AHW National Advisory Committee

Howard Bauchner, MD is a Professor of Pediatrics and Public Health at Boston University Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine. He served as the 16th Editor in Chief of JAMA and the JAMA Network between 2011 and 2021 and Editor in Chief of Archives of Disease in Childhood between 2003 and 2011. At BUSM, prior to JAMA, he was Vice-Chair of Research for the Department of Pediatrics and Chief, Division of General Pediatrics. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. He has continued to write on issues such as conflict of interest, pre-print servers, drug-approval, and open-science. In 2022 and 2023 he was a Visiting Scholar at the National University of Singapore.

At JAMA Howard focused on publishing important and novel research articles including randomized clinical trials, opinion pieces, and special communications, improving and expanding clinical content, using electronic/digital approaches to enhance communication, ensuring a commitment to innovation and increasing diversity. During his tenure followers on social media increased from ~13,000 to ~1,200,000 and the electronic table of contents was distributed to over 1,000,000 individuals each week.

In print, via eTOC, and social media content published by JAMA reached over 1.5M physicians worldwide each week. Views (PDF and HTML) increased from 10M in 2011 to over 100M in 2020 (50% from outside the U.S.). Podcast downloads increased from 300,000 in 2014 to 6M and videos were viewed more than 16M times in 2020. The print journals were redesigned for the first time in over 20 years and the website updated twice. All 9 of the specialty journals were renamed (Archives of Pediatrics became JAMA Pediatrics, etc.), 4 new journals were launched – JAMA Oncology (2015), JAMA Cardiology (2016), and JAMA Network Open (2018); and JAMA Health Forum (2020/2021), the latter 2 are both fully open-access journals.

Howard authored and recorded over 200 editorials and podcasts (including live-stream events) discussing issues such as open-science (data-sharing, pre-print servers, open access), conflict of interest, diversity in medicine, the interpretation of randomized clinical trials, mentoring, maintaining editorial standards during a pandemic, the language and reporting of race and ethnicity, scientific misconduct, authorship and team science, and numerous health policy issues, including healthcare as a right, waste in medicine, the cost of health care, health care disparities, and race, racism, equity, and poverty in medicine.

Asaf Bitton, M.D., M.P.H., is Executive Director of Ariadne Labs, a health systems innovation center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and an Associate Professor of Medicine and Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. Ariadne Labs develops scalable systems-level solutions that dramatically improve health care for life’s most critical moments and the stages in between, with a focus on maternal health, primary health care, surgery, and end of life care. Made up of over 110 physicians, nurses, researchers, data scientists, implementation specialists, program managers and operations professionals, and 155 associate faculty members from across the Harvard system and beyond, Ariadne Labs is active in over 26 countries across the globe.

Dr. Bitton previously served as director of Ariadne Labs’ Primary Health Care Program, leading primary care measurement and improvement work in over a dozen countries along with regional primary care learning collaboratives in Massachusetts. He is a core founder and leader of the Primary Health Care Performance Initiative, a partnership that includes the World Bank, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, dedicated to transforming the global state of primary health care. This initiative is currently active in over 20 countries and will produce country-level dashboards highlighting primary health care performance in 60 countries by 2022 as part of the monitoring efforts for the Sustainable Development Goals 2030.

A nationally-recognized expert on U.S. health policy, he serves as a senior advisor for primary care policy at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI). Since 2012, Dr. Bitton has helped design and test three major comprehensive primary care payment and delivery initiatives at CMMI, active in 18 states and 3,000 practices, and serving more than three million Medicare beneficiaries. These initiatives represent the largest tests of combined primary care payment and clinical practice transformation work in the United States.

In his research, Dr. Bitton has examined the rapid rise of chronic cardiometabolic diseases globally, studied the implementation of global public health treaties to reduce the burden of tobacco use, and analyzed the payment and transformation of primary care services across the United States as well as in Ghana, Costa Rica, Uganda, China, Haiti, and Estonia. Dr. Bitton practices primary care at Brigham and Women’s South Huntington clinic, a team-based primary care practice in Boston that he helped found in 2011. He holds an undergraduate degree from Brown University and a medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Bitton completed his residency and chief residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital and has a master’s in public health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Dr. Kemi Doll is a gynecologic oncologist at the University of Washington. She is an Associate Professor in the Division of Gynecologic Oncology at the UW School of Medicine and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Health Systems and Population Health at the UW School of Public Health. Her research centers on examining Black-White racial inequity in the care of benign and malignant gynecologic disease in the US and has been funded by the NIH, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) and several foundations. Dr. Doll is also an advocate and a co-founder of ECANA, the Endometrial Cancer Action Network for African-Americans (ecanawomen.org).

