Donald L. Ashkenase has been Executive Vice President - Corporate of Montefiore Medical Center since 1987. Montefiore is the University Hospital and Academic Medical Center for the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Professor Ashkenase graduated in 1965 from Brooklyn College and served four years in the United States Air Force as a hospital administrator. He received a Masters Degree from Wagner College and spent nine years at the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation leaving as First Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer. He left NYCHHC in 1979 to become CFO at Long Island Jewish Medical Center.

Alexander P. Bock MD, is currently chief of staff working for the CEO at Novartis International AG, based in Basel, Switzerland. Dr. Bock focused his PhD research on non-invasive cardiology and aspects of prevention. He spent his residency working in diverse healthcare systems such as China, South Africa, UK, Germany and Switzerland, in order to get exposure to similar clinical problems in very different environments. Integrating all those experiences helped him develop a clear idea for preventive medicine on which he has published and lectured ever since. And it opened a quest to find the best path for successful implementation.

Lawrence D. Brown is Professor of Health Policy and Management in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. A political scientist, he got a Ph.D. in government at Harvard University in 1973. After positions at Harvard, the Brookings Institution, and the University of Michigan, in 1988 he came to Columbia, where he chaired the Department of Health Policy and Management for ten years and the university’s Public Policy Consortium for three years. He is the author of Politics and Health Care Organizations: HMOs as Federal Policy (Brookings Institution, 1983) and of articles on the political dimensions of community cost containment, expansion of coverage for the uninsured, national health reform, the role of analysis in the formation of health policy, and cross-national health policy. Mr. Brown edited the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law for five years, has served on several national advisory committees for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has an RWJ Investigators in Health Policy award, and is a member of the Institute of Medicine.

With over 30 years of health administrative experience, Robert Chaloner has dedicated his career to the preservation, reorganization and turn-around of struggling community hospitals. He is the current President and Chief Executive Officer of Southampton Hospital in Southampton, New York. He has held this position since December 2006. As President of Southampton Hospital, Mr. Chaloner has been actively engaged in stabilizing and rebuilding the hospital’s financial and operating performance, as well as reestablishing the hospital’s community reputation.

Prior to Southampton he was President and CEO at Cabrini Medical Center located in New York City. At Cabrini he guided the organization through the post-9/11 traumas, stabilized and rebuilt the revenue cycle and cash flow, engineered a major cost reduction, rebuilt medical staff, union and regulatory relationships, and led the Board and Sponsors in the development of a fundamental strategic planning effort to redefine Cabrini for a rapidly changing healthcare market.

Mr. Chaloner received his undergraduate education at Dartmouth College, where he majored in Government and graduated with highest honors in his major. He pursued graduate work in Health Management and Planning at Columbia University where he received a Master of Public Health and a Master of Science in Urban Planning. He also received a Master of Business Administration from New York University where he majored in Finance.

Mr. Chaloner began his professional employment at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York as an administrative resident. He eventually assumed roles as Business Manager for Clinical Services and Assistant Vice President for Support Services. His major projects at Lenox Hill included reorganization of the ambulatory care services, development of new clinical programs and supporting the planning and development of a new Cardiothoracic program.

He next worked for Healthcare Management Counselors (HMC) in New York City as a management consultant specializing in health care information technology and operations improvement. After HMC’s merger with Richard A. Eisner and Company, Mr. Chaloner became a Practice Principal. His client base included hospitals and health systems located throughout the United States.

In 1991 Mr. Chaloner was asked by a large Catholic multistate health care system, the Franciscan Sisters of the Poor Health System, Inc. to assume the role of Vice President for Information Systems. He initiated this role and eventually assumed broader operational responsibility, ultimately being promoted to Senior Vice President for Operations.

In 1997 Mr. Chaloner was asked by the Franciscan Health System to assume the role of President for its New Jersey hospitals located in Hoboken and Jersey City, the Franciscan Health System of New Jersey. During his almost five year term in this role, he acquired a long term care facility, developed a large ambulatory care facility, developed a full post-acute continuum of services, and planned the merger with Christ Hospital. Mr. Chaloner also led the health system through integration into the Bon Secours Health System.

Mr. Chaloner is an Adjunct Instructor with the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University where he teaches a graduate level course on the management of information technology for future healthcare executives. He has a particular interest in the application of information technology to solve the communication and management challenges of community hospitals.

