Program Review: Master of Science in Health Policy Research

Dr. Joshua P. Metlay, MD, PhD, is Interim Physician in Chief at the Massachusetts General Hospital.  He is Chief the Division of General Internal Medicine and the Peter L. Gross Chair in Medicine at MGH. He is also Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Professor in the Department of Healthcare Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. At MGH, Dr. Metlay oversees an academic primary care network that includes 20 clinical sites and over 200 primary care physicians.  The Division also includes a hospital medicine program with over 100 hospitalists and advanced practice providers at MGH.  Under his leadership, the Division is working to create a greater degree of integration between acute, post-acute, and primary care programs to assure safer, more coordinated patient care.  Additional work is focused on linking new experiments in care delivery with evaluation scientists at MGH to support rigorous assessment of healthcare system innovations to inform both internal decisions and the broader fields of delivery sciences.  Dr. Metlay received his bachelor’s degree from Yale University, his PhD in Immunology from Rockefeller University, and his MD from Cornell University Medical College.  He completed residency and chief residency in internal medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and a fellowship in general internal medicine and epidemiology at the Massachusetts General Hospital.  Before his arrival at MGH, he was Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Co-Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars program at Penn.  His research focuses on the epidemiology of drug resistance among common bacterial respiratory pathogens, particularly S. pneumoniae and the development and evaluation of interventions to improve the quality of treatment decisions for respiratory tract infections, especially community-acquired pneumonia.  

Dr. Brandi Kaye Freeman is a physician dedicated to eradicating the health inequities that impact vulnerable populations through evidence-based practices and improved quality of health care delivery.  She is Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and the Associate Vice Chair for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the Department of Pediatrics as well as an Attending Physician at the Child Health Clinic at the Children’s Hospital of Colorado.  In these roles, she is a practicing primary care physician and health services researcher whose research portfolio includes developing approaches to improve Diversity and Equity in the Healthcare and investigating best practices to help children thrive in early childhood.  As a community leader and advocate, Dr. Freeman dedicates numerous hours to improving the health and wellbeing of minority communities.  She is a National President Emeritus of the Student National Medical Association and has been a mentor for the Tour for Diversity in Medicine since its inception in 2012. Dr Freeman is the former Speaker of the House of Delegates of the National Medical Association and current Region VI Trustee as well as Vice President of the Mile High Medical Society (Colorado NMA Local Affiliate). Dr. Freeman received a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology with minors in Chemistry and French from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.  After completing post-baccalaureate work at the Mayo Clinic, she received her Doctorate of Medicine from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX in 2008.  Dr. Freeman completed pediatric residency training at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Children’s Center as part of the Harriet Lane Housestaff.  From 2011-2013, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and received her Masters of Science in Health Policy Research from the Perelman School of Medicine in 2014.

Dr. Steven Joffe (he/him) is a pediatric oncologist and bioethicist who is currently the Art and Ilene Penn Professor of Medical Ethics & Health Policy and Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.  He is also the Director of the Penn Postdoctoral Training Program in the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) of Genetics and Genomics and Co-director of the Cancer Control Program within the Abramson Cancer Center. Dr. Joffe's research addresses the many ethical challenges that arise in the conduct of clinical and translational investigation.  He has led NIH-, PCORI- and foundation-funded projects to study the roles and responsibilities of principal investigators in multicenter randomized trials, accountability in the clinical research enterprise, children’s capacity to engage in research decisions, return of individual genetic results to participants in epidemiologic cohort studies, the integration of whole-exome sequencing technologies into the clinical care of cancer patients, strategies for diagnosis of germline risk among young adults with cancer, and the nature and challenges of learning health systems. He has coauthored over 200 articles addressing these topics.  He has served on many national ethics-related committees including the Department of Health and Human Services Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Vaccine Data and Safety Monitoring Board, the National Human Genome Research Institute’s Genomics and Society Working Group, and the FDA’s Pediatric Ethics Subcommittee. Dr. Joffe attended Harvard College, received his medical degree from the University of California at San Francisco, and received his public health degree from UC Berkeley.  He trained in pediatrics at UCSF and undertook fellowship training in pediatric hematology/oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital. 

Dr. Jeff Kullgren is the Kutsche Memorial Research Chair and Associate Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan, where he is also Vice Chief for Research and Innovation for the Division of General Medicine. Dr. Kullgren practices outpatient and inpatient general internal medicine at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System and is a Research Scientist in the Ann Arbor VA Center for Clinical Management Research. His research aims to help patients and clinicians make sound decisions that will improve the value of health care delivery. He serves as director of IHPI's National Poll on Healthy Aging. 

Dr. Vincent Lo Re is a tenured Associate Professor of Medicine in the University of Pennsylvania Division of Infectious Diseases, Senior Scholar in the Penn Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and Senior Investigator in the Penn Center for Real-World Evidence and Safety of Therapeutics. Dr. Lo Re leads an NIH-funded research program focused on infectious diseases epidemiology and pharmacoepidemiology. He also maintains an active clinical practice devoted to the care of patients with infectious diseases, particularly HIV and chronic viral hepatitis. In addition to his clinical and research efforts, he is Co-Director of Penn’s Master of Science in Clinical Epidemiology degree program and has been an active member of the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology, serving as a member of the Board of Directors, Scientific Program Chair for the 35th International Conference for Pharmacoepidemiology in August 2019, and President (2021-2022). He is also Regional Editor for the Americas of Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety. 

Dr. Devon Noonan is a nurse scientist, certified addictions nurse, an Associate Professor in the Duke School of Nursing, and the Dorothy L. Powell Term Chair in Nursing. She received her BSN at Boston College, her MS in Nursing at Georgetown University, her MPH and PhD at the University of Virginia and completed a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Michigan. Dr. Noonan’s research is focused on using community-engaged approaches to develop innovative health behavior change interventions, including digital interventions, with the goal of reducing risk for chronic diseases including cancer and cardiovascular disease. Dr. Noonan’s work has a strong focus on rural and medically underserved populations. Much of her work also focuses on tobacco cessation. She has been continuously funded by NCI for the past 5 years to examine text-based intervention approaches for tobacco cessation in rural and medically underserved populations. Dr. Noonan teaches and mentors students across all programs at DUSON and is the Co-Director of the Duke National Clinician Scholars Program. 

Alice Abernathy, MD
Emna Bakillah, MD
Zoe Bouchelle, MD
Arina Chesnokova, MD, MPH
Deepa Ramadurai, MD
Ashish Thakrar, MD
Emmett Wynter, MD

Srinath Adusumalli, MD, MSHP, MBMI, FACC
Elizabeth Brown, MD, MSHP
Krisda Chaiyachati, MD, MPH, MSHP
Jessica Lee, MD, MSHP
Margaret Lowenstein, MD, MSHP, MPhil
Shazia Siddique, MD, MSHP
Sarah Wood, MD, MSHP
Jane Zhu, MD, MPP, MSHP

David Grande, MD, MPA
Meghan Lane-Fall, MD, MSHP
Knashawn Morales, ScD
Marilyn Schapira, MD, MPH
Gary Weissman, MD, MSHP
Heather Wolfe, MD, MSHP

Justin Bekelman, MD
Katherine Courtright, MD, MSHP
Christopher Feudtner, MD, PhD, MPH
Alexander Fiks, MD, MSCE
Judith Long, MD
Shivan Mehta, MD, MSHP, MBA
Rachel Werner, MD, PhD

Peter Groeneveld, MD, MS
Judy A. Shea, PhD