Our Team
Dhruv Khullar, MD, MPP
Director
Dr. Dhruv Khullar serves as director of the Physicians Foundation Center for the Study of Physician Practice and Leadership. He is a practicing physician and an associate professor of population health sciences in the Division of Health Policy and Economics in the Department of Population Health Sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine. Dr. Khullar's research focuses on value-based care, health care consolidation, and medical innovation, and has been published in JAMA, Health Affairs, and The New England Journal of Medicine, among other high-impact journals. He is also a contributing writer at The New Yorker magazine, where he writes about medicine, health care, and politics.
Dr. Khullar earned his medical degree at the Yale School of Medicine and completed his medical training at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He also received a Master of Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, where he was a fellow at the Center for Public Leadership.
Lawrence Casalino, MD, PhD
Senior Advisor
Dr. Lawrence Casalino served as the founding director of the Physicians Foundation Center for Physician Practice and Leadership from 2018-2022. He is currently professor emeritus of population health sciences in the Weill Cornell Medicine Department of Population Health Sciences, and from 2008-2021, he served as chief of the Division of Health Policy and Economics.
Dr. Casalino’s research focuses on the intended and unintended effects of public and private policies on the types of provider organization that exist; the processes they use to provide care; the quality and cost of care; and the impact of policies and organizational processes on socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities. He has published more than 180 peer-reviewed articles, including 25 articles and editorials in the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA. Dr. Casalino currently serves as a Medicare Payment and Advisory Commission (MedPAC) Commissioner.
Dr. Casalino currently serves as a Medicare Payment and Advisory Commission (MedPAC) Commissioner and has served as a member of the Panel of Health Advisors for the Congressional Budget Office, as a consultant to the Federal Trade Commission, as senior advisor to the director of the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), as chair of the Academy Health Annual Research Meeting, and on multiple national committees, technical advisory panels, and on the board of directors of Fair Health.
Prior to academia, Dr. Casalino worked as a primary care physician for 20 years, and prior to that, he worked for several years as a community organizer with the United Farmworkers union and other organizations.
Amelia Bond, PhD, MS
Associate Professor | Weill Cornell Medicine
Dr. Amelia Bond is a health economist and an associate professor of population health sciences in the Division of Health Policy and Economics of the Department of Population Health Sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine. She studies provider behavior with a particular interest in examining how changes in provider payment and provider market and organizational structures impact health care quality, equity, and costs.
Dr. Bond received her PhD and Master of Science in managerial science and applied economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, her Master of Health Sciences in health economics from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and her Bachelor of Arts with honors in chemistry and French from Wellesley College.
Prior to Wharton, Dr. Bond worked as an analyst at the Center for Studying Health System Change, a health policy think tank in Washington, DC.
Robert Tyler Braun, PhD, MS
Assistant Professor | Weill Cornell Medicine
Dr. Robert Tyler Braun is an assistant professor of population health sciences in the Division of Health Policy and Economics in the Department of Population Health Sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine. His current research focuses on the organization of the health care system with a particular interest in the evolution of changes in the organization and financing of physician practices and providers of end-of-life and long-term care.
Dr. Braun has extensive experience in leveraging large and complex claims databases to answer important questions related to health services research. He has published in prominent journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA Internal Medicine, JAMA Network Open, and Health Affairs. His work on the consolidation of physician practices and long-term care organizations received coverage from major media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker, as well as substantial attention from policymakers, including the White House, Senate Finance Committee, and the House Ways and Means Committee. Dr. Braun’s research has been supported by the National Institute on Aging and by Arnold Ventures.
Hye-Young (Arian) Jung, PhD
Associate Professor | Weill Cornell Medicine
Dr. Hye-Young (Arian) Jung's research program is supported by three active awards from the National Institute on Aging and is concentrated on examining the organization of the clinical workforce in nursing homes and the quality of care provided by these facilities. For example, she has multiple projects underway to examine whether physicians and advanced practitioners who primarily practice in nursing homes, often referred to as “SNFists,” provide higher quality of care to residents than other clinicians. Since the spring of 2020, she has also committed a substantial amount of effort towards studies examining the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on nursing homes, producing among the first studies to identify the characteristics of facilities associated morbidity and mortality of individuals residing in them. This includes an analysis of nursing home characteristics associated with resident COVID-19 morbidity in communities with high infection rates, in addition to the first study to outline federal and state responses addressing COVID-19 in nursing homes.
Dr. Jung also devotes a substantial amount of effort to education. She founded the Master of Science in Health Policy and Economics program at WCM in 2015 and served as its director until 2020. She continues to teach a course each year, "Introduction to US Healthcare Policy and Delivery," and regularly mentors students.
