Speakers

(More biographies  to come.)

Joan Alker, Co-Executive Director, Georgetown University Health Policy Institute Center for Families and Children

Bio:  Joan Alker is co-executive director at the Center for Children and Families and a senior researcher at the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute. She has worked on issues facing low-income families for the past twenty years. Her current work focuses primarily on health coverage for low income children and families, with an emphasis on state Medicaid initiatives. Some of her recent publications include Children and Health Care Reform: Assuring Coverage Meets Their Health Care Needs, Premium Assistance Programs: How are they Financed and do States Save Money?, and
state-specific analysis of Medicaid changes in a number of states including two analysis of West Virginia’s Medicaid changes.  Her previous positions include associate director of government affairs at Families USA and assistant director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. She holds a Master of Philosophy in politics from St. Antony’s College, Oxford
University and a Bachelor of Arts with honors in political science from Bryn Mawr College.

Dr. Harry Goodman, Director, Office of Oral Health, Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

Bio:  Dr. Harold S. Goodman currently serves as the Director of the Office
of Oral Health at the Maryland Department of Health and Mental
Hygiene. Prior to coming to the health department, Dr. Goodman
served as the co-chair of the Maryland Dental Action Committee which developed key recommendations to reform the dental care delivery system for low-income children in Maryland. He previously served as Chair
of the Clinical Operations Board at the University of Maryland Dental School. Dr. Goodman also serves as the Region 3 Head Start Oral Health Consultant and is responsible for oral health training and technical assistance for Head Start programs in this 6-state region.  Dr. Goodman received his Bachelor of Arts from Rutgers University in 1972 and his dental degree from the
University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in 1975. He obtained a Masters in Public Health degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in 1986 and completed a Dental Public Health residency program at the University of Michigan School of Public Health in 1989.

Andrea Kane, Senior Director for Policy and Partnerships, The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

Bio:  Andrea Kane is the senior director of policy and partnerships at the National Campaign, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to promoting values, behavior and policies that reduce both teen pregnancy and unplanned pregnancy among young adults. She is responsible for
the National Campaign’s work on public policy, as well as partnerships with a wide range of national, state and local organizations. From 2001 through 2008, she was also affiliated with the Brookings Institution’s Center on
Children and Families in various capacities. Before joining the National Campaign in 2001, Kane served at the White House Domestic Policy Council as a special assistant to President Clinton. She has also worked at the National
Governors’ Association, and at the state and local level in California, Texas, and Virginia. She studied Government at Smith College, received a BA from Cornell University and an MPA from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the
University of Texas.

Elliott Main, MD, OB-Gyn, Principal Investigator for the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative

Bio:  Elliott Main, MD, is the Principal Investigator for the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative (CMQCC).   He has also been the Chairman of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology of California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco since 1998. That department, with over 90 Ob/GYN’s and over 6,000 annual births is one of the largest in the US. Through his career, Dr. Main’s clinical work and publications have focused on medical complications of pregnancy and outcomes-based quality improvement. Since 1997, he has also led OB Quality Improvement for all of Sutter Health’s 20 hospitals and 40,000 births and developed and led several large-scale data-driven quality improvement efforts.  These include Sutter Health’s “First Pregnancy and Delivery” quality initiative that focused on the care of nulliparous women. The program has identified and improved key issues in the management of nullip (first) labors that strongly impact outcomes for that birth and for future births.

Dr. Main trained in obstetrics and gynecology at Washington University School of Medicine (St. Louis, Mo.) and in maternal-fetal medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a founding member of CPQCC (1996) and has been actively involved in multiple state and national committees on Maternal Quality including active involvement with the process for identifying new national quality measures for perinatal care. Besides being on many CMQCC committees, he also chairs the California Pregnancy-Associated Mortality Review Committee (PAMR) which is taking a novel approach to analyzing maternal deaths by looking for quality improvement opportunities to turn into QI actions.

Carol MacGowen, Public Health Advisor, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Laurie Norris, Child Advocate Attorney for Maryland

Renee Samelson, MD, MPH, FACOG, Associate Medical Director, Division of Family Health, New York State Department of Health

Bio:  Renee Samelson is an associate clinical professor at Albany Medical College. She is a high risk obstetrician with boards in Ob-Gyn,
Maternal-Fetal Medicine, and Public Health/Preventive Medicine. Dr.

Samelson has become an expert in the importance of oral health during pregnancy while working at the New York State Department of Health and she co-edited the first clinical guidelines for oral health during pregnancy. In addition, Dr. Samelson currently serves as a consultant to the AIDS Institute of New York State for issues relating to perinatal transmission of HIV infection.

Barbara Shaw, Director, Illinois Violence Prevention Authority and Chair, Illinois Children’s Mental Health Partnership.

Bio:  Barbara Shaw is the Director of the Illinois Violence Prevention Authority, a state agency charged with planning, coordinating, funding and evaluating violence prevention efforts in Illinois. Ms Shaw has thirty years of experience working at community and statewide levels mobilizing the public, private, and community sectors to address family and community program and policy issues including poverty, family violence, affordable housing, violence prevention and children’s mental health.  Ms. Shaw chaired the Illinois Children’s Mental Health Task Force, a broad coalition that successfully advocated for passage of groundbreaking legislation, the Illinois Children’s Mental Health Act of 2003.  In the fall of 2003, Governor Blagojevich appointed Ms. Shaw as Chair of the Illinois Children’s Mental Health Partnership, which was created by the Act to implement its provisions.