NPA Board of Directors

Valerie Arkoosh, MD, MPH
NPA President
Valerie Arkoosh is Professor of Clinical Anesthesiology and Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.  Her primary clinical focus is Obstetric Anesthesiology and she holds a Master’s of Public Health degree, with a concentration in Health Policy, from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.  Her current policy focus is on the impact of national health reform efforts on cost, quality and access to care for the uninsured. Dr. Arkoosh is a former President of the Society for Obstetric Anesthesia and Perinatology.  Prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania, she was Chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology at Drexel University College of Medicine.

Cheryl Bettigole, MD, MPH
NPA President-Elect& Vice-President of Internal Affairs
Dr. Cheryl Bettigole is a family physician and the Chief Medical Officer of Complete Care Health Network, a group of community health centers serving southern New Jersey.  Prior to her current position, she worked for the Philadelphia Department of Public Health where she served as clinical director of a city clinic from 2006-2011.  While with the health department in Philadelphia, she worked to improve services for patients of limited English proficiency and to implement chronic disease management programs.  She is a magna cum laude graduate of Jefferson Medical College, completed her residency in Family Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, and completed her Masters in Public Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she received a Capstone award for her work on interpretation services in a public health clinic setting.

Alex Blum, MD
NPA Vice-President of Membership
Alex Blum is an American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the National Academy of Health (Office of Behavioral Social Science Research). He is a recent Ruth Kirschstein National Research Service Award health policy fellow at Mount Sinai School of Medicine; he is now an Adjunct Assistant Professor.  Dr. Blum graduated in 2005 from Howard University College of Medicine and in 2008 from the Community Health and Advocacy Track from University of California Los Angeles Mattel Children’s Pediatric residency program.  He has a Masters in Public Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He was a board member and former National Field Director for Doctors for America.

Laurel Cappa, MD, MPH
Laurel Cappa has been actively involved in reproductive health, both in managerial and technical roles in the U.S. and abroad, for more than 30 years.  Her diverse academic and experiential background — medicine, public health, education, and counseling — provides her with a broad programmatic perspective.  Dr. Cappa has managed large multi-country and multi-continent projects and is particularly skilled in assessment, program design and implementation management. She has worked directly in more than 30 countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, Eastern Europe and other post-Soviet countries. Dr. Cappa has recently expanded her focus to include international tobacco control, especially as viewed from a maternal and child health perspective.

Christine K. Cassel, MD
President and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine and the ABIM Foundation, is a leading expert in geriatric medicine, medical ethics and quality of care.  Dr. Cassel is one of 20 scientists chosen by President Obama to serve on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).  She is co-chair and physician leader of a PCAST working group that makes recommendations to the President on issues relating to health information technology.  In addition to serving on the IOM’s Comparative Effective Research Committee mandated by Congress to set priorities for the national CER effort, Dr. Cassel  also served on the IOM committees that wrote the influential reports To Err is Human and Crossing the Quality Chasm. In each of the last two years, Modern Healthcare has named Dr. Cassel to its list of top 100 most powerful people in health care in the U.S. An active scholar and lecturer, she is the author or co-author of 14 books and more than 150 journal articles on geriatric medicine, aging, bioethics and health policy.  Her most recent book is Medicare Matters: What Geriatric Medicine Can Teach American Health Care.  In 2010, Dr. Cassel was a Visiting Scholar at the prestigious Santa Fe Institute, where she investigated multidisciplinary approaches to professional self-regulation within the context of complex adaptive systems theory.  Dr. Cassel is former dean of the School of Medicine and vice president for medical affairs at Oregon Health and Science University, chair of the Department of Geriatrics and Adult Development at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and chief of General Internal Medicine at the University of Chicago.  Board certified in internal medicine and geriatric medicine, Dr. Cassel is recipient of numerous honorary degrees and awards of distinction, including Mastership in the American College of Physicians.

Ricky Y. Choi, MD, MPH
Ricky Y. Choi, MD, MPH, FAAP is the Department Head of Pediatrics at Asian Health Services Community Health Center based in Oakland, CA.  Dr. Choi is a consummate advocate for improving health care quality and access for low income and immigrant families for which he has been featured in both ethnic and mainstream media, including the Korea Times, New America Media, World Journal, KoreAm Magazine, KQED, and the San Francisco Chronicle.  He has also authored textbook chapters on access to health care for Asian Americans and for Korean Americans.  He is an active member of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) as a Fellow and as a Board member of AAP Northern California Chapter.  Dr. Choi has appointments to advisory councils of the California Health and Human Services Agency in the areas of multicultural health, care for children with special health care needs, and pediatric health care quality.  He is a clinical instructor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco.  He is a City Brights blogger for the San Francisco Chronicle and his writings can be found on SFGate and the Huffington Post.  Since 2011, Dr. Choi has been a fellow of the California Health Care Foundation Health Care Leadership Program.

