Biographical Sketches of Committee Members
Richard Bonnie, LL.B. (Chair), teaches and writes about criminal law, bioethics, and public policies relating to mental health, substance abuse, and public health. Professor Bonnie has been actively involved in public service throughout his career. Among other positions, he has been associate director of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse (1971-1973); secretary of the first National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse (1975-1980); chair of Virginia’s State Human Rights Committee, responsible for protecting the rights of persons with mental disabilities (1979-1985); and chief advisor for the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Mental Health Standards Project (1981-1988). He recently chaired a Commission on Mental Health Law Reform at the request of the chief justice of Virginia (2006-2011). Professor Bonnie has served as an advisor to the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA’s) Council on Psychiatry and Law since 1979, received the APA’s Isaac Ray Award in 1998 for contributions to the field of forensic psychiatry, and was awarded a special presidential commendation in 2003 for his contributions to American psychiatry. He also has served on three MacArthur Foundation research networks—on Mental Health and the Law (1988-1996), Mandated Community Treatment (2000-2010), and Law and Neuroscience (since 2008). In 1991, Professor Bonnie was elected to the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies. He has chaired numerous National Academies studies on subjects ranging from elder mistreatment to underage drinking, including the landmark report Ending the Tobacco Problem: A Blueprint for the Nation (2007). Most recently, he chaired a major National Research Council study on juvenile justice reform. He received the Yarmolinsky
Medal in 2002 for his contributions to the IOM and the National Academies. In 2007, Professor Bonnie received the University of Virginia’s highest honor, the Thomas Jefferson Award.
Claire D. Brindis, Dr.P.H., is director of the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies and professor of pediatrics and health policy in the Department of Pediatrics, Division of Adolescent Medicine, and the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Health Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She is also a director of the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health and executive director of the National Adolescent and Young Adult Health Information Center at UCSF. Incorporating a variety of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, as well as community participatory research, Dr. Brindis’s research focuses on program evaluation and the translation of research into policy at the local, state, and national levels. Dr. Brindis’s specific content expertise is in the areas of young adult, adolescent, and child health policy and analyses of a wide array of health policies, including those related to improving health care access for underserved communities and pursuing strategies for closing the gap between the emergence of evidence-based innovation and its application to policy and programs. Her research portfolio includes policy analyses and evaluations of the state of California’s comprehensive teenage pregnancy prevention programs; evaluation of California’s Family Planning, Access, Care, and Treatment (Family PACT) program; the impact of health care reform on adolescents’ and young adults’ access to health care, including the incorporation of clinical preventive guidelines aimed at improving the health of young adults; and the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Journalism’s Health Disparities Media Fellowship Program. Dr. Brindis recently served as a member of the Planning Committee on Improving the Health, Safety, and Well-Being of Young Adults. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the California Department of Health Services’ 2000 Beverlee A. Myers Award for Excellence in Public Health, the Federal Maternal and Child Health Bureau Director’s Award, the Association of Maternal and Child Health Programs’ John C. MacQueen Lecture Award, UCSF’s Chancellor’s Award for the Advancement of Women, and the University of California, Los Angeles’ (UCLA’s) 2012 Alumni Hall of Fame Award. She was elected to the IOM in 2010.
Gladys Carrión, J.D., was appointed commissioner of New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services in December 2013. Previously, she served as commissioner of the New York State Office of Children & Family Services (OCFS), starting in January 2007. The numerous responsibilities she oversaw at OCFS included foster care, adoption and adoption assistance, child protective services, preventive services for children and families,
child care services, and protective programs for vulnerable adults. Commissioner Carrión was also responsible for directing the oversight, administration, and management of specialized programs for juvenile delinquents and juvenile offenders and residential facilities for youth placed in the custody of OCFS by the family and criminal courts. She also was responsible for directing the functions performed by the Commission for the Blind and state government responses to the needs of Native Americans on reservations and in communities. Previously, Commissioner Carrión was senior vice president for community investment with the United Way of New York City and executive director of Inwood House, one of the oldest youth-serving organizations in the city. She also served for 3 years as commissioner of the New York City Community Development Agency, where she developed citywide policy and programs designed to address the human services needs of the city’s most vulnerable citizens and ensured the quality performance of more than 300 city-funded community-based organizations. Until her appointment, Commissioner Carrión was chair of the board of the New York Foundation and served on the advisory board of Child Welfare Watch. She has served on numerous boards, including the Executive Committee of Legal Services of New York, the Puerto Rican Policy Institute, and Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice. She served as chair of the Latino Child Welfare Collaborative, a project of the Committee for Hispanic Children and Families, and was a member of the Children’s Defense Fund’s New York Advisory Board and a co-chair of Agenda for Children Tomorrow (ACT). Commissioner Carrión is a graduate of Fordham University and New York University School of Law.
