CMAP Team

Maria Cruz is a doctoral candidate in Health Services Research and Policy in the department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Cruz's research interests include public involvement in mental health policy and research, examining mental health service disparities in underserved populations, and transforming the widening gap of mental health inequity across marginalized groups. Prior to coming to Hopkins, she was a research associate at the University of Miami’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, where she served as a clinical and research coordinator for the Tics, OCD, and Related Disorders clinic. She received her BA in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2018.

Yimin Ge is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Health Policy and Management. Her current work focuses on analyzing the impact of healthcare and social policies on mental health and substance use disorder treatment supply, utilization, and quality. 

Victoria Green is a PhD student in the Department of Mental Health. She is broadly interested in behavioral health policy and evaluation, with a specific focus on the intersection of substance use and physical disability policy. She is also interested in evaluating public communication strategies that can reduce stigma associated with mental health and substance use disorders. Green previously worked at the Congressional Research Service as a health policy analyst and at the National Institute on Drug Abuse as a tobacco research analyst. She received her MHS in mental health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and her BA in psychology from Gettysburg College.

Sarah Henderson is a PhD student in the Department of Health Policy and Management. Sarah’s interests include health services research, population mental health, Medicaid reform, and state health policy. Before her training at Hopkins, Sarah worked as an analyst at Vanderbilt's Department of Health Policy and The Sycamore Institute, a state-level policy research center. Sarah received her Master of Public Health degree from Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health and BS/BA degrees from Furman University.

Iraj Qureshi is a statistical programmer and specializes in processing and analyzing datasets for several projects. She is leading the work on Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project dataset at CMAP and works on other datasets that contain hospital records and claims records for mental health and addiction patients, providers, and policies. 

Hridika Shah is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research is focused on policy to lower barriers to harm reduction and treatment for substance use disorder. Prior to starting in the PhD program, Hridika was a research coordinator within the Bloomberg Overdose Prevention Initiative. She received her MSPH in Health Policy from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and her BA in Public Health and Economics from Johns Hopkins University.

Ben Thornburg is a 3rd-year PhD candidate specializing in health economics within the Department of Health Policy and Management. His research focuses on using applied microeconomics to study behavioral healthcare, including patient outcomes and the incentives that determine provider decision-making. His dissertation examines the impact of the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade on population mental health, the outcomes of the National Residency Match for behavioral healthcare providers, and the dynamics of private equity investment in behavioral health treatment facilities. Before his graduate training at Johns Hopkins, Ben studied economics & mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where he received his BS in 2020.