Rachel Rosen DeGolia, MPA
Rachel Rosen DeGolia is the Executive Director of the Universal Health Care Action Network (UHCAN), headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio.  UHCAN supports and collaborates with a wide diversity of organizations and advocates organizing at the local, state and national levels around multiple approaches to advance comprehensive health reform.  Rachel has worked for UHCAN since its founding in 1992, previously serving as Associate Director, Communications Director and Organizing and Operations Director.  Rachel has been fortunate to work in the nonprofit advocacy field throughout her career, previously in the civil liberties field.  She was the Director of the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights for 15 years, and served in various positions with the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation (formerly the National Committee to Abolish HUAC).  Rachel received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago in 1975 and a Masters in Public Administration with a concentration in Non-Profit Management in 2003 from the Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University.

David Evans, MD
NPA Immediate Past-President
David Evans is a board-certified family physician offering a broad scope of services, including operative obstetrics and endoscopy, to members of his rural community.  He is the recipient of several community service and teaching awards.  Viewing the marketing tactics of the pharmaceutical industry as a negative force on patient care, his practice, Madras Medical Group, is pharm-free.  He practices in Madras, Oregon where he lives with his wife and two children.

Frances S. Hanckel, Sc.D.
Frances Hanckel holds a doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins University in Health Services Research and is a retired health care executive with significant east and west coast experience.  Her last role was as the Chief Operating Officer of the MemorialCare five hospital system in southern California.   She has served on the boards of many community agencies, now lives in Portland, Oregon, and is a Director for the Oregon Public Health Initiative.

William B. Jordan, MD, MPH
NPA Treasurer
Dr. William Jordan is Co-Director of Medical Student Education in the Department of Family and Social Medicine at Montefiore/Einstein.  He trained in family medicine at Montefiore and preventive medicine at Mount Sinai.  He focuses on direct care, community health, medical education, and policy advocacy in underserved communities.  His interests include: (1) promoting programs that provide economic opportunity and healthy food to communities (Locarto); and (2) training medical professionals in advocacy skills.  He currently serves as Co-Chair of the Policy and Legislative Committee of the Public Health Association of New York City.

Salomeh Keyhani, MD, MPH
NPA Development Committee Chair
Dr. Keyhani is an Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine at UC at San Francisco. She is also a researcher and staff physician in the San Francisco VA Medical Center. She is a practicing primary care internist and a health services researcher. Dr. Keyhani completed residency training in internal medicine and a fellowship in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar program at Johns Hopkins. She received her Master’s in Public Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She also completed a health policy fellowship in the US Senate. Her research interests include the examination of the quality of health care services and health care policy research. Her quality of care research to date has focused on examining the underuse and overuse of medical treatments.  Dr. Keyhani’s policy research has largely focused on areas important to health care reform. She has surveyed physicians on their views regarding coverage expansions (the public option and Medicare expansions), defensive medicine, comparative effectiveness research and reimbursement reform. She has also examined the guideline development process and conflicts of interest in medicine.

Basim Khan, MD, MPA
Basim Khan is a primary care physician at the Arlandria Health Center, a community health center in Alexandria, VA. His primary interest is improving access to health care, particularly among uninsured patients in northern Virginia. His other interests include strengthening primary care, promoting civic engagement among physicians, and global health. He obtained his medical degree from UCLA and completed completed internal medicine residency at UCSF its San Francisco General Hospital primary care track. He also obtained a Master’s in Public Administration from Harvard Kennedy School as a Zuckerman Fellow. As AMSA’s Health and Human Rights Coordinator, he was the founder and managing editor of Global Pulse, a journal on global health issues. His writings have appeared in the LA Times and Huffington Post. Basim currently lives in Arlington, VA.

Amy Lu, MD, MPH, MBA
Amy Lu, MD, MPH, MBA joined the Loyola Department of Surgery, Division of Transplant Surgery in February 2011 as the Chief of the Division of Abdominal Transplantation. She completed her undergraduate degree at Amherst College and received her medical education and public health degree at Tufts University Medical School.  She completed general surgery training at the New York Presbyterian Hospital and her transplant surgery fellowship at Stanford University.  She also received her Masters from Auburn University.   She has been on faculty at Georgetown University Hospital  and Montefiore Medical Center in NY. She oversees the clinical, academic and administrative leadership of liver, kidney and pancreas transplantation. She also works with the hospital leadership in development of a transplant center concept.

Rishi Manchanda, MD, MPH
Rishi Manchanda shapes his practice of medicine to advance health where it begins — where we live, work, learn and play — and works to increase opportunities for vulnerable populations to participate in democracy and promote health and human rights. He was the first Director of Social Medicine and Health Equity at St. John’s Well Child and Family Centers, a community health center network in south Los Angeles. Dr. Manchanda serves on the board of the National Physicians Alliance and founded RxDemocracy, a coalition effort to promote civic engagement in clinical settings.  He was a founding member of the South LA Health and Human Rights Collaborative and is a member the National Advisory Council of the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnerships. He is an HIV Specialist, board certified in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics, and a medical expert on substandard housing-related health problems.

