Jordan J. Cohen, M.D.
As President and Chief Executive Officer of the Association of American Medical
Colleges (AAMC), Jordan J. Cohen, M.D. leads the Association’s support and
service to the nation’s medical schools and teaching hospitals. The Washington- based association was founded in 1876, and represents all 125 U.S. medical
schools, nearly 400 major teaching hospitals, 89 academic and research
societies, and more than 160,000 U.S. medical students and residents.
His almost 40-year career in academic medicine has included positions at some
of the most prestigious institutions in the country. Most recently, he served
as dean of the medical school and professor of medicine at the State University
of New York at Stony Brook, and president of the medical staff at University
Hospital. In his six-year administration at Stony Brook, Dr. Cohen fostered
the Medical Center’s development as a regional health care provider and
launched an innovative model curriculum that emphasized the changing role of
medicine in modern society.
Prior to serving as dean at SUNY-Stony Brook, Dr. Cohen served as professor and
associate chairman of Medicine at the University of Chicago-Pritzker School of
Medicine, and physician-in-chief and chairman of the Department of Medicine at
the Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center. He has held medical faculty
positions at Harvard, Brown, and Tufts universities.
Dr. Cohen is also a former president of the medical staff at the New England
Medical Center Hospital in Boston.
He has held a wide variety of leadership positions in almost all aspects of
academic medicine, including chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine
and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, as well as
president of the Association of Program Directors of Internal Medicine. A
member of the American College of Physicians since 1978, he has served as vice
chair of its Board of Regents and chair of its Education Policy Committee; he
was awarded a mastership from the college in 1993.
Concurrent with his leadership of the AAMC, Dr. Cohen also serves on the Board
of Directors of the Foundation for Biomedical Research, the China Medical
Board, and Research!America, and is a Trustee of the Educational Commission for
Foreign Medical Graduates. He is a member of the Special Medical Advisory
Group of the Department of Veterans Affairs. In 1994, Dr. Cohen was named a
member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine. He is a
member of the board of directors of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation of New York.
He is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Medical School and completed
his postgraduate training in internal medicine on the Harvard service at the
Boston City Hospital. He completed a fellowship in nephrology at the Tufts-New
England Medical Center. His chief areas of research interest are acid-base
metabolism and renal physiology. He is the author of more than 100
publications and is editor of Kidney International’s Nephrology Forum.
Peter Lurie, MD, MPH
Dr. Lurie is Deputy Director of Public Citizen’s Health Research
Group, a Ralph Nader-founded advocacy group in Washington, DC. He has held
faculty positions at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the
University of Michigan. After obtaining his medical degree from the Albert
Einstein College of Medicine, he completed residencies in Family Practice at
UCSF and in Preventive Medicine at the University of California, Berkeley,
where he also obtained an MPH. He was the principal investigator of a three-
volume, 700-page study of needle exchange programs for the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention. He has written on the subject of needle exchange
programs in the Lancet and on ethical aspects of mother-to-infant HIV
transmission studies and HIV vaccine trials in developing countries in the New
England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical
Association. He has also examined the impact of economic development policies
upon the spread of HIV and conducted a number of HIV epidemiology studies in
Africa, Asia and Brazil. At Public Citizen, he has been involved in efforts to
ban or relabel multiple drugs (e.g., Propulsid, Lotronex, Arava) and has sought
to increase access to anti-HIV drugs in the developing world. He has filed
petitions to ban certain unsafe needles, to ban candles with lead wicks, to
reduce worker exposure to beryllium and to lower medical resident work hours.
He was a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s Transmissible Spongiform
Encephalopathy Advisory Committee and is conducting several studies related to
pharmaceutical company influence in clinical care and medical education.
David Grande
David Grande graduated from Ohio State Medical School and took a year off
before starting residency. During that year, he served a full-time one-year
term as national president of the American Medical Student Association (AMSA).
He has an interest in health policy and physician activism and has dedicated a
portion of his time during residency to organizing residents in the city of
Philadelphia on advocacy projects through a consortium called the Health Care
Action Network.
Lisa Bellini
Dr. Bellini is Vice Chair for Education in the Department of Medicine. Her
primary responsibilities revolve around directing educational programs for
students, residents and fellows. As the director of the core clerkship in
Medicine, as well as the director of the medicine subinternships, Dr. Bellini
supervises the clinical experiences of over 300 students annually.
Additionally, she is the Program Director of the Internal Medicine Residency
program that has 150 residents. The residency program at Penn is one of the
nation's best and is regarded by the faculty as the gem of the department. In
her role as Vice Chair, she is also responsible for overseeing all of the
subspecialty fellowship programs. She spends a large portion of her time
teaching students and residents.
Given the concentration of teaching experiences on the inpatient services, Dr.
Bellini is responsible for the organization and maintenance of the inpatient
medicine services that cover over 220 beds and 13,000 admissions per year.
Her primary research interests involve the design, implementation and
evaluation of new educational initiatives. Most recently, she initiated a
hospitalist program for general medicine patients. Current interests involve
sleep deprivation among housestaff.
Her clinical interests include general pulmonary medicine, particularly
advanced lung disease.
Dr. Bellini's bio can be found online.
David Asch
Dr. Asch is Robert D. Eilers Professor of Medicine and Health Care Management
and Economics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and The
Wharton School, Executive Director of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health
Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and Chief of the Health Services
Research Service at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He
received his A.B. in Philosophy from Harvard University, his M.D. from Cornell
University, and his M.B.A. in both Health Care Administration and Decision
Sciences from the Wharton School. He has been a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical
Scholar, a Measy Foundation Scholar, a John A. Hartford Foundation Faculty
Fellow, and a Department of Veterans Affairs Senior Research Associate in
Health Services Research and Development. Dr. Asch is interested in the moral
and cognitive determinants of the decisions made by clinicians and patients.
This area of research combines elements of quantitative medical decision making
with moral and psychological theory. He has special interests in decisions that
involve diagnostic tests (including genetic screening), end of life concerns,
and tradeoffs between the interests of individuals and groups. Dr. Asch's bio
can be found online.
