2012 Faculty and Speakers

Hilda Bastian
Phil B. Fontanarosa, M.D., M.B.A.
Allen Frances, M.D.
Trish Groves, M.B.B.S., M.R.C.Psych
Scott Hensley
Barnett S. Kramer, M.D., M.P.H.
Virginia A. Moyer, M.D., M.P.H.
David M. Murray, Ph.D.
T.R. Reid
Lisa M. Schwartz, M.D., M.S., and Steven Woloshin, M.D., M.S.
Gary Schwitzer
Natasha Singer
Heather Won Tesoriero

Hilda Bastian has been the editor responsible for PubMed Health at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health since 2011. PubMed Health is a clinical effectiveness resource bringing together systematic reviews and information for consumers and clinicians.

Previously, Ms. Bastian headed the Health Information Department at the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) (2004–2011). She first became involved in health as a health consumer advocate in the 1980s, serving as chairperson of the Consumers’ Health Forum of Australia (1997–2001). She has been participating in and communicating the results of systematic reviews since the early 1990s, when she helped establish the Cochrane Collaboration.

Phil B. Fontanarosa, M.D., M.B.A., is the executive editor of JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and is vice president of scientific publications and multimedia applications at the American Medical Association. Dr. Fontanarosa has been an editor at JAMA since 1993, served as interim co-editor-in-chief of JAMA in 1999, and has been executive deputy editor since 2000 and executive editor since 2010.

Dr. Fontanarosa received his medical degree from the Medical College of Ohio and was selected as the 2009 Distinguished Alumnus. He is board certified in emergency medicine and received an M.B.A. from the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Fontanarosa has published over 100 articles, has edited two books, and has served as issue editor for 16 theme issues of JAMA.

Dr. Fontanarosa is adjunct professor of emergency medicine and preventive medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and serves as faculty for courses in the medical school curriculum, in the master’s of public health program, and in the master’s of science in clinical investigation program.

Allen Frances, M.D., was chair of the DSM IV Task Force and is professor emeritus and former chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University. His book, Saving Normal, suggests ways of correcting the artificial loss of sanity caused by fads, false epidemics, and diagnostic inflation in psychiatry.

Trish Groves, M.B.B.S., M.R.C.Psych, is deputy editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and editor-in-chief of BMJ Open, an online-only, open-access medical journal. She has worked at BMJ for more than 20 years and leads its international outreach programme as well as the team that peer reviews and publishes original research articles.

Dr. Groves has been a member of several research-related organisations and groups, including the council of the Committee on Publication Ethics, the CONSORT 2010 group on reporting randomised controlled trials, and the SPIRIT group on reporting trial protocols. She also participates in strategic efforts to encourage the sharing of raw research data, to develop prognosis research methods, to revise the European Union clinical trials directive, and to improve the practice of grant review.

Dr. Groves has presented programmes and series for BBC World Service Radio, presented TVam’s Doc Spot, co-authored the HarperCollins Consumer Guide to Mental Health (winner of the Medical Journalists’ Association best book of 1995), and edited the BMJ book Countdown to Community Care. Dr. Groves trained in medicine at London’s Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine and specialised in psychiatry.

Scott Hensley has been writing and editing posts for Shots , the National Public Radio’s (NPR’s) health blog, since the summer of 2009. Before joining NPR, he was the founding editor of The Wall Street Journal's Health Blog .

He is a convert to blogging and online journalism after years of print reporting. He covered the pharmaceutical industry and the Human Genome Project for The Wall Street Journal. Earlier in his journalism career, he was a reporter for Modern Healthcare and American Banker. Longer ago than he would care to admit, he oversaw clinical trials for high-tech medical devices. The machines worked most of the time.

He has a bachelor’s degree in natural sciences from Johns Hopkins University and a master’s in journalism from Columbia University. You can follow him on Twitter: @scotthensley .