Mark E. Courtney, Ph.D., M.S.W., is a professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. He also has served on the faculties of the University of Wisconsin (1992-2000) and University of Washington (2007-2010). His fields of special interest are child welfare policy and services, the connection between child welfare services and other institutions serving families living in poverty, and the transition to adulthood for vulnerable populations. He is a faculty affiliate of Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, for which he served as director from 2001 to 2006. He was a member of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood and Public Policy from 2003 to 2010. Dr. Courtney received the 2010 Peter W. Forsythe Award for leadership in public child welfare from the National Association of Public Child Welfare Administrators and in 2012 was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare. He obtained his M.S.W. and Ph.D. degrees from the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley.
Robert Crosnoe, Ph.D., is Elsie and Stanley E. (Skinny) Adams, Sr. centennial professor in liberal arts at The University of Texas at Austin, where he is a faculty member in the Department of Sociology, Department of Psychology (by courtesy), and Population Research Center. Prior to coming to the university, he received his Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Crosnoe’s main field of interest is the connections among health, human development, and education and the contributions of these connections to socioeconomic and immigration-related inequalities in American society. This work has been published in Child Development, Developmental Psychology, American Sociological Review, Social Forces, American Educational Research Journal, and Journal of Marriage and Family and supported by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the William T. Grant Foundation, and the Foundation for Child Development. His books include Mexican Roots, American Schools: Helping Mexican Immigrant Children Succeed (Stanford University Press), Fitting In, Standing Out: Navigating the Social Challenges of High School to Get an Education (Cambridge University Press); and Physical Attractiveness and the Accumulation of Social and Human Capital from Adolescence into Adulthood (forthcoming at SRCD Monographs, with Rachel Gordon). Dr. Crosnoe also is a member of the NICHD Early Child Care Network, the Governing Council of the Society for Research in Child Development, the Governing Council of the Society for Research on Adolescence, and the Advisory Board of the Council of Contemporary Families, and serves as deputy editor of the Journal of Marriage and Family.
Maryann Davis, Ph.D., is a research associate professor with the Center for Mental Health Services Research in the University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry. She is also director of the Learning and Working During the Transition to Adulthood Rehabilitation Research and Training Center (Transitions RTC). Dr. Davis is an internationally recognized expert on services for transition-age youth and young adults with serious mental health conditions. Her focus is on improving treatments and services for this population that help support the development of adult role functioning during the transition from adolescence to mature adulthood. She has examined the ways in which policies and practices support or impede the healthy development of this unique age group. Dr. Davis’s work also emphasizes the development of evidence-based interventions that can improve this population’s transition to adulthood, including facilitation of mental health and related treatment, as well as interventions that reduce criminal behavior and substance abuse while supporting the successful completion of education and training and movement into mature work life.
Kathleen Mullan Harris, Ph.D., is James E. Haar distinguished professor of sociology, adjunct professor of public policy, and faculty fellow at the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research addresses social inequality and health, with particular focus on family demography, the transition to adulthood, health disparities, and family formation. Dr. Harris is director and principal investigator of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a longitudinal study of more than 20,000 teens who are being followed into adulthood. Under her leadership, the study has pioneered innovative study designs and integrative multidisciplinary research to understand social, environmental, behavioral, biological, and genetic linkages in developmental and health trajectories from adolescence into adulthood. Dr. Harris has been an advocate within the social science and population disciplines for bridging the social and biomedical sciences to advance knowledge of the development of health disparities from both an inter- and intragenerational perspective to inform public health and social policy. She is currently building Add Health into a nationally representative intergenerational study with parallel social, behavioral, biological, and genetic data across three generations. Her publications appear in journals in a wide range of disciplines, including demography, genetics, family, epidemiology, biology, public policy, survey methodology, medicine, and social and health behavior. Dr. Harris serves on several national advisory boards for leading National Institutes of Health (NIH) studies, as well as on the National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic, and Other Populations of the Census Bureau and the Committee on Population of the National Academy of Sciences. She received her doctorate in demography from the University of Pennsylvania. She was awarded the 2004 Clogg Award for Early Career Achievement from the Population Association of America and was president of the Population Association of America in 2009. Dr. Harris was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2014.
