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NPA Board of Directors

Valerie Arkoosh, MD, MPH (NPA PRESIDENT)

Valerie Arkoosh is Professor of Clinical Anesthesiology and Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.  Her primary clinical focus is Obstetric Anesthesiology and she holds a Master's of Pubic Health degree, with a concentration in Health Policy, from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.  Her current policy focus is on comprehensive state-based health care reform efforts and their impact on 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)

Cheryl Bettigole is a board-certified family physician and the clinical director of a public health clinic in Philadelphia.  Her areas of interest include chronic disease management and health care for immigrants.  She received her Masters of Public Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where she received the Capstone Award for her work on evaluating the impact of interpretation services for patients of limited English proficiency.  She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and 3 children.

Alex Blum, MD

Alex Blum is a Health and Evidence Policy Fellow at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.  He is enrolled in a Masters in Public Health Program at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.  He graduated in 2005 from Howard University College of Medicine and in 2008 from the Community Health and Advocacy Track from UCLA Mattel Children's Pediatric residency program.  Prior to joining Mount Sinai he was a Visiting Professor of Pediatrics at UCLA.  Alex served on the Battle Ground committee for Senator Obama's Health Policy Advisory Committee.  He currently is the National Field Director for Doctors for America, sits on the Board of Directors of DemDocs and acts as their National Volunteer Director.  Alex lives in New York City with his wife.

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.  There he provides primary care for patients from families who speak any of ten different Asian languages.  Dr. Choi is a passionate advocate for improving health care quality and access for low income and immigrant families for which he has been published and cited in both ethnic and mainstream media.  He is a clinical instructor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco.  He is a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and as the AAP Governmental Affairs Representative of Northern California.  Dr. Choi serves on the Board of Directors for both the National Council of Asian Pacific Islander Physicians (NCAPIP) and the National Physicians Alliance (NPA).  In 2009, he was appointed to the California Council on Multicultural Health through which he advises the California Department of Public Health and Department of Health Care Services on policy and programs affecting the health of racial and ethnic minorities.  Dr. Choi was educated at The University of Chicago, the Medical University of South Carolina, and the Harvard School of Public Health.  He completed his internship and residency at the University of California, San Francisco Pediatric Leadership for the Underserved (PLUS) Program.  He currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with his talented wife and two spirited children.

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.

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 Grande, MD, MPA

David Grande is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.  Dr. Grande's research and work focuses on health policy with a specific focus on the health care safety net and access to care.  He chaired the health transition team for Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter and has worked with the City of Philadelphia and State of New Jersey on issues related to access to care and the financial viability of safety net institutions.  He is a founding board member of Healthy Philadelphia, an organization chartered by the City of Philadelphia focused on improving the quality of care for vulnerable populations.  He also conducts research on aspects of medical professionalism including the civic and social roles of physicians and the influences of commercial marketing on the profession.  Dr. Grande trained in internal medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.  Previously he was the national president of the 40,000 member American Medical Student Association and led the organization's health policy and advocacy work on issues concerning access to care and health care for vulnerable populations.  He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the National Physicians Alliance.  He completed a Masters in Public Affairs (MPA) at Princeton University and was a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.

William B. Jordan, MD, MPH

William Jordan, MD MPH is a Faculty Development Fellow at Montefiore. He served as Chief Resident in Preventive Medicine and earned his MPH at Mount Sinai under an American Cancer Society grant. He completed Family and Social Medicine Residency at Montefiore after graduating from medical school at McGill University. He has worked in primary care and preventive medicine in underserved communities, with particular attention to immigrants and people with chronic mental illness. More recently, he has focused on healthy food availability and economic development as a means to improve community health, as Board President of Esperanza del Barrio. Since early 2009, he has worked with the NY Local Action Network of the National Physicians Alliance to advocate for national health care reform.