Barnett S. Kramer, M.D., M.P.H., is director of the Division of Cancer Prevention at the National Cancer Institute. He was editor-in-chief of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute from 1994 to 2012. He serves as chairman of the Physician Data Query (PDQ) Editorial Board on Screening and Prevention and is a member of the PDQ Treatment Editorial Board. Dr. Kramer has served on the Cancer Prevention Committee of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and was the committee chairperson from 2006 to 2007.

Dr. Kramer received his medical degree from the University of Maryland Medical School, and completed his internship and residency in internal medicine at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri. He completed a medical oncology fellowship at the National Cancer Institute. He is board certified in internal medicine and medical oncology, and received a master’s degree in public health from Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Dr. Kramer has extensive experience in primary cancer prevention studies, as well as clinical screening trials of lung, ovarian, breast, and prostate cancers. He is an investigator and on the steering committee for two large cancer screening trials sponsored by the National Cancer Institute: the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, Ovarian Trial, and the National Lung Screening Trial. He has a strong interest in weighing and reporting the strength of medical evidence and created an annual Medicine in the Media Workshop to help working journalists develop methods of reporting medical evidence.

Virginia A. Moyer, M.D., M.P.H., is the chair of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. She is also head of the Academic General Pediatrics Section and a professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine. She is chief of the academic medicine service at Texas Children’s Hospital and was its first chief quality officer for medicine from 2009 to 2011. Dr. Moyer is a board-certified pediatrician with expertise in ambulatory care, diagnostic testing, and evidence-based medicine. She is also an experienced researcher, lecturer, and author.

Dr. Moyer serves as deputy editor of Pediatrics, the leading journal in the Nation covering issues of child health, and is a past member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Steering Committee on Quality Improvement and Management. She also serves as editor of or reviewer for numerous pediatric journals, including being a founding editor of Evidence-Based Child Health, a Cochrane Review journal.

Prior to joining Baylor and Texas Children’s Hospital, Dr. Moyer was a professor of pediatrics and internal medicine at the University of Texas Medical School. There, she was also the associate director of the Center for Clinical Research and Evidence-Based Medicine and served on and chaired numerous committees, including the admissions and curriculum committees for the graduate clinical research program.

Dr. Moyer has been a member of many organizations and societies, including the American Pediatric Society and Ambulatory Pediatric Association. She serves as chair of the American Board of Pediatrics Scholarly Activities Examination Committee. Internationally, Dr. Moyer is a member of the Evidence-Based Medicine Working Group and steering committee for the Cochrane Collaboration Child Health Field. Among her many honors, Dr. Moyer was elected to the University of Texas Academy of Health Science Education in 2006.

Dr. Moyer earned her M.D. from Baylor College of Medicine and her M.P.H. from the University of Texas School of Public Health. She completed residency training in general pediatrics at Children’s Hospital National Medical Center and was chief resident at The George Washington University School of Medicine.

Dr. Moyer was previously a member of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force from January 2003 to December 2008. She returned to the Task Force as chair in March 2011 for a 3-year term.

David M. Murray, Ph.D., is the NIH Associate Director for Prevention and the Director of the Office of Disease Prevention. Dr. Murray has spent his career evaluating public health intervention programs, focusing largely on the analysis of group randomized trials. Prior to his current appointment, he worked on more than 40 NIH-funded grants and contracts, including many multicenter trials. He was the first chair of the NIH Community-Level Health Promotion study section and served on review committees for the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Dr. Murray, a fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has authored more than 230 articles in peer-reviewed journals and served on the editorial board for Preventive Medicine (2005–2012), Prevention Science (2006–2012), and Evaluation Review (2011–2012). Dr. Murray earned a B.A. in psychology from Denison University and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Tennessee. He spent 20 years in the Division of Epidemiology at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, 7 years as the Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence in Psychology at the University of Memphis, and the last 7 years as professor and chair of epidemiology in the College of Public Health at The Ohio State University.

T.R. Reid has become one of the Nation’s best-known reporters through his coverage of global affairs for The Washington Post, his books and documentary films, and his light-hearted commentaries on National Public Radio.