Harry J. Holzer, Ph.D., is a professor of public policy at Georgetown University and an institute fellow at the American Institutes for Research. Since receiving his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, he also has served as a professor of economics at Michigan State University, chief economist of the U.S. Department of Labor (in the Clinton Administration), and an institute fellow at the Urban Institute. Dr. Holzer was co-founder and co-director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy. He serves on the board of directors of the National Skills Coalition and the Economic Mobility Corporation, as well as several other advisory or editorial boards. Dr. Holzer has authored or edited 11 books and published several dozen articles in peer-reviewed journals, focusing heavily on employer behavior and job quality but also on particular groups of low-income workers, such
as current/former welfare recipients, less-educated young men, ex-offenders, and noncustodial fathers in the job market. His policy interests include workforce development, equal employment opportunity and affirmative action, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Pell Grant reform, immigration reform, and removing barriers to work for ex-offenders.
Charles E. Irwin, Jr., M.D., is distinguished professor of pediatrics, director of the Division of Adolescent & Young Adult Medicine, and director of health policy in the Department of Pediatrics at UCSF School of Medicine and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital. Dr. Irwin is a graduate of Hobart College, Dartmouth Medical School, and UCSF. He heads two national policy centers focused on adolescents and young adults: the National Adolescent Health Information and Innovation Center and the Public Policy Analysis and Education Center for Adolescent and Young Adult Health. His current health services research focuses on improving preventive screening practices in clinical settings and the financial and structural issues altering adolescents’ and young adults’ ability to access health care in the United States. Dr. Irwin has received numerous awards, including the Society for Adolescent Medicine’s Outstanding Achievement Award, the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Adele D. Hofmann Lifetime Achievement Award in Adolescent Medicine, the Swedish Medical Society’s Lectureship Award, the National Center for Youth Law’s Annual Award for Improving the Lives of At Risk Youth, and the Society for Adolescent Medicine’s Hillary E. C. Millar Award for innovative Approaches to Adolescent Health Care. He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed articles and several chapters in medical textbooks. He served as the first chairman of the Subspecialty Board in Adolescent Medicine of the American Board of Pediatrics, a member of the Executive Council of the Section of Adolescent Health of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and president of the Society for Adolescent Medicine. Currently, he is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Adolescent Health, the official journal of the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine. He has just completed service as co-chair of the National Advisory Council on Healthcare Research and Quality’s Subcommittee on Quality Measures for Children’s Healthcare. Dr. Irwin has played an active role in the three reports issued by the IOM/National Academies on adolescent and young adult health: Losing Generations: Adolescents in High Risk Settings (1993); Adolescent Health Services: Missing Opportunities (2008); and Improving the Health, Safety, and Well-Being of Young Adults: Workshop Summary (2013).
Beatriz Luna, Ph.D., is Staunton Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics and professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on the brain basis underlying the transition from adolescent- to
adult-level cognitive control of behavior. She uses neuroimaging methods to characterize changes in brain function underlying developmental improvements in core cognitive and reward processing tasks. In 2005 Dr. Luna received the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering for her pioneering work on the brain basis of development. Her work has informed three Supreme Court decisions related to extended sentences for juveniles, pediatric practice (National Alliance to Advance Adolescent Health), and education. Dr. Luna received her B.A. in psychology at American University, her M.A. in clinical psychology at Duquesne University, and her Ph.D. in developmental psychology at the University of Pittsburgh.
Velma McBride Murry, Ph.D., is Betts Chair of Education and Human Development in the Peabody School at Vanderbilt University. Her work has focused on the significance of context in studies of African American families and youth, particularly the impact of racism on family functioning. This research has elucidated the dynamics of this contextual stressor in the everyday life of African Americans and the ways in which family members buffer each other from the impact of the external stressors that cascade through African American lives. Prior to joining the Vanderbilt faculty in 2008, Dr. Murry was professor of child and family development and co-director of the Center of Family Research in the Institute for Behavioral Research at the University of Georgia. She received a Ph.D. in human development and family studies from the University of Missouri, Columbia.