Mr. Chaloner has served on the board of many health care and community service organizations. He is a Fellow in the American College of Healthcare Executives and lives in East Hampton, NY.

Frank Cino, MPH, CPA, is the Senior Vice President, Chief Risk Officer, at The Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. At Mount Sinai, Frank is responsible for managing the audit and compliance services functions with a focus on mitigating business risks, achieving company performance objectives and sustaining operational improvement.

Prior to joining Mount Sinai in 2001, Frank spent sixteen years with the international accounting firm of Ernst & Young, LLP, primarily focusing on hospitals and health care-related client services. In addition, Frank served as the Vice President and Controller of United Wisconsin Services, Inc., a publicly traded managed care organization headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Frank was a Trustee and Chairman of the Audit Committee of Senior Health Partners, Inc., an affiliate of Mount Sinai, until its sale by Mount Sinai in 2010, and is a board member of Princeton Tigers Aquatics Club. He received his undergraduate degree in economics from New York University and his master’s degree in health care management from Columbia University.

Thomas D’Aunno, PhD, focuses his research on the organization and management of healthcare services. He has a particular interest in leadership, organizational change, and performance improvement, and has examined these issues in a variety of national studies of healthcare organizations that have been funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the Agency for Health Care Quality and Research, and the Pew Memorial Trust. Dr. D’Aunno was previously a faculty member at the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan and, most recently, at INSEAD, where he held the Novartis Chair in Healthcare Management. He has published articles in leading management and health journals, including Administrative Science Quarterly, the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. Dr. D’Aunno has been a member of the editorial boards of several journals, including Administrative Science Quarterly, the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, and the Academy of Management Review. In addition, he has consulted and taught executive education courses on several topics including leadership, performance management, high-performance teams, organizational design, and organizational change. Dr. D’Aunno is a past chairman of the Academy of Management Division of Health Care Management and a recipient of this Division’s award for career distinguished service.

Thomas Ference, is a Clinical Professor in Health Policy & Management. As a member of the faculty of the Columbia Graduate School of Business, he directed the school’s Executive MBA Program from 1974 through 1994 and initiated the Institute for Non-for-Profit Management. He is a founding member and first Chair of the Executive MBA Council. He has a PhD in Organization Theory, from Carnegie Mellon University. His principal interests include strategic management, leadership, the management of professionals, career development and management, and the management of not-for-profit organizations.

Dr. Ference has published numerous books, reports, and articles in professional journals. He is the founder and head of The Riverside Group, a management consulting and executive development firm that does work across many sectors in the United States and abroad. He is past Chair of the Board of the Volunteer Consulting Group and past Chair of the Board of Reality House.

Mattia J. Gilmartin holds a doctoral degree in nursing administration from the University of Virginia, and bachelor’s degree in nursing and a combined master’s in nursing and a master’s of business administration degree from the University of San Francisco. Dr. Gilmartin is a senior research scientist and the director of the Center for Continuing Nursing Education, at the New York University College of Nursing. Prior to her appointment at NYU, she served on the faculty of the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing, where she led the implementation of the school’s Clinical Nurse Leader Program. Dr. Gilmartin spent a decade abroad in England and France in a post-doctoral appointment at Cambridge University and a faculty post at INSEAD’s Healthcare Management Initiative. Her research focuses on leadership, organizational change and entrepreneurship, and performance improvement in health care organizations. Her current research examines leadership effectiveness, nurse turnover, and the adoption of innovation. She has published in leading nursing and health care management journals, including Nursing Administration Quarterly; Healthcare Management Review; the Annals of the Academy of Management; Leadership Quarterly, and Medical Care Research and Review. She also has published several teaching cases, including an award-winning case that examines a nurse-led pre-surgery assessment center in London’s University College Hospital. Dr. Gilmartin is a member of the Academy of Management Division of Healthcare Management.

Ms. Katherine Garrett, MBA is a consultant on performance measurement and improvement for not-for-profit organizations and a writer on health care policy and quality. Ms. Garrett has over twenty years’ experience in the health care industry including five years as program designer and lead strategist for the 22-facility New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation’s Quality Management initiative. Ms. Garrett’s recent clients include the Council of Medical Specialty Societies, the Fire Department of the City of New York, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Ms. Garrett is an Adjunct Lecturer in Health Policy and Management at the Columbia University School of Public Health. She is also on the faculty of Columbia Business School’s Institute for Not-for-Profit Management. She has an M.B.A. in finance with distinction from New York University and a B.A. cum laude from Harvard University.

