Board of Advisors

Darnell F. Hawkins, PhD, JD

James Adams, MD, FACEP

Adams is Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of Northwestern Medicine (NM) as well as Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine, Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. He is an active clinician and educator, overseeing a research program focused on health services research directed to improving healthcare delivery in the United States. He was previously Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, Vice Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and a founding faculty member of the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine residency. Prior to that, he was Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Wilford Hall Medical Center at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, and a Major in the United States Air Force. He has over 75 academic publications related to health services, quality management, safety, ethics, professionalism and communication, he has been a visiting professor, speaker, and distinguished lecturer at over 200 universities and national conferences.  He has led numerous local, regional, and national committees on both ethics and quality management and has served on U.S. Presidential Commissions. He has held notable leadership positions including service on the Board of Directors of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine and, for 10 years, as Senior Associate Editor of the journal Academic Emergency Medicine. For three editions he was an editor of Rosen’s Principles and Practice of Emergency Medicine. In 2008, the comprehensive textbook Adams Emergency Medicine was published, an innovative major work oriented toward contemporary learning styles for which he serves as Executive Editor, currently 2 editions.

Bernard S. Black, MA, JD

Bernard Black is Nicholas D. Chabraja Professor at Northwestern University, Pritzker School of Law, and Kellogg School of Management (Finance Department). Professor Black received a B.A. from Princeton University, an M.A. in physics from University of California at Berkeley and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. He was Professor of Law and Professor of Finance at the University of Texas (2004-2010), and Professor of Law at Stanford Law School from 1998 to 2004 and Columbia Law School from 1988 to 1998. His principal research areas are law and finance, international corporate governance, health care and medical malpractice, and corporate and securities law. His principal research areas include health policy and medical malpractice, applied empirical methods for causal inference, law and finance, and international corporate governance.

He has studied how health insurance and medical malpractice liability affects the quality and cost of medical care.  His research seeks, where feasible, to assess the causal impacts of legal changes and other shocks, including the impact of health insurance or medical malpractice reform on health care outcomes.  His published and working papers are available athttp://ssrn.com\author=16042.  He runs the annual Northwestern-Duke workshop on Research Design for Causal Inference, see http://www.law.northwestern.edu/research-faculty/conferences/causalinference/, and was the founding Chairman (2006-2015) of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies.

David Cella, PhD

Cella is Ralph Seal Paffenbarger Professor and Chair of the Department of Medical Social Sciences, Director, Center for Patient-Centered Outcomes, Institute for Public Health and Medicine, and Associate Director for Prevention and Control at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University. He is principal investigator on multiple trans-NIH initiatives that center around patient-centered health measurement and care. As department chair, he plays leadership roles in the development and orchestration of multiple transdisciplinary scientific collaborations. A theme of his work has been ensuring that the voice of the patient is reflected in clinical care and clinical research, including areas of high-stakes decision-making such as regulatory review, payer negotiations, and individual clinical care. A major focus of many of these initiatives has been ensuring measurement sensitive to diverse populations including issues of health literacy and health disparities and developmentally-sensitive measurement across the lifespan. Cella has over 800 peer-reviewed publications, and is the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Gustav O. Lienhard Award, The International Society for Quality of Life Research President’s Award, and the Medical Outcomes Trust John Ware/Alvin Tarlov Award. Cella trained at Loyola University of Chicago, Cornell University Medical Center-Payne Whitney Clinic, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. ​

David Figlio, PhD

One of the nation’s most influential researchers on education and social policy, David Figlio is the Orrington Lunt Professor and Dean of the School of Education and Social Policy. In 2017, Figlio was elected to the National Academy of Education for his work involving school accountability, standards, higher education practice, welfare policy, policy design, and the link between health and education. An economist by training, Figlio currently serves as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty. In addition, Figlio has advised the governments of several U.S. states and nations on five continents on the design, implementation, and evaluation of education policy. Figlio is a prolific writer and has been published in leading journals, including the American Economic Review, JAMA Pediatrics, Review of Economics and Statistics, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Law and Economics, and Journal of Human Resources. Figlio earned his PhD in economics in 1995 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development, and the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Education, and Health and Human Services. His work also has been supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Atlantic Philanthropic Society, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Laura and John Arnold Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation.

Joseph Feinglass, PhD

Feinglass is Research Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics.  He is a health services researcher with a PhD in Public Policy Analysis from the School of Urban Planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has over 25 years of experience in health policy, quality improvement, health disparities, medical informatics, patient safety, and social epidemiology research with over 200 peer reviewed publications. His recent work includes studies on the effect of the Affordable Care Act on health care in Illinois, integrating social services with home based primary care for high risk patients, the effectiveness of hospital transition care, quality of care and patient outcomes for breast, prostate and lung cancer patients, vascular surgery, arthritis, orthopedic surgery and physical activity research, adverse childhood experiences and adult health, and pregnancy complications and maternal health. Dr. Feinglass has taught in the Northwestern Masters in Public Health Degree Program since 1996. He has extensive experience with Chicago-area safety net health policy advocacy as a long time Board Member of the Health and Medicine Policy Research Group.

Neil Jordan, PhD

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, PhD