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.

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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

ASSociate PROFESSOR

Dr. Austin is an Associate 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.

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.

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 F. Topper, PhD, MEd

research professoR

Dr. Topper 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.

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.

Amal Wanigatunga, PhD

ASSISTANT professor

Dr. Wanigatunga's primary focus is to investigate the intersection of the aging process and physical activity, a topic that broadly touches all aspects of health. He is currently exploring the interactions among the brain, physical activity, and mobility with aging. Dr. Wanigatunga's ultimate goal is to promote the infusion of healthy levels of physical activity back into the public's routine lifestyle in an effort to increase quality of life, prevent disease and disability, and positively shift the perspective of aging independently as a welcomed stage of life. Read Bio.

Get in Touch

Request more information or call us at 443-927-8579 to speak with an admissions officer. You can also reach us via email at MAS-Office@jh.edu.