Sherry Glied is professor of Health Policy and Management, currently on leave at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services serving as the Assistant Secretary for Planning & Evaluation. Her principal areas of research are in health policy reform and mental healthcare policy. Earlier, she served as a senior economist for healthcare and labor market policy to the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, under both President Bush and President Clinton. In the latter part of her term, she was a participant in President Clinton’s Health Care Task Force. In 1996-1997, Dr. Glied was a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. Her research on health policy has focused on the financing of healthcare services in the U.S. She is an author of many published articles and reports on managed care, women’s health, child health, and health insurance expansions. In recent health insurance-related research, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, she has been examining methods for modeling health insurance expansion programs. Some of this research has been incorporated in the estimating assumptions of the Congressional Budget Office. She is also continuing work on the U.S. employer-based health insurance system. In research sponsored by the Commonwealth Fund, Dr. Glied has been studying the characteristics of uninsured Americans and novel strategies to expand health insurance coverage to them. Her work in mental health policy has focused on the problems of women and children, and she has conducted research, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, on the well-being of people with illness over the past 50 years.

Herschel Goldfield is a Senior Counsel in the Health Care Law Department of the law firm Proskauer Rose LLP. He has been a practicing health care lawyer for 15 years following stints in health care consulting and health care finance. His clients are principally institutional providers of health care services, but include a full array of the participants in the health industry. He has been listed in Best Lawyers in America (for health care) since 2005. In addition to legal practice, he has taught Public Health Law at several local law schools and serves on the board of Out2Play, a small charity that builds playgrounds for schoolchildren in NYC.

Mr. Goldfield obtained his J.D. from Columbia University, has an M.S. in Health Policy and Management from the Harvard School of Public Health, and a B.A. cum laude (in Sociology) from Harvard University.

Josh Graff Zivin, is Associate Professor of International Relations and Pacific Studies and Affiliated Faculty of Economics. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and Research Director for International Environmental and Health Studies at the Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC). In 2004-2005, he served as Senior Economist for Health and the Environment on the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Prior to joining UCSD in 2008, he was an Associate Professor of Economics in the Mailman School of Public Health and the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, where he served as the Director of the PhD Program in Sustainable Development.

Professor Graff Zivin has published numerous articles on a wide range of topics in top economic, policy, and medical journals. His research spans three fields of economics ó health, the environment, and international developmentó and focuses on how uncertainty and heterogeneity affect both individual and societal decision-making. Policy relevance serves as a guiding force behind all of this work. He is currently engaged in three large and distinct projects. The first makes use of primary data collected over the past several years to examine the economic impacts of the AIDS crisis in Africa. The second relies on a unique, matched dataset to understand the role of institutions, social networks, and financial incentives in the production of new scientific knowledge within the life sciences. The third examines the relationship between poor environmental quality and human capital formation, including a focus on behavioral responses to mitigate adverse impacts.

Fred Hyde, is a Clinical Professor part time in the Department of Health Policy and Management of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. His academic background includes medical and law degrees from Yale and a business degree from Columbia. He has been a member of the Bar since 1975 and is a member of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America. Dr. Hyde is a nationally known consultant to hospitals, medical schools and physicians, as well as to unions, community groups and others interested in the health of hospitals, health care facilities and organizations.

Dr. Hyde has served twice as chief executive of a non-profit hospital, once as chief executive of an HMO, as vice president of a major university teaching hospital, director of a medical school faculty practice plan and consulting manager of physician practices. He has also been a consultant to major unions and labor-management benefit funds in the health field.

Dr. Donna Lynne, DrPH, MPA is currently the President of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Colorado Region. From 1998 to April 2005, Dr. Lynne was the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for Group Health Incorporated, a $2.5 billion managed care organization. In the mid-1990s, she was also the Executive Director of the New York Business Group on Health. Dr. Lynne spent 20 years in various positions in New York City government, including First Deputy Commissioner, Office of Labor Relations; Director, Mayor’s Office of Operations; and Senior Vice President, New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation.

Dr. Lynne is an Adjunct Associate Professor in Health Policy and Management at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. She holds the designation of Certified Employee Benefits Specialist (CEBS) from the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans/University of Pennsylvania Wharton School. She is also active and on the board of a number of Colorado non-profit and community organizations.