Dr. Doll is from Atlanta, GA and completed a Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University. She then attended medical school at Columbia University where she earned a number of awards for academic achievement and humanism in medicine. She completed OBGYN residency training at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, IL, and went on to complete subspecialty training in Gynecologic Oncology at the University of North Carolina Hospitals in Chapel Hill, NC. She has a Master’s degree in Clinical Research from the UNC School of Public Health where she also completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Cancer Care Quality in the Department of Health Policy and Management.

Atul Grover, MD, PhD, is the inaugural executive director of the AAMC Research and Action Institute. The institute convenes national experts to examine the most critical issues affecting the missions and institutions of academic medicine; develop policy and programmatic solutions; and harness member medical schools, teaching hospitals and academic health systems, and academic societies to test, validate, and scale effective change.

Dr. Grover is an internal medicine physician, health services researcher, and nationally recognized expert in health policy. Dr. Grover joined the AAMC as the associate director for the Center for Workforce Studies in 2005, where he managed research activity and directed externally funded workforce studies. He became a director of government relations and health care affairs in 2007 and served as the association’s chief public policy officer from 2011 to 2016. From 2016 to 2020, he served as executive vice president, where he provided strategic leadership in the areas of medical education, academic affairs, health care affairs, scientific affairs, learning and leadership programming, diversity and inclusion, public policy, and communications.

Previously, Dr. Grover held positions in health care finance and applied economics consulting and worked with the U.S. Public Health Service, Health Resources and Service Administration National Center for Health Workforce Analysis. Dr. Grover earned his medical degree from the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences (GW SMHS) and his doctorate in health and public policy from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Grover holds faculty appointments at GW SHMS and JHU Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Octavio N. Martinez, Jr., M.D., M.P.H., M.B.A., F.A.P.A., is executive director of the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health at The University of Texas at Austin. Martinez is also a Senior Associate Vice-President within the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, where he heads up the Community Integrated Health Initiatives program for the university. He is the Associate Chair of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for the Dell Medical School Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, a Professor of Psychiatry at DMS, Clinical Professor at the Steve Hicks School of Social Work, Faculty Affiliate of the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice in the School of Law, and Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at the Long School of Medicine, UT Health San Antonio. Internationally, Martinez is a member of the International Initiative for Mental Health Leadership.

Nationally, he is a member of the Advisory Committee to the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and a member of the ADC’s Health Equity Workgroup. He is also a board member of Trust for America’s Health, a member of the Psychiatric Services Journal editorial board, and current member and former chair of the National Hispanic Council on Aging.

Martinez recently served on the Presidential COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force for the White House and served on the National Advisory Committee for Rural Health and Human Services for HHS. At the Texas state level, he is a commissioner for the Judicial Commission on Mental Health and executive committee member for the Texas Child Mental Health Care Consortium.

Brian Miller, M.D., M.B.A., M.P.H. is a practicing hospitalist at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Business (courtesy) at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and a health policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, where he serves as a Nonresident Fellow.

Dr. Miller runs a multi-disciplinary, fifteen-person research group that analyzes market-driven solutions in FDA regulatory policy, payment policy, and healthcare competition policy. Research by his team has been published in The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Tobacco Control, BMJ, and Health Affairs Forefront among other venues.

Trained and board-certified in preventive medicine and internal medicine, Dr. Miller has broad regulatory experience at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. He serves as an advisor to members of Congress and other elected officials and lives in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Judith Monroe joined the CDC Foundation in February 2016 as president and CEO, following her role as a deputy director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and director of CDC’s Office of State, Tribal, Local and Territorial Support. In her work at the CDC Foundation, Dr. Monroe advances priority programs that improve the health of people across America and around the world. The CDC Foundation mobilizes philanthropic and private-sector resources to support CDC’s critical health protection work, managing hundreds of programs in the United States and in more than 160 countries.

Prior to the CDC Foundation, Dr. Monroe oversaw key activities and technical assistance at CDC supporting the nation’s health departments and the public health system. Throughout the 2014–15 Ebola epidemic she served as senior advisor for the domestic response. During her tenure as the state health commissioner for Indiana she served as president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials through the H1N1 pandemic. Dr. Monroe currently serves on the board of directors for the Center for Global Health Innovation, is a member of the Milken Institute’s Public Health Advisory Board, the COVID Collaborative, the Advisory Council of the Pandemic Action Network and the APHA Alliance for Disease Prevention and Response.