Zizi Papacharissi, Ph.D., is professor and head of the Communication Department at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her work focuses on the social and political consequences of online media. Her book A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age (Polity Press, 2010) examines how online media redefine understanding of public and private in late-modern democracies. She also recently edited a volume on online social networks titled A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (Routledge, 2010). Dr. Papacharissi is the author of 4 books and more than 40 journal articles, book chapters, and reviews, and she serves on the editorial boards of 11 journals, including the Journal of Communication, Human Communication Research, and New Media and Society. She is editor of the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media and the new open-access and free Sage journal Social Media and Society. Her latest book, titled Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology and Politics, will be published in late 2014 by Oxford University Press.
John Schulenberg, Ph.D., is professor of developmental psychology, research professor at the Institute for Social Research and Center for Human Growth and Development, and associate director of the Survey Research
Center, all at the University of Michigan. He has published widely on several topics concerning adolescence and the transition to adulthood, focusing on how developmental tasks and transitions relate to health risks and adjustment difficulties. His current research is on the etiology and epidemiology of substance use and psychopathology, focusing on risk factors, course, comorbidity, and consequences during adolescence and the transition to adulthood. Dr. Schulenberg is co-principal investigator of the national Monitoring the Future study, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), concerning substance use and psychosocial development across adolescence and adulthood. He collaborates on two international interdisciplinary projects involving several long-term studies addressing key questions about life-course pathways. His work has been funded by NIDA, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), NICHD, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. For these and other institutes and foundations, he has served on numerous advisory and review committees, including as chair of the NIH Psychosocial Development and Risk Prevention Study Section. He also serves on several editorial boards and for guest-edited special issues of Addiction, Applied Developmental Science, Development and Psychopathology, and the Journal of Longitudinal and Life-course Studies. He is a fellow of the APA and president-elect of the Society for Research on Adolescence.
Martin Sepúlveda, M.D., FACP, is an IBM fellow and vice president of health systems and policy research in the Research Division of IBM Corporation. He collaborates in research with a diverse global team of computational, informatics, and other IBM scientists to advance population health improvement through health systems and health care innovation. Previously, he served as IBM vice president for integrated health services and led in the areas of health policy and strategy, health benefits and clinical care program design, occupational and behavioral health, wellness, safety, and productivity for IBM globally. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians, the American College of Preventive Medicine, and the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. He was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Family Medicine and serves on the IOM’s Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice, the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation, and the Council on Health Research for Economic Development. Dr. Sepúlveda received his M.D. and M.P.H. degrees from Harvard University. He completed residencies in internal medicine at the UCSF Hospitals and occupational/environmental medicine at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health; trained in the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the U.S. Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); and completed a fellowship in internal medicine at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.
Kasisomayajula “Vish” Viswanath, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), a faculty member with the Center for Community-Based Research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and faculty director of the Health Communication Core of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center (DF/HCC). Dr. Viswanath is also the leader of DF/HCC’s Cancer Risk and Disparities Program. He is the founding director of DF/HCC’s Enhancing Communications for Health Outcomes Laboratory. He also chairs the steering committee for the health communication concentration at HSPH and teaches health communication courses within this concentration. Before coming to Harvard, Dr. Viswanath was acting associate director of the Behavioral Research Program, Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at the National Cancer Institute. His work draws on literature in communication science, social epidemiology, and social and health behavior sciences and focuses on the use of translational communication science to influence public health policy and practice. He focuses in particular on elucidating the relationship between communication inequalities and disparities in public and individual health in diverse populations and the implications for the use of knowledge translation to influence public health practice and policy. His research is supported by funding from private and public agencies, including NIH and CDC.
Leslie R. Walker, M.D., is chief of the Division of Adolescent Medicine at Seattle Children’s Hospital and professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine. She also directs the University of Washington’s Leadership Education in Adolescent Health training program. Dr. Walker was the 2011-2012 president of the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine, and has served on many national committees and boards dedicated to the health and well-being of adolescents. She has been a member of previous committees of the National Academies/IOM, including Adolescent Health Care Services and Models of Care for Treatment, Prevention and Healthy Development, and the Standing Committee on Family Planning. Dr. Walker is currently involved in national and local efforts to address workforce diversity in the field of pediatrics. Her research interests and publications are in the areas of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and substance abuse, adolescent health care transition, and teenage pregnancy prevention.
