Hopes for Health in the Biden Administration

Elena Fuentes-Afflick, MD, MPH, is Professor and Vice Chair of Pediatrics, Chief of Pediatrics at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, and Vice Dean for Academic Affairs in the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Fuentes-Afflick obtained her undergraduate and medical degrees at the University of Michigan and a Masters degree in Public Health (Epidemiology) from the University of California, Berkeley. She completed her Pediatric residency and chief residency at UCSF, followed by a research fellowship at the Phillip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at UCSF. Dr. Fuentes-Afflick’s scholarly work has focused on the broad themes of Latino health, acculturation, immigrant health, health disparities, faculty misconduct, and faculty development. Her research demonstrated the validity of the “epidemiologic paradox” of favorable perinatal outcomes among immigrant Latina women, reported that the relationship between maternal birthplace and perinatal outcomes varies by maternal ethnicity, and that immigration status influences access to care and perinatal health outcomes among Latina women. She has served in national leadership roles for the Society for Pediatric Research (Council and President) and the American Pediatric Society (Council and President). Dr. Fuentes-Afflick completed a Fellowship through the Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine (ELAM) program, served as an ELAM Learning Community Advisor and is currently an ELAM Learning Community Partner. In 2010, Dr. Fuentes-Afflick was elected to membership in the National Academy of Medicine and has served on numerous consensus committees, the Membership Committee, the Diversity Committee, was elected to the Governing Council, the Executive Committee of Council, and is currently serving as Home Secretary. In 2020, Dr. Fuentes-Afflick was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Rashawn Ray, a David M. Rubenstein Fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution, is Professor of Sociology and Executive Director of the Lab for Applied Social Science Research (LASSR) at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is also one of the co-editors of Contexts Magazine: Sociology for the Public. Formerly, Ray was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ray’s research addresses the mechanisms that manufacture and maintain racial and social inequality with a particular focus on police-civilian relations and men’s treatment of women. His work also speaks to ways that inequality may be attenuated through racial uplift activism and social policy. Ray has published over 50 books, articles, and book chapters, and nearly 20 op-eds. Recently, Ray published the book How Families Matter: Simply Complicated Intersections of Race, Gender, and Work (with Pamela Braboy Jackson) and another edition of Race and Ethnic Relations in the 21st Century: History, Theory, Institutions, and Policy, which has been adopted nearly 40 times in college courses.

Ray has written for the New York Times, Newsweek,  Huffington Post, and NBC News. Selected as 40 Under 40 Prince George’s County and awarded the 2016 UMD Research Communicator Award, Ray has appeared on C-SPAN, MSNBC, HLN, Al Jazeera, NPR, and Fox News. His research has been cited by the Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, ESPN, Vox, The Root, and The Chronicle. Previously, Ray served on the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington Planning Committee and the Commission on Racial Justice with Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc

Lawrence O. Gostin is University Professor, Georgetown University’s highest academic rank, and Founding O’Neill Chair in Global Health Law. He directs the World Health Organization Center on National and Global Health Law. Gostin is Professor of Medicine at Georgetown University and Professor of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.

The WHO Director-General appointed Prof. Gostin to high-level positions, including expert panels on the International Health Regulations (IHR) and on Mental Health. He served on the Director-General’s Advisory Committee on Reforming WHO, as well as WHO expert advisory committees on pandemic influenza, smallpox, genomic sequencing, and migrant health. He served on WHO’s Blue Ribbon Panel on global health equity. He co-chairs the Lancet Commission of Global Health Law.

Professor Gostin served on two global commissions on the 2015 Ebola epidemic. He was senior advisor to the UN Secretary General’s post-Ebola Commission. He served on the drafting committee for the G-7 Summit agenda in Tokyo 2016 on global health security and Universal Health Coverage.

Prof. Gostin holds international professorial appointments, including at Oxford University, the University of Witwatersrand (South Africa), and Melbourne University. He holds honorary degrees from the State University of New York, Cardiff University, Sydney University, and the Royal Institute of Public Health. Prof. Gostin is Legal and Global Health Editor, Journal of the American Medical Association.

Prof. Gostin is an elected lifetime Member of the National Academy of Medicine, and currently serves on the Academy’s Global Health Board. The National Academy, American Public Health Association, and New York Bar Association have all awarded Gostin their Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Awards. In 2016, President Obama appointed Prof. Gostin to the President’s National Cancer Advisory Board. He serves on the National Institutes of Health Director’s Advisory Committee on the ethics of public/private partnerships to end the opioid crisis.

Prof. Gostin’s book Global Health Law (Harvard University Press) is read throughout the world—translated into simplified and traditional Chinese, Korean, and Spanish.

The National Consumer Council (United Kingdom) bestowed Prof. Gostin with the Rosemary Delbridge Memorial Award for the person “who has most influenced Parliament and government to act for the welfare of society.”

Alan B. Cohen, Sc.D., is a Research Professor in the Markets, Public Policy, and Law Department at the Boston University Questrom School of Business, and Professor of Health Law, Policy and Management at the Boston University School of Public Health.  He currently serves as Editor of The Milbank Quarterly, a leading multidisciplinary journal of population health and health policy.

From 1992 to 2016, he directed the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Program and, from 2013 to 2018, he also directed the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research Program.  At BU, he directed the Questrom School’s Health Care MBA Program from 1994 to 2003, and was Executive Director of the University’s Health Policy Institute from 2003 to 2013.

Earlier in his career, Dr. Cohen held faculty positions at Johns Hopkins University and Brandeis University, and was Vice President for Research and Evaluation at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.  He has co-authored Technology in American Health Care: Policy Directions for Effective Evaluation and Management (U. Michigan, 2004), co-edited Medicare and Medicaid at 50: America’s Entitlement Programs in the Era of Affordable Care (Oxford, 2015), and co-edited of “The Politics and Challenges of Achieving Health Equity,” a special issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law (Duke, 2017).  Dr. Cohen is an elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance.  He received his B.A. in psychology with honors from the University of Rochester, and his M.S. and Sc.D. in health policy and management from the Harvard School of Public Health.