Faculty
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is comprised of over 650 full-time faculty including professors, scientists, lecturers, instructors and researchers. These renowned experts in the field are shaping public health through teaching, research, and application.
The Master of Applied Science in Patient Safety and Healthcare Quality is an interdisciplinary fully online, part-time degree. Faculty contribute to the program via course development, teaching, and advising students. Below are a few of the experts students will learn from.
Albert Wu, MD, PhD
PROFESSOR AND DIRECTOR, MAS IN PATIENT SAFETY AND HEALTHCARE QUALITY
Dr. Wu is Director of the Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research. He is a practicing general internist and has devoted his career to improving the experience of patients receiving health care, as well as their outcomes and safety. He has published widely in the areas of patient-reported outcomes research, with a focus on assessing patient-reported outcomes (PROs), and on the quality and safety of health care. He was among the first to measure quality of life outcomes in people with HIV. Dr. Wu was one of the founders of the Outcomes Committee of the AIDS Clinical Trials Group of the NIH ACTG. He developed the MOS-HIV Health Survey, a leading measure of health related quality of life for people with HIV that is used widely in international trials and research studies. Dr. Wu has studied the handling of medical errors since 1998, and has published influential papers including “Do house officers learn from their mistakes” (JAMA 1991), “Medical error: the second victim” (BMJ, 2000). He was a member of the Institute of Medicine committee on Preventing Medication Errors, and Senior Adviser to the World Health Organization Patient Safety program in Geneva from 2007-2009. Read Bio.
John Matthew Austin, MS, PhD
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
Dr. Austin is an assistant professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His research focuses on health care performance measures. Dr. Austin is a faculty member at the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. Before joining the Johns Hopkins faculty in 2012, Dr. Austin worked at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he provided oversight for the Leapfrog Hospital Survey, an annual survey of U.S. hospitals conducted by The Leapfrog Group that compares hospital performance on national measures of safety, quality and efficiency. He also served as a co-investigator on the Wisconsin Coalition for Collaborative Excellence in Assisted Living project, an evaluation of an innovative public-private collaborative initiative to improve the health, safety and quality of life for residents in assisted living facilities. In his current role at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Austin continues to provide strategic guidance to The Leapfrog Group on performance measures for their annual Leapfrog Hospital Survey and their new Hospital Safety Score. Dr. Austin also serves as the principal investigator on a number of grants focusing on the use of performance measures in U.S. hospitals. Read Bio.
Tony Boonyasai, MD, MPH
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
Dr. Romsai Tony Boonyasai is an assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His areas of clinical expertise include hypertension and internal medicine. Dr. Boonyasai serves as medical director of the Johns Hopkins Patient Access Line program. He is an expert on implementing chronic disease improvement programs. He has particular expertise in building programs for improving hypertension control in low-resource settings and for ensuring safe transitions between hospitals and community-based settings. Dr. Boonyasai’s research interests include hypertension, quality improvement for chronic disease, and care coordination at hospital discharge. Read Bio.
Avonne Connor, PhD
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
Dr. Connor is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and holds a joint appointment in Oncology at the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. She is currently the Principal Investigator of a breast cancer study to evaluate novel approaches to address survival disparities among African American, Hispanic and non-Hispanic white women from New Mexico and Maryland. Her research focuses on the roles of modifiable risk factors with breast cancer incidence and mortality among diverse study populations. In addition to directing the Online Introduction to Epidemiology course, she is a lab instructor in the core Epidemiologic Methods series and serves as a the course director for two cancer epidemiology courses - Etiology, Prevention, and Control of Cancer and Cancer Epidemiology, Prevention, and Control during the Graduate Summer Institute of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins. Read Bio.
Melanie Curless, MSPH, RN, CIC
INFECTION CONTROL EPIDEMIOLOGIST
Melanie Curless has post-graduate degrees in public health and pediatric nursing and is certified in infection control. Currently based in Malaysia, in her current position as Senior Infection Control Epidemiologist with The Johns Hopkins Hospital, she assesses, plans, and leads infection prevention performance improvement initiatives at the large academic facility in Baltimore and as well as internationally. Melanie has worked with facilities and health professionals in variety of global settings to increase capacity and prevent infections. She currently works on several projects preventing blood-stream infection in neonatal intensive care units situated in low and middle income settings. Previously, she worked with the CDC Global Disease Detection Center in Egypt designing a healthcare-associated infection surveillance system and coordinating infection control research and training. Her main areas of expertise include developing and delivering training workshops, mentoring infection prevention teams, and surveillance and prevention of healthcare-associated infection.
Renee Demski, MSW, MBA
VICE PRESIDENT OF QUALITY
Renee Demski currently serves as Vice President of Quality of Johns Hopkins Health System. Previously, she served as the senior director of The Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Center for Innovation in Quality Patient Care and the senior director of Quality Improvement for Johns Hopkins Health System. In these roles, she worked on the effective integration of services across the health care continuum with the goal of maximizing organizational improvement, efficiencies, and the value of clinical services. Specifically, among other projects, Ms. Demski led the strategic design and implementation of The Johns Hopkins Medicine Revenue Recovery Initiative, which applied Lean Sigma methodology to the front-end registration process.