Padi McFadden, MD
NPA Secretary
Padi McFadden is a board-certified emergency physician in Maryland. She received her doctorate from University of Pittsburgh and completed her residency training at Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut. She then received a certificate in Health Policy during fellowship training at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. She currently practices in inner city Baltimore where she lives with her husband.

Jennifer Ng’andu
Jennifer Ng’andu currently serves as Deputy Director of the Health Policy Project at the National Council of La Raza (NCLR).  She oversees NCLR’s efforts to improve the health status and outcomes of Latinos through national policy change.  Her work focuses on eliminating injustices in health care for Latinos by increasing health coverage in the Latino community and improving access to quality health care and services.  In her position, Ms. Ng’andu has successfully advanced policies that expand health coverage opportunities for Latinos.  In 2009, she fought to enact a major children’s health initiative, which led to the restoration of critical benefits for legal immigrant children and families.  As a result, more than 250,000 uninsured children received access to insurance and Congress restored at least $1 billion of public health insurance to legal immigrant children and expectant mothers.  Ms. Ng’andu has expertise in a broad range of health and nutrition issues affecting Latinos, specializing in immigrant communities.  Her media credits include a spectrum of radio, print, and television media, including The New York Times, BBC, and The Washington Post.  She received recognition for her work to eliminate racial and ethnic health care disparities when presented with the 2008 Congressional Black Caucus Health Braintrust Leadership in Advocacy Award.  Prior to joining NCLR, Ms. Ng’andu worked at the National Immigration Law Center, helping to advance legislation that improved health and expanded access to social services for low-income immigrants, as well as increasing educational opportunities for immigrant students.  Ms. Ng’andu holds a B.S. in psychology from Duke University.  She was born in Lusaka, Zambia and hails from southeastern Connecticut.

Adair Parr, MD, JD
NPA Vice-President of Communications
Adair Parr, M.D., J.D. is a board certified child and adolescent psychiatrist and Training Director of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellowship at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC.  She is a graduate of Duke University, Georgetown University Law Center and Tulane University School of Medicine.  She completed her General Psychiatry Residency at Georgetown University and her Child and Adolescent Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University.  Her professional interests include anxiety disorders, improving communication with patients, families and physicians, advocacy for mental health and health care reform.

Mark Ryan, MD
Mark Ryan is an Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU)’s School of Medicine, and was recently appointed the Medical Director for the VCU School of Medicine’s International/Inner City/Rural Preceptorship (I2CRP). He received his BS cum laude from the College of William and Mary and his MD from VCU, where he was a member of the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Society, and completed his residency in family medicine in Blackstone, Virginia. Dr. Ryan worked in rural Virginia for four years before returning to Richmond, Virginia, to work with members of medically underserved urban communities. Currently he provides primary care to a largely Spanish-speaking pediatric population and uninsured English-speaking adults. Dr. Ryan also precepts a weekly teaching clinic in a Richmond free clinic, and teaches medical students in the clinical setting in his office practice. He has a strong personal interest in underserved communities, social determinants of health, and health care advocacy and reform. Dr. Ryan also leads an ongoing medical service/community development project in an economically marginalized community in the Dominican Republic, and is interested in enhancing access to health care both in the US and in the DR. He is currently interested in the use of social media to enhance doctor/patient communication, improve clinical care and outcomes, and support advocacy and outreach. Dr. Ryan lived in South America much of his childhood and speaks fluent Spanish. He lives in Richmond, Virginia with his wife and adorably troublesome dog.

Jim Scott, MD
NPA Vice-President of Policy
Jim Scott has always had a singular passion for development of a health care system that strives for care that is optimal for each individual patient, and provides the supports for the care team essential to make that happen. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, he was an early proponent of primary care, and eagerly embraced what was then a new specialty – Family Practice. He practiced in a small town on the Oregon coast for 20 years, where he was a leader in a variety of innovations in primary care practice and integrated, community based approaches to care. Since the early 1990s, Dr. Scott has held numerous positions within PeaceHealth, an integrated health system with facilities in Oregon, Washington, and Alaska.  He was a member of the senior executive team for over 10 years.  Areas of focus have included clinical quality, patient safety, information systems, outcomes measurement, innovation, and implementation of evidence based medicine and operations.  Currently Dr  Scott is serving as Dean of the  PeaceHealth Advanced Training Program (ATP) in clinical improvement, an intensive 4 week program for clinicians and other leaders focused on quality, safety, value, and change leadership in health care.  He also serves on the faculty at Oregon Health Sciences University.