Peter Muennig, MD, MPH focuses his research on reducing socioeconomic disparities through more efficient use of societal resources, providing policymakers with strong and informative evidence upon which to make decisions, and novel scientific approaches to understanding the mechanisms underlying disparities. This interest has led to work in cost-effectiveness analyses, which he uses to explore issues related to the health system, immigrant health, and post-secondary education. It has also led to the study of small area analysis as a policy tool, ways of improving cost-effectiveness methodology, and more recently, interdisciplinary approaches to examining the biological mechanisms linking poverty to morbidity and mortality. Prior to joining the Mailman School faculty, Dr. Muennig was an assistant professor at the Medical School of the City University of New York. He also directed the Program in Cost-Effectiveness and Outcomes at New School University and consulted for Health Canada and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Dr. Muennig has published numerous studies in the medical literature, has authored a textbook on cost-effectiveness analysis, and has contributed to academic publications and governmental reports.

Dr. Payson has had a thirty year career as Chief Executive Officer of multiple healthcare organizations including two S & P 500 publicly traded companies, and has worked closely with private equity firms in the transformation of underperforming healthcare companies.

Dr. Payson has been Chairman and CEO of Apria Healthcare Group since Blackstone’s purchase of the company on October 28, 2008. Apria is the nation’s largest home healthcare provider with 12,000 employees and over $2.1 billion in annual revenue.

From November 2005 through 2008 Dr. Payson was chairman of Viant Holdings and its predecessor company, Concentra, Inc. overseeing its strategic restructuring. Concentra is the nation’s largest occupational health care provider and is majority owned by Welsh Carson.

From 1998 through 2002 aligned with TPG, Dr. Payson was Chief Executive Officer of Oxford Health Plans. Dr. Payson led the dramatically successful turnaround of this $5 billion health plan.

From 1985 to 1997 Dr. Payson was co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Healthsource, Inc., a 3 million member health plan located in 15 states.

From 1980 through 1984 Dr. Payson was CEO of a 120 physician multispecialty group practice.

Dr. Payson is a graduate student lecturer at the Tuck School at Dartmouth, the Columbia University School of Public Health and the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

Dr. Payson is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his MD at Dartmouth Medical School.

David Rosenthal, PhD, is the Director of Behavior Science for Columbia University’s Center for Family and Community Medicine. He is also a faculty member at the Mailman School of Public Health where he teaches Managing Public Health Nonprofits.

For 23 years, Dr. Rosenthal was a faculty member at the University of Iowa, teaching in the Colleges of Medicine, Public Health, and Education. He was named Teacher of the Year by residents in the Department of Family Medicine and was given the College of Medicine Service Award. He was also the Director of Counseling and Health Promotion Services at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. Later he became the Director of La Bodega de La Familia and served as the Executive Director of the Lower Eastside Harm Reduction Center in New York City.

Dr. Rosenthal is a licensed marriage and family therapist and has served as president of the Iowa Association of Marriage and Family Therapy. He has given more than 100 presentations in the United States and has conducted workshops in Zimbabwe, Uganda, Russia, and Greece. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of two non-profit organizations: Heritage Health and Housing and the Burmese Refugee Project, and he is helping create the Space in Tompkins Square Park, a program for transient young people. He has also participated as a member or board chair of other public health nonprofits, such as Iowa City Hospice, Iowa City Free Medical Clinic, & the Mid Eastern Council on Chemical Abuse.