Beth McGinty, PhD, MS
Chief, Division of Health Policy and Economics | Weill Cornell Medicine
Dr. Beth McGinty is chief of the Division of Health Policy and Economics and the Livingston Farrand Professor of Population Health Sciences in the Department of Population Health Sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine. Dr. McGinty is a prominent international health policy expert whose research focuses on how health policies affect populations with complex health and social needs, including people experiencing mental illness, substance use disorder, chronic pain, and others. Her work is characterized by integrating approaches from the fields of public policy, health economics, and implementation science to understand how policies affect population health.
Dr. McGinty has served on multiple prominent advisory groups, including a United National Technical Consultation Panel on Stigma Reduction and Drug Use, a White House Task Force on suicide prevention, and on the Joseph R. Biden Campaign Behavioral Health Committee. Dr. McGinty holds a Master of Science from Columbia University and a doctorate in health and public policy from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Previously, she was a professor and the associate chair for research and practice in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, as well as the director of the Center for Mental Health and Addiction Policy and the ALACRITY Center for Health and Longevity in Mental Illness.
William Schpero, PhD
Assistant Professor | Weill Cornell Medicine
Dr. William Schpero is a health economist and an assistant professor of population health sciences in the Division of Health Policy and Economics of the Department of Population Health Sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine. He is also co-associate director for research at the Cornell Center for Health Equity.
Dr. Schpero studies Medicaid and the health care safety net in the United States. Through his research, he aims to identify policy levers to address racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in health and health care. His research has appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and Health Affairs, and has been featured by Bloomberg, CNBC, Politico, the Washington Post, and other news outlets.
Dr. Schpero received his PhD in health policy and economics from Yale University, during which he was also a pre-doctoral fellow in aging and health economics at the National Bureau of Economic Research. For work stemming from his dissertation, he received the Annual Student Prize from the International Health Economics Association. Before attending Yale, Dr. Schpero completed a master's degree and a research fellowship at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Dartmouth College.
Jiani Yu, PhD
Assistant Professor | Weill Cornell Medicine
Dr. Jiani Yu is an assistant professor of population health sciences in the Division of Health Policy and Economics in the Department of Population Health Sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine. As a health services researcher with training in health economics, her work broadly focuses on how changes in the payment and delivery of health care services affect access to health and health outcomes for vulnerable patient populations.
Her current research interests revolve around three major themes: the relationship between telehealth use and access to care, health care costs, and quality of care; health system strategies that improve medical care and quality of life for Medicare beneficiaries; and how the acquisition of provider organizations impacts the quality and cost of care.
Yasin Civelek, PhD, MA, MS
Research Associate
Dr. Yasin Civelek is a health economist and research associate in the Division of Health Policy and Economics in the Department of Population Health Sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine. He primarily focuses on provider incentives and evaluates government health care policies by leveraging medical claims data and employing both quasi-experimental and experimental research methods.
Through his research, Dr. Civelek aims to shed light on the institutional and behavioral factors that affect health and health related outcomes. He received his PhD and MA in economics and MS in mathematics and statistics from Georgia State University. Prior to Weill Cornell Medicine, Dr. Civelek worked as a senior researcher on the Health Economics Research Team at Elevance Health, Inc.
Anam Ahsan, MS
Research Program Manager
Anam Ahsan is the research program manager in the Department of Population Health Sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine. She holds a bachelor's degree in genetics with a minor in public health from Rutgers University and a master's degree in bioinformatics from Johns Hopkins University. Anam has over five years of experience working in and managing clinical research trials on topics ranging from cancer-related cognitive decline to novel therapeutic models for the treatment of depression. In addition to research, she has completed a service year at AmeriCorps for equitable access to education.
Reekarl Pierre, MPH
Research Coordinator
Reekarl Pierre is a research coordinator in the Department of Population Health Sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine, where he assists the Division of Health Policy and Economics in researching several topics.
Reekarl has six years of combined research experience in neurocellular biology and public health, along with an MPH in epidemiology from SUNY Downstate School of Public Health, and a BS in biology with a minor in neuropsychology from SUNY Old Westbury.
Christine Zhuang, MPH
Communications Manager
Christine Zhuang is the communications manager for the Department of Population Health Sciences and the Office of the Senior Associate Dean for Clinical Research at Weill Cornell Medicine. She specializes in strategic communications and rebranding efforts that lead to transformational growth in the health care sector.
Christine holds a Master of Public Health in health policy and management from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and a Bachelor of Arts in English from Wellesley College.