Jean Silver-Isenstadt, MD, PhD
NPA Executive Director
Jean Silver-Isenstadt holds a doctorate in the history and sociology of medicine from the University of Pennsylvania, a medical degree from the University of Maryland, and a master’s degree in nonfiction and science writing from the Johns Hopkins University.  Her doctoral work focused on 19th-century American health reform.  She is the author of Shameless: The Visionary Life of Mary Gove Nichols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), a biography of the infamous and influential health advocate and social reformer best known for her leadership of the water-cure movement and for her scandalous public lectures to women on anatomy and physiology.

Julia Skapik, MD, MPH
NPA Vice-President of Educational Programming
Julia Skapik is a clinical instructor in the department of general internal medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, where she completed her residency in internal medicine in 2011. She currently works full-time as an AAAS Science and Technology Policy fellow at the National Science Foundation in the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering focusing on their Smart Health and Wellbeing initiative in health innovation and information technology.  She completed her MD and MPH at the Johns Hopkins Schools of Medicine and Public Health in 2008.  Originally from Licking County, Ohio, she attended New College of Florida, graduating with dual BAs in biology and psychology.  Subsequently, she spent a year at the FDA in Bethesda performing viral and vaccine neurovirulence research.  Since then, she has worked on several research projects at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, primarily examining medical errors and the junction of mental and medical illness.  She is also the author of the chapter “Psychotic Disorders, Severe Mental Illness, and HIV Infection” in the Comprehensive Textbook of AIDS Psychiatry and was an editor and author of the sixth edition of the review book First Aid for Step 2 CK and the fourth edition of First Aid for the Wards.  She previously served as Health Policy Action Committee chair for the American Medical Student Association, promoting legislation and education about universal health care, medical quality improvement, smoke-free indoor air, student activism, nutrition policy, and climate change. As a Mirzayan fellow in 2007 at the Institute of Medicine, she worked primarily with the Roundtable on Environmental Health Sciences, Research, and Medicine and was a primary organizer of the workshop, “Environmental Health, Energy, And Transportation: Bringing Health to the Fuel Mixture.”  She also worked on global water and its environmental impact, Hurricane Katrina, and also collaborated briefly with the Roundtable on Evidence-Based Medicine.

Harvey I. Sloane, M.D.
Harvey Sloane is a public health physician with extensive “grass roots” and organizational experience. He served in President Kennedy’s appellation Health Program in East KY and, subsequently, initiated and directed urban community health centers in Louisville, Kentucky. In the 1970s and 1980s, he served two terms as Mayor of Louisville, Kentucky and one term as County-Executive of Jefferson County, Kentucky. In the mid nineties, he was the commissioner of Health for the District of Colombia. As Commissioner of Health, he had overview authority over the District’s TB control program. He served as a medical officer in Vietnam in the late 60s. Recently, Dr. Sloane has been with project HOPE promoting early child development and literacy programs in Gary, Indiana and Camden, New Jersey. Dr. Sloane is Director, Public Health at EMEP and is integral in setting-up TB and HIV control programs and developing public health promotion and disease prevention initiatives with Russian counterparts. He assisted in establishing the successful TB and HIV control program in Siberia, Russian Far East and Sverdlovsk, Russia. Dr. Sloane’s undergraduate work was at Yale University and he received his medical degree at Case Western School of Medicine and interned at the Cleveland Clinic.

Kate Tulenko, MD, MPH, MPhil
Dr. Kate Tulenko serves as the Deputy Director of CapacityPlus, the US government’s $300 million global health workforce project, where she is responsible for health worker education and health service quality.  As the largest health workforce program in the world, CapacityPlus aims to help countries implement sustainable solutions to the health workforce crisis and make the global health services more effective and efficient. Previously Dr. Tulenko served as a health specialist in the World Bank where she advised ministries of health on creating improved health systems to deliver care to their populations. She coordinated the Bank’s $4 million Africa Health Workforce Program which conducted research and funded programs at the country level to better understand and resolve the health worker shortage with an emphasis on labor market and private sector solutions.  She has also worked extensively on issues of maternal and child health; global aging; HIV/AIDS; water, hygiene, and sanitation; and public-private partnerships for health. Dr. Tulenko has worked with the bipartisan Hope Street Group to develop a series of issue papers on national health reform.  She is currently working on a book on how the US health system affects the global health worker crisis.  Dr. Tulenko has a Bachelors in Biochemistry from Harvard University (cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa), a Masters in Philosophy in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge (Emmanuel College), an MD from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and a Masters of Public Health from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health (Delta Omega). She serves on the board of advisors for the Global Business School Network and in 2002 she received a Rainer Arnhold Fellowship for innovation in global development. She is a board certified pediatrician and a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Dr. Tulenko has academic appointments at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and the George Mason College of Health and Human Services.

_________________________________________________