Nicole Lurie, MD, MSPH, is Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response at the US Department of Health and Human Services. Prior to that, she was Senior Natural Scientist and the Paul O’Neill Alcoa Professor of Health Policy at the RAND Corporation. There she directed RAND’s public health and preparedness work as well as RAND’s Center for Population Health and Health Disparities. She has previously served in federal government, as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Health in the US Department of Health and Human Services; in state government, as Medical Advisor to the Commissioner at the Minnesota Department of Health; and in academia, as Professor in the University of Minnesota Schools of Medicine and Public Health. Dr. Lurie has a long history in the health services research field, primarily in the areas of access to and quality of care, managed care, mental health, prevention, public health infrastructure and preparedness and health disparities. Dr. Lurie attended college and medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, and completed her residency and MSPH at UCLA, where she was also a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar. She serves as Senior Editor for Health Services Research and has served on editorial boards and as a reviewer for numerous journals. She has served on the council and was President of the Society of General Internal Medicine, is currently on the board of directors for the Academy of Health Services Research, and has served on multiple other national committees. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the AHSR Young Investigator Award, the Nellie Westerman Prize for Research in Ethics, the Heroine in Health Care Award, the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine’s Distinguished Alumni Award, and is a member of the Institute of Medicine. Dr. Lurie continues to practice clinical medicine in the health care safety net in Washington, DC.

Gail Steketee is Dean and Professor at Boston University’s School of Social Work. She received her master’s and her doctorate from Bryn Mawr Graduate School of Social Work. She has conducted numerous research studies on the psychopathology and treatment of anxiety and related problems. This work includes NIMH-funded research projects on familial factors that influence treatment outcomes, and on the development and testing of cognitive and behavioral interventions for obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), for body dysmorphic disorder, and most recently and most extensively, hoarding problems. She has published over 180 articles and chapters and 8 books, mainly focused on evidence based treatments for OCD and related disorders such as hoarding, as well as cognitive aspects of OCD. Four more books are under contract including an edited volume on OC spectrum conditions (Oxford Press), a co-authored book (with Dr. Christiana Bratiotis and Dr. Cristina Sorrentino) on hoarding and human services (also with Oxford) and a co-authored book with Dr. Randy Frost for the public entitled Stuff: Hoarding and the Meaning of Things with Harcourt Press. She gives frequent lectures and workshops on hoarding, OCD, and related topics to professional and public audiences in the US and abroad.

Michael Sherraden is Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development and founding director of the Center for Social Development (CSD) at George Warren Brown School of Social Work, Washington University in St. Louis, and visiting Distinguished Chaired Professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Concentrating on social experiments, his research has received widespread recognition for its impacts on public policy. Research on Individual Development Accounts (IDAs), matched savings for the poor, has influenced policy in the United States and other countries, including the Australia, China, Canada, China, Hungary, Korea, Peru, Uganda, and the United Kingdom. For example, in the United Kingdom, Dr. Sherraden extensively advised the Prime Minister’s Office and Chancellor of the Exchequer in creating a Child Trust Fund, a savings account for every child beginning at birth. Current research is planning a study of youth asset building in four developing countries. CSD is also engaged in international research on civic engagement, productive aging, and other topics. Recently, with colleagues Nancy Morrow-Howell and Gao Jianguo, CSD organized a conference on productive aging in China, the first of its kind in that country. In 2009 Sherraden was honored to give the wrap up speech for Social Work Day at the United Nations.

Fred Ssewamala is an Associate Professor of Social Work and International Affairs at Columbia University School of Social Work; a Global Thought Fellow with Columbia University; and a Senior Research Fellow with New America Foundation. Dr. Ssewamala has several years of practice in the International Social Development field. His practice experience includes serving at the Red Cross (Uganda), where he acted in several programmatic positions related to designing projects and programs for poverty alleviation and community development, and at Justine Petersen Housing and Reinvestment Corporation a 501(c) (3) Missouri (USA) not-for-profit corporation that assists low-to-moderate income individuals and families become homeowners, access financial institutions, start their own micro-businesses, and accumulate assets. His current research on Africa is funded by a consortium of organizations, including the National Institute of Health, and the World Bank. This research focuses on asset-ownership development and creating life options through economic empowerment models for Orphaned and Vulnerable Children (OVC) in sub-Saharan Africa. Professor Ssewamala is also currently researching the acceptability and feasibility of economic empowerment interventions in poor African immigrant communities in the urban U.S.

Sarah Gehlert, PhD, is the E. Desmond Lee Professor of Racial and Ethnic Diversity at the Brown School of Washington University in St. Louis. She has been the Principal Investigator and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Health Disparities Research (CIHDR) at the University of Chicago, and project leader of one of its four interdependent research projects since 2003, when it was first funded by NIH as one of the eight Centers for Population Health and Health Disparities in the United States. Gehlert is a member of the Siteman Cancer Center at Washington University. Her publications focus on social influences on health, especially the health of vulnerable women. She and her CIHDR team of geneticists, molecular biologists, oncologists, biopsychologists, and social scientists, working in concert with community stakeholders, examine gene and environment interactions in breast cancer to explain the increasing gap in breast cancer mortality between black and white women in the United States.

Betty Blythe received her PhD in Social Welfare from the University of Washington in 1983. She has been on the faculties of the University of Michigan, University of Pittsburgh, and Florida International University before coming to Boston College in 1994. Professor Blythe’s scholarly interests include child and family welfare, evidence-based practice, global social welfare, and methodologies for evaluating the outcomes of social services. Professor Blythe is a founding board member of the International Initiative for Children, Youth, and Families.