policy initiatives among the federal public health agencies and serving as liaison with the White House, the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency. In addition, he was the Associate Commissioner for Public Affairs at the Food and Drug Administration from 1993 to 1997 where he developed and oversaw the agency's communications with the public on numerous multi-state outbreaks of foodborne illness. Mr. O'Hara was awarded the U.S. Surgeon General's Medallion in 1999 by Dr. David Satcher for his work in public health policy.
Mr. O'Hara received his BA from the University of Notre Dame in 1972, his MA from the University of Chicago in 1978 and was a Knight Fellow at Stanford University in 1981-1982. He is a senior scholar with the O'Neil Institute for National and Global Health Law.
Michael Odeh - See Center on Children and Families
Karen Pollitz is a Research Professor at the Health Policy Institute at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. There she directs research on health insurance reform issues as they affect consumers and patients. Her areas of focus include regulation of private health insurance plans and markets, managed care consumer protections, and access to affordable health insurance. She is also an adjunct professor in Georgetown’s Graduate Public Policy School. Her projects include the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Consumer Guides Project and the Consumer Healthcare Education Project.
Prior to joining the Institute faculty, Ms. Pollitz served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health Legislation at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from 1993 to 1997. In this capacity she was the Secretary’s legislative liaison on all federal health care issues, including national health care reform, Medicare, Medicaid, and U.S. Public Health Service agencies and programs.
From 1984 to 1991, Ms. Pollitz worked as a health policy advisor to Members of Congress. She was legislative assistant to Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV), Congressman Sander Levin (D-MI), and the Subcommittee on Compensation and Employee Benefits of the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee. After leaving the Hill, Ms. Pollitz worked as the Assistant Director of the Washington Office of the American Academy of Family Physicians, and taught at the Marymount University School of Business.
Ms. Pollitz holds an M.P.P. from the University of California at Berkeley, and a B.A. with Honors from Oberlin College.
Joy Pritts - E-mail
Joy Pritts is an Assistant Research Professor at Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute. Her primary area of research is the privacy of medical information, including individuals’ access to their own medical information. Ms. Pritts conducts legal research and analysis on both state and federal privacy laws. Her current research is focused on the implementation of the Federal Health Privacy Rule (also known as the HIPAA Privacy Rule), the interplay of the federal and state privacy laws, and the access to and use of medical information by financial institutions.
Ms. Pritts writes and speaks extensively on medical privacy issues .She is the primary author of The State of Health Privacy: An Uneven Terrain, a survey of state health privacy statutes, written while she was Senior Counsel at the Health Privacy Project, formerly associated with Georgetown. She has testified before Congress on issues related to privacy and the commercial use of medical information.
Ms. Pritts holds a law degree from Case Western Reserve University School of Law, where she was an associate editor of the law review. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Oberlin College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
Kristina Rosinsky - See Center for Juvenile Justice Reform
Kristin Schwarz - E-mail
Accounts Analyst
Laura Summer - E-mail
Laura Summer is a Senior Research Scholar at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute. She has over 25 years of experience in the federal government, state government, independent policy organizations and academic institutions. She directs research that examines the manner in which states design, administer, and operate publicly financed health and long-term care programs. The focus of much of Laura’s recent work has been on methods to increase enrollment in public programs for moderate and low-income Americans. She has written extensively about access to health insurance and health and long-term care for populations of all ages, as well as about the operation of the Medicaid and Medicare programs. Ms. Summer served as the Deputy Director for the Institute’s Center on an Aging Society for six years. Prior to joining the Georgetown faculty, Summer was a policy consultant to a number of Washington-based organizations and spent several years as a health policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. She holds a Master of Public Health degree from the University of Michigan.
Jennifer Thompson - E-mail
Jen Thompson is a research associate at the Georgetown Health Policy Institute, working primarily on projects related to Medicare and Medicaid. She holds a master's degree in public policy from Georgetown University and a A.B. in American History from Harvard University.
Joseph Touschner - See Center on Children and Families
Tricia Waller - E-mail
Financial Analyst
Tim Westmoreland - E-mail
Tim Westmoreland is a Research Professor at the Institute and a Visiting Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center. From 1979 through 1995, Professor Westmoreland served as Counsel to the Subcommittee on Health and the Environment in the U.S. House of Representatives. From 1995 through 1999, he was the Senior Policy Fellow at the Law Center's Federal Legislation Clinic. From mid-1999 through January 2001, Professor Westmoreland was the Director of the Medicaid program for the Federal government. He has worked extensively on public health and health finance policy. Professor Westmoreland was counsel to the Advisory Committee on Tobacco Policy and Public Health and an advisor to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation.
Professor Westmoreland holds a Bachelor of Arts from Duke University and a J.D. from Yale University.
Philip Zorn - E-mail
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