Rishi Manchanda, MD, MPH

Dr. Rishi Manchanda lives in LA, is married, and is the father of a precocious and supercute two-year old daughter. He is a primary care doctor in south central Los Angeles and is the founder of NPA's Rx Democracy! / Rx the Vote Campaign, a nationwide nonpartisan coalition effort to increase civic participation and voter turnout through health care and, in turn, address health disparities. In its 2008 inaugural effort, Rx Vote coalition partners registered over 26,000 voters in clinics nationwide. Dr. Manchanda is the founding director of the Program in Social Medicine and Health Equity at St.John's Well Child and Family Centers, one of the largest community health centers for low-income and underinsured working families in Los Angeles. Along with other LA-area community advocates, Dr. Manchanda is one of the architects of the recently unveiled South Los Angeles Declaration of Health and Human Rights. He was the first graduate of UCLA's combined internal medicine and pediatrics residency program, is a member of the National Health Service Corps. Dr. Manchanda was the founding convener of the 2009 National Summit of Progressive Physician Organizations, which assembled leaders of 15 national groups representing over 170,000 physicians to pursue areas of common purpose.

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.

Akbar Rahman, MD, MPH

Akbar Rahman is a resident physician at the Long Beach Memorial Family Medicine Program in Southern California.  He received his medical and graduate degrees from Northwestern University, where he focused on domestic health policy. Prior to medical school, he spent two years teaching high school in East Africa, and worked at the World Bank Institute in Washington DC.

Mitesh Rao, MD

Mitesh Rao is a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar and an Emergency Medicine resident at the Yale School of Medicine. His policy research focuses on emergency and trauma care provision, violence prevention, and on-call specialty care shortages.

Josh Rising, MD, MPH

Josh Rising is a pediatrician in New Haven, CT.  After time in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at Yale University, he now works for the Connecticut state legislature.  He was the Legislative Affairs Director for the American Medical Student Association from 2000-2001.

Ben Schaefer, MD

After completing his residency in Internal Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and his Fellowship at the University of Washington, Ben Schaefer now works as a cardiologist in Bangor, ME. He is Chief of Cardiology at St. Joseph's Hospital in Bangor and the director of its cardiac rehabilitation program.  He serves an advisor to the Maine Independent Clinical Information Service, an academic detailing program started in 2009. He is the former president of the University of Washington House Staff Association and served as a house staff representative on the University of Washington Medicine Board.

Stephen R. Smith, MD, MPH (NPA TREASURER)

Steve Smith recently retired as associate dean of medicine at Brown Medical School in Providence, Rhode Island. He is professor emeritus in the Department of Family Medicine. Dr. Smith has been a long-time activist, helping to create the National Health Service Corps while a medical student, serving as deputy mayor in his hometown of New London, Connecticut, caring for patients at the Rhode Island Free Clinic, working to bring universal health insurance to Rhode Island, and most recently pushing for a ban on pharmaceutical gifts to doctors in Connecticut. He currently practices family medicine part-time in a community health center in New London.

Anjali Taneja, MD, MPH

Anjali is a family physician in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  She is a provider and partner at Casa de Salud, an innovative, walk-in, fair-priced integrative clinic for the uninsured, staffed by western-trained clinicians and natural/eastern medicine providers.  She also works as an emergency room provider at a rural Indian Health Service hospital on the Navajo Nation.  Anjali serves on the board of directors of Justice, Access, Support and Solutions for Health (JAZZ for Health), an organization involved in health justice advocacy, harm reduction and addiction medicine, community health worker organizing, and health system change.  In 2007, she founded the online health justice community CureThis.org.  She writes regularly for LAist.com, the largest blog about Los Angeles.  She was selected for the 2010 class of EmergeNM, a political leadership training program for women.  Anjali completed her family medicine residency and faculty development fellowship at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, her medical training at UMDNJ-New Jersey Medical School in Newark, New Jersey, and her public health training at Columbia University School of Public Health.  She also previously served as the Jack Rutledge Fellow at the American Medical Student Association.  As a DJ, she was a member of the MUTINY DJ crew in NYC, and currently DJs regularly and produces original music.  She also blogs at LosAnjalis.com.

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.

 

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Jean Silver-Isenstadt, MD, PhD

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.