Additionally, she was appointed by Gov. Holcomb to co-chair a public health commission aimed at modernizing the public health system in Indiana; serves as a member of the World Health Organization Foundation’s Advisory group and on the executive committee of Woman of Impact and is a member of the Atlanta Rotary Club. Among her many awards, Dr. Monroe was recognized as one of Atlanta’s Most Admired CEOs for 2021 by the Atlanta Business Chronicle; awarded the United Way of Greater Atlanta Woman of Excellence Award; received the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce MAC Heroes of Global Health award and was recognized by CDC’s Office of Minority Health and Health Equity as a Health Equity Champion.

Dr. Monroe received the American Public Health Association’s (APHA) Presidential Citation for her work to improve the health and well-being of people around the world, and for her commitment to the future of public health as a mentor to young physicians and public health students.

Julie Morita, MD, is executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), where she oversees all programming, policy, research and communications activities. As the nation’s largest private philanthropy dedicated solely to improving the nation’s health, RWJF is focused on building a comprehensive Culture of Health that provides everyone in America a fair and just opportunity to live the healthiest life possible. Knowing many factors, such as clean air and water, access to healthy food, safe housing, secure employment,education, and quality healthcare, contribute to the well-being of our nation, the Foundation concentrates on advancing health equity by eliminating barriers to health, including discrimination.

Before joining RWJF, Julie helped lead the Chicago Department of Public Health for nearly two decades, first as a medical director, then as chief medical officer. In 2015, she was appointed to the department’s top position, commissioner. In that role, she oversaw the public health needs of 2.7 million residents in the nation’s third largest city. As commissioner, Julie led the development and implementation of Healthy Chicago 2.0, a four-year health improvement plan focused on achieving health equity by addressing the conditions in which people live, learn, work and play. The plan was based on RWJF’s Culture of Health framework.

As medical director, Julie’s top priority was reducing disparities in immunization coverage levels among children and adults in Chicago. She implemented systems to identify communities with the lowest rates of immunization and to provide families in those areas with information about, and access to, critical vaccines. Additionally, Julie led several policy initiatives to reduce tobacco usage among teens, including raising the legal age to purchase tobacco products to 21. She has been called to serve as an advisor to the White House, U.S. Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Academy of Medicine, and numerous state and local public health agencies. She is currently a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases Board of Directors, and a member of a the Advisory Committee to the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Julie began her medical career as a pediatrician in Tucson, Ariz., before moving into public health as an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta (CDC). Influenced deeply by her own family history, Julie has been a lifelong advocate of equity issues. As children, both of her parents, Mototsugu and Betty Morita, were detained in Japanese internment camps during World War II. They and their extended families were uprooted from their homes, communities, and jobs in the states of Washington and Oregon and transferred to a detention camp in Idaho.

Having grown up hearing stories about the harsh and unjust treatment her grandparents, parents, and thousands of others endured, Julie has used that knowledge to pursue health equity in every aspect of her work. Born and raised in Chicago, Julie earned her undergraduate degree in biology from the University of Illinois, and her medical degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical School. She completed her residency at the University of Minnesota. Julie is married to William Trick, MD, an internist who is director of the Collaborative Research Unit at Cook County.

Dr. Elizabeth Ofili is a Professor of Medicine, at Morehouse School of Medicine, and a practicing cardiologist with Morehouse Healthcare in Atlanta, Georgia. She serves as Chief Medical Officer of the Morehouse Choice Accountable Care Organization, a Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Shared Savings Program, that includes Morehouse Healthcare, and Federally Qualified Health Centers across the state of Georgia. Dr. Ofili is a national and internationally recognized clinician scientist with particular focus on cardiovascular disparities and women’s health. She has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), since 1994, with a track record in clinical trials that impact health disparities.

In 2002, as president of the Association of Black Cardiologists (ABC), Dr. Ofili led the initiative to implement the landmark African American Heart Failure Trial (AHEFT), whose findings changed practice guidelines for the treatment of heart failure in African Americans. Dr. Ofili also established the ABC Center for Women’s Health and Epidemiology, and currently leads the ABC Cardiovascular Study (CVIS), a practice based research registry that is integrating social determinants and technology innovation to support clinical trials and address health disparities at the point of care.

Dr. Ofili brings her knowledge of health and medicine to technology and innovation. She is the Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of AccuHealth Technologies Inc., which is “Empowering patient centered care through technology and health coaching”. (www.Myaccuhealth.com) AccuHealth Technologies holds the patent for “A System and Method for Chronic Illness Care”, and has developed Health 360x platform to support population health and clinical trials.