Dr. John Rowe, MD is a Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Previously, from 2000 until his retirement in late 2006, Dr. Rowe served as Chairman and CEO of Aetna, Inc., one of the nation’s leading health care and related benefits organizations. Before his tenure at Aetna, from 1998 to 2000, Dr. Rowe served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Mount Sinai NYU Health, one of the nation’s largest academic health care organizations. From 1988 to 1998, prior to the Mount Sinai-NYU Health merger, Dr. Rowe was President of the Mount Sinai Hospital and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. Before joining Mount Sinai, Dr. Rowe was a Professor of Medicine and the founding Director of the Division on Aging at the Harvard Medical School, as well as Chief of Gerontology at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital. He has authored over 200 scientific publications, mostly on the physiology of the aging process, including a leading textbook of geriatric medicine, in addition to more recent publications on health care policy. Dr. Rowe has received many honors and awards for his research and health policy efforts regarding care of the elderly. He was Director of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Aging and is co-author, with Robert Kahn, Ph.D., of Successful Aging (Pantheon, 1998). Currently, Dr. Rowe leads the MacArthur Foundation’s Initiative on An Aging Society and chairs the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on the Future Health Care Workforce for Older Americans. Dr. Rowe was elected a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition, Dr. Rowe serves on the Board of Trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation and is a former member of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC). Dr. Rowe is also Chairman of the Board of Trustees at the University of Connecticut and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Donald E. Sexton is a Professor of Business at Columbia University. Dr. Sexton received his Ph.D. and M.B.A. from the University of Chicago and his B.A. from Wesleyan University, all in the fields of economics and mathematics. He has been teaching for more than thirty-five years at Columbia in the areas of marketing, international business, and operations management and is a recipient of the Business School’s Distinguished Teaching Award. Dr. Sexton served as a visiting professor at INSEAD for several years and has also taught at the Beijing Management Institute, the Shanghai University of Finance, the Australian Graduate School of Management, the University of Tehran, Jagiellonian University (Krakow), the U.S. Business School in Prague, and the China Europe International Business School (Shanghai). His articles have appeared in numerous journals such as the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Marketing Research, and the Journal of Business. His research concerns branding and marketing return on investment.

Sheryl Skolnick first joined CRT in 2006 to provide equity and credit coverage of health care services companies and re-joined in 2010 after a short tenure at Pali Capital. She became CRT’s Co-Head of Research in September 2011. With more than 24 years on Wall Street, Dr. Skolnick has been named WSJ Best on the Street in 2009 in Healthcare Providers, her fifth appearance on the roster. Sheryl is known for her differentiated re-search, unique perspectives, finding what others miss and client service. She has pro-vided differentiated health care services investment research at Robertson Stephens and Fulcrum Global Partners, a top independent research boutique, among other sell- and buy-side firms. In her early career, Dr. Skolnick was an Economist for both the US Department of Labor and the Antitrust Division of the US Department of Justice. She has a Ph.D. in Economics from Washington University in St. Louis where she was an Olin Fellow.

Michael S. Sparer is Professor and Chair in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Professor Sparer studies and writes about the politics of health care, with a particular emphasis on the health insurance and health delivery systems for low-income populations, and the ways in which inter-governmental relations influences policy. He is a two-time winner of the school’s Student Government Association Teacher of the Year Award, as well as the recipient of the 2010 Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. Professor Sparer spent seven years as a litigator for the New York City Law Department, specializing in inter-governmental social welfare litigation. After leaving the practice of law, Sparer obtained a Ph.D. in Political Science from Brandeis University. Sparer is the editor of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, and the author of Medicaid and the Limits of State Health Reform, as well as numerous articles and book chapters.

Steven D. Stellman, PhD, MPH, is Professor of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. His research interests include environmental and lifestyle causes of cancer, especially tobacco-related cancers and breast cancer, and the health of Vietnam veterans. He formerly served as Assistant Commissioner of Health for Biostatistics and Epidemiological Research for the New York City Department of Health, and as a designer and associate director of the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Prevention Study 2 (CPS-2), a prospective study of more than one million American men and women. Dr. Stellman’s doctorate is in physical chemistry.

Alan Weinberg is an Associate Professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Health Evidence and Policy at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. He was formerly a faculty member in the Departments of Surgery and Biostatistics at Columbia University and continues to teach "Biostatistics" for the Executive MPH program at Columbia University, which he has done since its inception.

His statistical area of expertise is in Survival Analysis and Mixed Modeling for the analysis of repeated measurements. Other interests include the appropriate treatment of missing data. He uses these techniques primarily in the area of cardiovascular surgical trials analyzing outcomes such as survival, adverse events (with a particular interest in infections) and quality of life following a variety of surgical interventions which include organ transplantation, mitral valve surgery, biventricular pacing and the implantation of mechanical circulatory assist devices.

Professor Weinberg participates in the design and analysis of Clinical Trials. He participated in the landmark NHLBI-sponsored REMATCH Clinical Trial investigating survival, infection and quality of life outcomes for patients receiving a Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD) for so called destination therapy.

He is currently involved in the NINDS-funded ARUBA trial, a randomized multicenter clinical trial exploring various interventions pertaining to unruptured brain AVMs (arteriovenous malformations).

He is also exploring wound cure rates post treatment for diabetic foot and pressure ulcers, an important, growing and costly clinical problem.

In addition to teaching Biostatistics, Professor Weinberg instructs courses in statistical computing using SAS software.