Program Leadership

Executive Director
Stephanie Abbuhl, MD
Vice Chair and Associate Professor
Department of Emergency Medicine
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Stephanie Abbuhl, MD is Vice Chair and Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. She is board certified in both emergency medicine and internal medicine and completed the ELAM (Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine) fellowship in the spring of 2005. Dr. Abbuhl played a key role in the evolution of Emergency Medicine into a full academic department at Penn, and provided leadership as the acting chair of the new department from 1993-1994. She also served as Medical Director of the Emergency Department from 1990 to 2004. She has continued to actively practice and teach emergency medicine for a total of 22 years of clinical and educational service. Dr. Abbuhl’s honors include: AOA (1980); the Bryce Collier Prize for Compassion in Medicine (1980); the American Medical Women’s Association Award (1980); Excellence in Teaching Award (1992); Philadelphia Magazine’s "Top Doc" award (1994, 1996); The Lenore Rowe Williams Award (2003); and, the Emergency Medicine Residency Mentorship Award (2003). Dr. Abbuhl’s research interests include operational and administrative issues in emergency medicine, pain management, and faculty development. She has over 80 publications to her credit and serves as a peer reviewer for two prominent emergency medicine journals. Dr. Abbuhl is the Executive Director of FOCUS on Health and Leadership for Women, a faculty development program funded by the dean of the School of Medicine since 1997, to recruit, retain and promote women faculty. In this role she has been involved in many key gender equity initiatives within the School of Medicine and across the University. She has been invited to speak at academic health centers across the country on the issues concerning women in medicine, women’s professional development, and leadership mentoring. In 2004, the FOCUS program received the AAMC’s Women in Medicine Leadership Development Award.

Director of Professional Development
Lucy Wolf Tuton, PhD
Adjunct Professor, Department of Medicine
Adjunct Professor, Prevention and Population Health Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology
Director, Program Development in Community Health
Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics
Executive Director, Bridging the Gaps
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Lucy Wolf Tuton, PhD serves as Executive Director of Bridging the Gaps, a program which is jointly administered by seven academic health centers in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Bridging the Gaps provides health related service in underserved communities while training community responsive health and social service professionals. The Philadelphia Bridging the Gaps Program has developed a Bridging the Gaps Clinical Scholars program which is made up of the Bridging the Gaps Community Health Internship Program, Bridging the Gaps Seminar Series and Bridging the Gaps Clinical Program. At the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Dr. Tuton is Adjunct Professor of Medicine, Adjunct Professor of Prevention and Population Health in the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, and Director of Program Development in Community Health in the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics. She is a core faculty member of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine’s Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program and in this capacity, she is co-leader of both the community and leadership curricular components. She is also Director of Professional Development for FOCUS on Health & Leadership for Women, a program which promotes both advocacy, education and research in women’s health and the advancement of women in academic medicine.

Director of Research Programs
Susmita Pati, MD, MPH
Assistant Professor, Department of Pediatrics
Senior Co-Director, PolicyLab, The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP)
Senior Fellow, The Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the Wharton School
Associate Scholar, Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine
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Susmita Pati, MD MPH is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Department of Pediatrics at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) School of Medicine. She is a Senior Fellow with the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the Wharton School, an associate scholar in the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania, and a core faculty member and mentor for the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She provides key research leadership as the Senior Co-Director of PolicyLab, a newly established center to bridge research, practice, and policy at CHOP’s Joseph R. Stokes, Jr. Research Institute. She is also the Director of Research Programs at FOCUS, a faculty development program funded by the dean of the School of Medicine to recruit, retain and promote women faculty. Dr. Pati received an A.B. cum laude in biochemistry from Harvard-Radcliffe College in 1992 and completed her medical education at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine in 1996. She was a pediatric resident and chief resident at Babies and Children’s Hospital in New York where she received the Edward C. Curnen Jr. Award for compassionate clinical service. In 2002, she completed a post-doctoral general academic fellowship with a Master’s in Public Health in epidemiology from Columbia University. She received the 2001 Fellow Clinical Research Award from the Society for Pediatric Research for her study comparing child health expenditures in managed care and fee-for-service. In 2002, she joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and CHOP. Dr. Pati is board certified in pediatrics, practices inpatient and outpatient general pediatrics, and is a member of the advisory board to the Community Pediatrics and Advocacy Program at CHOP. She specializes in health services research with a focus on investigating the impact of public policy on the health of underserved children and families. Supported by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development and the Commonwealth Fund, her current research projects examine predictors of Medicaid retention, the relationship between maternal health literacy and child health outcomes, and methods to tailor pediatric health supervision to individual needs. Based on her work to date, she was nominated for the 2009 Marjorie A. Bowman New Investigator Award at Penn. She also serves as a member the Board of Trustees for the Medical Center Nursery School in Northern Manhattan and the Board of Directors of Public Citizens for Children & Youth in Philadelphia.

Director of Operations
Patricia Scott, BA
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Patricia Scott serves as Director of Operations for FOCUS on Health & Leadership for Women. In this role, Ms. Scott supports FOCUS’ involvement in many key gender equity initiatives within the School of Medicine and across the University, as well as nationally. Along with FOCUS Executive Director Dr. Stephanie Abbuhl, Ms. Scott spearheaded the first intensive effort to compile, collect, and analyze gender statistics for every department, rank and track in the School of Medicine and compare these data with national statistics published by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). The FOCUS Benchmarks Initiative is currently in the process of issuing its tenth annual report, Benchmark Data: Gender Statistics of Faculty-- University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. This document has continued to expand in scope and has become an integral tool utilized across the School of Medicine to help monitor progress in efforts to improve the retention, promotion and recruitment of women in academic medicine. Ms. Scott has been instrumental in securing extramural funding to support the growth of the women’s health research related initiatives of FOCUS. She supervises the “Junior Faculty Investigator Awards” program, which to date has awarded 31 seed grants to junior faculty, as well as the “Medical Student Fellowships,” which have supported 45 Penn medical students in fulltime faculty-mentored research projects related to women’s health. Ms. Scott is also responsible for managing the overall day-to-day administrative and organizational infrastructure for all professional development and research-based initiatives. In addition to the initiatives above, this includes two annual conferences for women in medicine and an actively attended Seminar Series for men and women faculty. Ms. Scott received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

Administrative Coordinator
Susan Primavera
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Susan Primavera is the administrative coordinator for FOCUS and is responsible for providing administrative support to the broad range of professional development and research initiatives. She combines her FOCUS responsibilities with a similar role for the Bridging the Gaps Program which combines the training of health professionals with the provision of health related service to underserved communities. Ms. Primavera has also served as a staff assistant to numerous research studies at the University of Pennsylvania.



Founder
Jeane Ann Grisso, MD, MSc
Professor of Public Health, Medicine and Nursing
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Dr. Grisso has served as principal investigator of many federally-funded investigations focused on urban women’s health issues, including studies of reproductive health, intimate partner violence, menopause, and aging. Dr. Grisso recently returned to Penn after 7 years at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.  At RWJF, Dr. Grisso and colleagues developed a $17-million national program to prevent teen dating violence as well as other programs addressing Intimate Partner Violence (IPV). Dr. Grisso is currently working with the City’s public health clinics to detect and refer patients who experience IPV. She is also Principal Investigator (with Stephanie Abbuhl as joint PI’s) of a recently funded NIH intervention program to improve the status of junior women faculty in academic medicine. Dr. Grisso was the founder of the program, FOCUS on the Health & Leadership of Women. She is a Senior Scholar and core faculty member of the Center for Public Health Initiatives at Penn.


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