The Awards Program » National Program Office
The National Program Office (NPO) for the Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research is led by Alan B. Cohen, Sc.D., and headquartered at the Boston University Health Policy Institute. The NPO provides direction and technical assistance for the program, manages the grant application and review process, monitors the progress and outcomes of the awards, organizes all program meetings, supports collaborative work by the program’s investigators, produces publications, and helps investigators disseminate their research findings.
 |
Alan B. Cohen, Sc.D.
National Program Director |
| Alan Cohen is Executive Director of the Boston University Health Policy Institute and Professor of Health Policy and Management in the Boston University School of Management. He directs the RWJF Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research and RWJF Scholars in Health Policy Research Program. Dr. Cohen has 35 years of experience in health policy, health services research, and program evaluation. His current research interests include evaluation of quality improvement initiatives, cross-national comparisons of health care systems, and evaluation of healthcare informatics tools and information systems.
Dr. Cohen served as Faculty Director of the School of Management’s Health Care MBA Program from 1994 to 2003, where he taught courses in American health policy, technology management, and comparative healthcare systems. Prior to joining Boston University, he was Research Professor and University Lecturer in the Institute for Health Policy of the Florence Heller Graduate School at Brandeis University, where his research focused on assessing the feasibility of setting national health care expenditure limits. Before that, he served as Vice President for Research and Evaluation at The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, where he directed staff operations overseeing the design of national program evaluations and several major surveys. He also had management responsibility for programs in the areas of health care financing, state health policy, quality of care, and medical malpractice reform. Previously, he was Associate Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Hospital Finance and Management, and Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management in the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. His earlier work as a senior analyst for Urban Systems Research & Engineering, Inc., in Cambridge, MA, involved evaluation studies of federal and state health programs in the areas of health statistics, health planning, Certificate of Need regulation, and health professions training.
Dr. Cohen currently serves on the editorial board of Inquiry; is a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance; and in 2010 was the William Evans Visiting Fellow at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He is the principal author of Technology in American Health Care: Policy Directions for Effective Evaluation and Management (University of Michigan Press, 2004). He received his B.A. in psychology from the University of Rochester, and his M.S. and Sc.D. in health policy and management from the Harvard School of Public Health. | |
 |
Jed N. Horwitt, M.P.H.
Deputy Director |
| Prior to his role as Deputy Director of the RWJF Investigator Awards Program, Mr. Horwitt served as Associate Director of Boston University’s Health Policy Institute, where he managed a portfolio of health research projects on quality improvement, hospital performance, and health information technology, and coordinated Institute activities on a daily basis. Previously, Mr. Horwitt was a Program Coordinator at the Boston University Goldman School of Dental Medicine, where he managed the Division of Dental Public Health’s postdoctoral program, the Graduate Medical Sciences Program in Oral Health Sciences, and various recruitment pipeline programs to attract minorities and underrepresented groups to the field of dentistry. Prior to that, he conducted immunology and bioinformatics research at Mount Holyoke College, investigating the genetics of immunodeficiency in a murine model of HIV/AIDS. Mr. Horwitt holds a B.A. in biology from Amherst College and a M.P.H. in international health from the Boston University School of Public Health. | |
 |
Melissa Manolis, M.S.
Program Manager |
| Since 2007, Ms. Manolis served as Program Manager for the RWJF Scholars in Health Policy Research Program, and in 2012, assumed the same role for the RWJF Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research. Prior to joining Boston University, Ms. Manolis served as Programs Coordinator at the Tufts Health Care Institute and as Project Coordinator for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Partnerships for Quality Education (PQE) Program at the Harvard Medical School. Earlier in her career, she supported faculty, engineers and scientists in several administrative positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), including the MIT Technology and Policy Program, and was the office manager for an MIT start-up company. Ms. Manolis holds a B.S. in political science from the University of Massachusetts – Amherst and an M.S. in project management from Boston University’s Metropolitan College. | |
 |
Christine L. Halbig, M.P.H.
Communications and Data Manager |
| Ms. Halbig is the new Communications and Data Manager, supporting both the RWJF Investigator Awards program and the RWJF Scholars Program. Most recently, she was a Program Manager in the Boston University Health Policy Institute, working with faculty and providing analytic support and database management to the RWJF Scholars Program. Previously, she served as Project Manager for Boston Medical Center’s Medical Information Sciences Unit, overseeing research and managing two grant-funded studies. Her prior work experience includes serving as Executive Assistant at the Fair Haven Community Health Center in New Haven, Connecticut, where she worked to improve patient access and clinical efficiency as team leader for the Access & Redesign Regional Collaborative. Ms. Halbig holds a B.S. in film and television from the Boston University College of Communications and an M.P.H. in epidemiology from the Boston University School of Public Health. | |
