Mark J. Schlesinger, Ph.D. is a wayward economist often mistaken for a political scientist or social psychologist. For the past two decades, he has studied patient experience and patients’ responses to problematic medical encounters; over the past five years complementing that work with research into ways of enhancing the scope, clarity, and influence of patient voice. Dr.
Theda Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology in the department of sociology at Harvard University. From 2005-2007, she served as dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and from 2000-2006 she was director of the Center for American Political Studies. Her research focuses on the politics of U.S. social policies, and on changing patterns of civic engagement in American democracy.
Michael S. Sparer is a professor and chair of the department of health policy and management at the Joseph L. Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. He received a Ph.D. in political science from Brandeis University and a J.D. from the Rutgers School of Law (Newark). Sparer spent seven years as a litigator for the New York City Law Department, specializing in intergovernmental social welfare litigation. He now studies and writes about the politics of health care with an emphasis on the state and local role in the American health care system.
Deborah Stone is currently Distinguished Visiting Professor at Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. She will be at Brandeis through the 2018 academic year, returning as a research professor of government at Dartmouth College. She taught politics and public policy for 25 years at Duke University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University, where she held the Pokross Chair in Law and Social Policy until 1999.
Margaret M. Weir is a professor of sociology and political science and the Avice Saint Chair in Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley and a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Weir has written widely on social policy and politics in the United States. She is the author of several books including, Schooling for All: Race, Class and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal (coauthored with Ira Katznelson, 1985); and Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States (1992).
Tim Westmoreland holds a joint appointment at Georgetown University (2001-present), as a professor of law and a research professor of public policy, teaching about legislation and statutory interpretation, health law, and budget policy. He is also a Senior Scholar at the O'Neill Institute. From 2002-2005, Westmoreland was awarded the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Investigator Award in Health Policy Research, and in 2002, he received the American Foundation for AIDS Research Award of Courage.