Dr. Ofili helped to raise over $175 million to fund pioneering research and training infrastructure at Morehouse School of Medicine. She leads multi institutional regional and national networks funded by the National Institutes of Health, to address diversity and inclusion in the biomedical workforce, as well as community engagement to ensure participation of under represented populations in NIH, Foundations, and Industry sponsored research. She serves as multi PI of Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance (GaCTSA), the statewide initiative at Emory University, Morehouse School of Medicine, Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Georgia, along with partnering health systems and research organizations. As contact PI of the RCMI Coordinating Center, she works with 18-22 NIMHD funded Research Centers at Minority Institutions (RCMI) across fourteen states and territories, to support investigator development, dissemination, and metrics for data standards and evaluation across the consortium.

Dr. Ofili has received over 50 national awards, including “Changing the Face of Medicine: The Rise of America’s Women Physicians” Exhibit at the National Library of Medicine. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine, which is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine and recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service. Dr. Ofili currently serves as Membership Chair of Medicine and Subspecialties, Dermatology and Pathology, the largest member section in the National Academy of Medicine.

During his 20-plus years in philanthropy, Dr. Dwayne Proctor has always worked to ensure that American communities were healthy and thriving. He is President and CEO of Missouri Foundation for Health, joining MFH in 2021. The Foundation works to improve health through collaboration, convening, knowledge sharing and strategic investment, never losing sight of the equity lens that shapes all its work. Under his leadership, MFH strives to become an antiracist institution that fairly targets is resources to achieve health equity in Missouri by 2023. The Foundation recently launched a 20-year Food Justice strategic initiative to build collaborative efforts and galvanize shifts in current policies and practices that shape the way Missourians eat. MFH works to address a diverse mix of pressing issues across the state, including Medicaid expansion, childhood obesity, firearm violence and suicide prevention, crisis response, and behavioral health. The Foundation works on several strategic initiatives focused on women’s health, such as access to contraception, and infant health and vitality.

Before his time at MFH, he served in a variety of roles at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In 2005, Dr. Proctor was tapped to lead RWJF’s national strategies to reverse the rise in childhood obesity rates. In this role, he collaborated with his colleagues to promote effective changes to public policies and industry practices, test and demonstrate innovative community and school-based environmental changes and leverage sustainable changes using both “grassroots” and “treetops” advocacy approaches to educate local and national leaders on their roles and opportunities to prevent childhood obesity.

Dr. Proctor serves on the National Academy of Medicine’s Leadership Consortium, focused on advancing and supporting the learning health care system and through evidence mobilization, digital health, value incentives and systems, and culture inclusion and equity. Dr. Proctor was an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine where he taught courses on health communication and marketing practices to reach multicultural populations. During his Fulbright Fellowship in Senegal, West Africa, his research team investigated how HIV prevention messages raised awareness of AIDS as a national health problem.

Dr. Proctor received his doctoral, master’s, and bachelor’s degrees in marketing and communication science from the University of Connecticut. He is the former chairperson of the board of directors for the Association of Black Foundation Executives and currently is the chairperson of the board of trustees for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Foundation, as serves as an advisor to both the University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy and the Wisconsin Medical School.

Beth Resnick, DrPH, MPH is the Assistant Dean for Public Health Practice and is a Senior Scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the Department of Health Policy and Management. The first decade of Dr. Resnick's career was spent working at the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) to support and advance the capacity of the nation’s nearly 3,000 local health departments.

Her research at Johns Hopkins has focused on the public health infrastructure, specifically looking at funding for state and local public health agencies, workforce protections and well-being, and identifying system capacities, gaps, and opportunities.

Sandra L. Wong, MD, MS is the William N. and Bessie Allyn Professor of Surgery and the Chair of the Department of Surgery at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center and the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. She is the senior vice president of the Surgical Service Line at Dartmouth Hitchcock Health and also professor of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. Dr. Wong is a surgical oncologist and has clinical expertise in soft tissue sarcoma and skin cancer. She has published more than 270 manuscripts and book chapters.

Her health services research program has been funded by National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the American Cancer Society. Her work broadly focuses on the quality and costs of care; she is currently working on (1) the development and implementation of systems to integrate patient reported outcomes into oncology care, particularly as it pertains to improving symptom management and (2) the study of disparities in access to and outcomes of cancer surgery for rural patients.

Dr. Wong is the co-leader of Dartmouth Health’s new Center for Rural Health Care Delivery Science, funded by the NIH’s Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) program. Dr. Wong is past president of the Society of Surgical Oncology, Society of Surgical Chairs, and the Society of University Surgeons. She is an associate editor for Annals of Surgery and World Journal of Surgery, deputy editor for Annals of Surgical Oncology, and on the Editorial Boards of Journal of Surgical Oncology and Journal of the American College of Surgeons. She has been honored with numerous medical student and resident teaching awards.