Cheryl Dennison Himmelfarb, PhD, RN, ANP, FAAN
PROFESSOR
Dr. Dennison Himmelfarb is a clinician, researcher, and nurse educator at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and is committed to improving cardiovascular care for high-risk, underserved populations. Her current research—which bridges scientific research and clinical practice and develops and tests interdisciplinary and health information technology-based approaches—focuses on reducing system and provider barriers to the implementation of cardiovascular guidelines in acute, primary care, and community settings. She is an associate professor at the School of Medicine’s Division of Health Sciences Informatics and a core faculty member of the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. In addition, she is a deputy director of the Research Participant and Community Partnership Core of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (ICTR). Read Bio.
Sydney Dy, MD
PROFESSOR
Dr. Dy is a Professor of Health Policy and Management, Medicine and Oncology, with extensive expertise in quality of care, safety, and decision-making research, particularly in patients with cancer and serious and terminal illness. She is a co-author on over 100 peer-reviewed publications and numerous government reports and book chapters. She is a co-developer of the Cancer Quality-ASSIST supportive oncology quality measures and performs quality measurement development, testing and implementation in palliative care, patient safety and many other fields. She is particularly interested in improving health systems and services in order to increase the appropriateness of technology and medication use. She is also interested in end-of-life health care policy, particularly with quality measurement. Her research includes systematic literature reviews, primary qualitative and quantitative data collection, analyses of secondary databases, and quality measurement improvement. She is a practicing physician in primary care, cancer survivorship, and palliative care. Read Bio.
Hanan Edrees, DrPH
QUALITY & PATIENT SAFETY MANAGER
Dr. Edrees serves as Quality & Patient Safety Manager at the Ministry of National Guard Health Affairs in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. She earned her doctorate in Healthcare Management from Johns Hopkins University and is a recipient of the King Abdullah Scholarship Program. She served as project manager at the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute and consulted for the World Health Organization during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. She also served as a Comprehensive Unit-Based Safety Program (CUSP) Coach at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she worked closely with clinicans in identifying and solving patient safety concerns. Her research interests include developing an emotional support structure to help second victims.
Lilly Engineer, DrPH, MD, MHA
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
Dr. Engineer is an assistant professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She is also an assistant professor in health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and associate faculty in the Armstrong Institute for Quality and Patient Safety. She serves as associate director of the doctor of public health (DrPH) program in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Engineer’s primary research interest includes the quality and safety of medical care, especially in rural and underserved communities. Among her many accomplishments, she is credited with the development of the first anonymous intensive care unit safety reporting system (ICUSRS) in the United States. Read Bio.
Elizabeth Golub, PhD, MEd
SENIOR LECTURER AND DIRECTOR, ONLINE PROGRAMS FOR APPLIED LEARNING
Dr. Golub is Director of the School’s Online Programs for Applied Learning. She currently serves as primary instructor for one blended on-site course and two online courses at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, as well as two online courses at the Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. Her primary research interests include the effects of HIV infection and treatment on women's reproductive health, and evaluating the effectiveness of antiretroviral therapy in observational studies. She serves as Principal Investigator of the Data Management and Analysis Center for the Women’s Interagency HIV Study, the largest ongoing prospective cohort study of HIV among women in the United States. Read Bio.
Lisa Maragakis, MD, PhD
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
Dr. Maragakis is an Associate Professor in infectious diseases and epidemiology at The Johns Hopkins University, is the Hospital Epidemiologist and Director of the Department of Hospital Epidemiology and Infection Control (HEIC) at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. In this role, she is responsible for the conceptualization, planning, implementation, and development of the hospital’s infection control and prevention program. Her research interests are the epidemiology, prevention and control of healthcare-acquired infections and antimicrobial-resistant gram negative bacilli. Dr. Maragakis serves as a Councilor on the Board of Directors of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA). Read Bio.
Jill Marsteller, PhD
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
Dr. Marsteller specializes in organizational behavior and theory, specifically in estimating the influence of organizational variables and contextual measures on quality improvement activities in learning organizations. She focuses her research on the determinants of successful implementation, dissemination, and sustainability of knowledge. She conducts mixed methods research in both inpatient and ambulatory health care settings. She is jointly appointed in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine's Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care Medicine in the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality, where she leads the Research Facilitation Council, and at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. She is an Associate Director of the Center for Health Service and Outcomes Research and co-leader of the Behavioral, Social and Systems Science Translational Research Community within the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research. Read Bio.
John McGready, PhD
SENIOR SCIENTIST
Since joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins, Dr. McGready has split his time between research collaborations and statistical education. He is the primary instructor for three on-site courses, four online courses, as well as being co-creator and instructor of intensive data analysis workshops offered in the School's Summer Institute of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Dr. McGready has won numerous teaching awards, from the Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Association of Schools of Public Health, and the American Statistical Association. He is actively involved in collaborative research with investigators from the Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Hospital, and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Read Bio.