Mr. Reid majored in classics at Princeton University, and served as a naval officer and a teacher, and in various other jobs. At The Washington Post, he covered Congress and four presidential campaigns. He served as the paper’s bureau chief in Tokyo and in London.

Mr. Reid has written seven books in English and three in Japanese. He has written and hosted documentary films for National Geographic TV, for PBS, and for the A&E network. His latest film, “U.S. Health Care: The Good News,” premiered on the PBS network in February 2012.

Mr. Reid is a member of the board of the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, the Japan-America Society of Colorado, and the Health Research and Educational Trust. He has taught at Princeton University and the University of Michigan.

He has been married for 40 years to the attorney Margaret M. McMahon. They have three children.

Lisa M. Schwartz, M.D., M.S., and Steven Woloshin, M.D., M.S., are professors of medicine and community and family medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, co-directors of the Center for Medicine and the Media at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, and co-directors of the Veterans Affairs (VA) Outcomes Group at the White River Junction VA Medical Center.

Their research addresses the excessive fear and hope created by exaggerations, distortions, and selective reporting in medical journals, advertising, and health news. Their goal is to improve communication of medical evidence to physicians, journalists, and the public. Their research has appeared in leading medical journals, and they are co-authors of two books: Know Your Chances and Overdiagnosed. They are columnists for the British Medical Journal, and their essays have appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post (where they had an occasional series called "Healthy Skepticism" ).

Gary Schwitzer has specialized in healthcare journalism in his more than 30-year career in radio, television, interactive multimedia, and the Internet. He is publisher of the website HealthNewsReview.org , leading a team of more than two dozen people who grade daily health news reporting by major U.S. news organizations. From 2001 to 2010, he was a tenured journalism professor at the University of Minnesota, where he taught health journalism and media ethics. He was also a television medical news reporter for 14 years, with positions at CNN in Atlanta, WFAA-TV in Dallas, and WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee. He was head of the medical news unit at CNN, leading the efforts of 10 staff members in Atlanta and Washington, DC. In 2000, he was the founding editor-in-chief of the MayoClinic.com consumer health website. He served two terms as a member of the board of directors of the Association of Health Care Journalists for which he authored the organization’s Statement of Principles. For that organization, he also wrote a guide on how to report on medical research studies.

Natasha Singer joined The New York Times in 2005 and is currently a reporter in the Sunday Business section. She previously worked as a reporter in the daily Business section, where she covered the pharmaceutical industry, drug marketing, and professional medical ethics. She was part of a team at the Times whose investigative series on cancer, “The Forty Years War,” was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting in 2010.

From 2005 to 2007, she developed the “Skin Deep” column for the Times Thursday Style section, where she covered the beauty industrial complex with stories on the health risks associated with devices like breast implants. Her investigative reporting into untested cosmetic medical procedures resulted in the closure of a chain of fat-melting clinics across the country.

Ms. Singer graduated from Brown University with a degree in comparative literature and creative writing. Before joining The New York Times, she was a correspondent for Outside magazine, covering the environment and biodiversity. In the 1990s, she was a foreign correspondent in Moscow, working variously for Forward, USA Today, GQ, and Vogue.

She participated in the Medicine in the Media course in 2006 and presented in 2011. She has also been a journalism fellow at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Marine Biological Laboratory, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

Heather Won Tesoriero is a medical and healthcare producer for the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley, where she produces news and features. Her reporting interests include healthcare fraud, drug pricing, genetics, and primary care medicine.

Prior to joining CBS in 2008, she was a healthcare reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where she wrote about medical-legal issues and covered litigation over Vioxx, a controversial painkiller. In 2010 she was Knight Fellow at the Salzburg Global Seminar for its forum on shared medical decision-making.

Ms. Tesoriero is a graduate of Hamilton College. She was born in Wonju, South Korea, and grew up on the eastern end of Long Island. She enjoys running, cycling, and hiking. She doesn’t eat anything that swims.