Laura Morlock, PhD
PROFESSOR
Dr. Morlock is Executive Vice Dean for Academic Affairs at JHSPH. She is a sociologist with primary research interests in how organizational and managerial factors affect the quality and costs of health care, evaluating quality improvement and safety initiatives, efforts to secure the viability and improve the services of safety net providers, and evaluating efforts to improve health insurance coverage. Among many other initiatives, she is helping to implement and evaluate an AHRQ funded national incident reporting system in Intensive Care Units, and is a member of the evaluation team of the Robert Wood Johnson sponsored national collaborative to improve the recognition and treatment of depression in nine health plans. Read Bio.
Lori Paine, RN, MS
DIRECTOR OF PATIENT SAFETY
Lori Paine is the Director of Patient Safety at the Johns Hopkins Medicine Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality and the Johns Hopkins Hospital. She was responsible for implementing the health system’s online event reporting system and now manages the operations, surveillance and data analysis from this system. She has brought more than thirty Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program (CUSP) units across the hospital. Recently, she served on the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the National Quality Forum’s Expert Panel for Common Formats in event reporting. She has spoken to audiences and consulted with hospitals nationally and internationally on Patient Safety Strategic Planning, CUSP, Science of Patient Safety, event reporting, safety culture measurement, and improvement as well as patient and family involvement in safety. She is an adjunct faculty member at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing and associate faculty at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Read Bio.
Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD, FCCM
PROFESSOR
Dr. Pronovost is the Former director of the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality at Johns Hopkins, as well as Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Former Senior Vice President for Patient Safety and Quality. One of the world’s leading authorities on patient safety, Dr. Pronovost developed a scientifically proven method for reducing the deadly infections associated with central line catheters. His simple but effective checklist protocol virtually eliminated such infections in ICUs across the state of Michigan, saving 1,500 lives and $100 million annually. The checklist protocol has since been implemented across the United States, state by state, and in several other countries. He serves in an advisory capacity to the World Health Organizations’ World Alliance for Patient Safety. The winner of several national awards, including the 2004 John Eisenberg Patient Safety Research Award and a coveted MacArthur Fellowship in 2008, Dr. Pronovost was named by Time magazine as one of the world’s 100 “most influential people” in the world for his work in patient safety. He is a practicing critical care physician. Read Bio.
Michael Rosen, PhD, MA
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
Dr. Rosen is an Associate Professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is a human factors psychologist with research interests in the areas of teamwork and patient safety as well as simulation-based training, performance measurement, naturalistic decision-making, and quality and safety improvement. In 2009, he was a co-recipient of the M. Scott Myers Award for Applied Research in the Workplace from the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, in recognition of his work in developing innovative team decision making training for Explosive Ordinance Disposal Teams, including a simulation-based curriculum and performance measurement tools. His current research focuses on the development, validation, and application of behavioral markers of team performance in a variety of clinical domains, team feedback strategies, and the development of methods for using in situ simulation and diagnostic classification models to understand unit safety needs. Read Bio.
Melinda Sawyer, MSN, RN, CNS, BC
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF PATIENT SAFETY
Sawyer is a board-certified clinical nurse specialist, spent nine years as a bedside nurse in progressive care and then in bed management and as a member of the hospital’s resuscitation team. Her clinical experiences led her to the field of patient safety and served as the patient safety officer in the department of Medicine at The Johns Hopkins Hospital prior to her current role. She serves as the president of the local chapter of the National Association of Clinical Nurse Specialists. Sawyer began one of the first Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program projects outside of an ICU at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and has since participated in numerous quality improvement projects. She is most interested in multidisciplinary collaboration as a tool to improve patient outcomes. She leads the Armstrong Institute's Learning and Development team, which helps Johns Hopkins Medicine and other organizations to build internal capacity to improve patient safety and quality of care. Read Bio.
Kathleen Sutcliffe, PhD
PROFESSOR
Dr. Sutcliffe is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Business and Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Her research is on how organizations and their members cope with uncertainty and unexpected surprises, and how organizations can be designed to be more reliable and resilient. She is currently investigating these issues in healthcare as well as in wild-land firefighting, oil and gas exploration, and other dynamic high-risk industries. Read Bio.
Amal Wanigatunga, PhD
ASSISTANT SCIENTIST
Dr. Ng is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and is a multi-Principal Investigator of the Data Coordinating and Analysis Center for the Chronic Kidney Disease in Children (CKiD) study, a longitudinal epidemiologic cohort to investigate pediatric chronic kidney disease. He is interested in study design and applied methods for improved epidemiologic inference in the context of longitudinal data and survival analysis, particularly in pediatrics. Dr. Ng is also a co-investigator in the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS) and collaborates with faculty in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering. In addition to directing the Online Introduction to Epidemiology course, he is a lab instructor in the core Epidemiologic Methods series and serves as a lecturer for the course, Advanced Methods in the Design and Analysis of Cohort Studies. Read Bio.
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