Cornell's Broadest
Health Care Conversation
Learn about all the different facets of health
and get inspired to improve American health care.
CORNELL UNIVERSITY Health Care Symposium
April 8-15, 2010
Sick in America Series Event Schedule
International Health
Thursday April 8th
165 McGraw
8:00PM-9:30PM
Watch the Academy Award-winning film, The Blood of Yingzhou District, about the lives of children in a Chinese province who have lost their parents to AIDS, followed by a discussion with the film's producer, Thomas Lennon.
 |
Thomas F. Lennon is a documentary filmmaker. His work, broadcast on PBS and HBO, has been twice nominated for and once won an Academy Award, and has received all major television awards: two George Foster Peabody Awards, two national Emmys and a DuPont-Columbia Journalism award. For years, his work focused on ethnicity and race; recently he has focused on health, mounting, with filmmaker Ruby Yang, a nationwide AIDS prevention campaign on Chinese television. |
Keynote Address
Monday April 12th
Malott 253
7:00PM - 9:00PM
This year we will be kicking off our event with a keynote address from Robert Martensen, MD/PHD, the Director of the Office of History at the NIH. His research into the history of medicine, health, and science has helped to shape new research methods and the public's perception of medicine. Previously, he has explored the origins of neuroscience in the Scientific Revolution, the development of nuclear medicine, and the scientific transformation of United States medicine that occurred during the Progressive Era, among other topics. For our Keynote Address Dr. Martensen will be discussing his perspectives on chronic illness and the future of health care, and discussing his most recent book, A Life Worth Living: A Doctor's Reflections on Illness in a High-Tech Era. Afterward, Dr. Martensen will be doing a book signing outside of the auditorium.
 |
Dr. Robert Martensen, MD/PhD, the Director of the Office of History,NIH |
Interactive Health and Wellness Fair
Tuesday April 13th
Arts Quad
11AM - 2PM
Lunchtime health fair on Arts Quad. Free massages, tai chi, belly dancing, games, prizes and more!
Mental Health
Tuesday April 13th
165 McGraw
5PM-7PM
Hear Dr. Yuhua Bao from Weill Cornell Medical College, Catherine Wedge from the Mental Health Association at Tompkins County, and Dr. Judith Samuels from the Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research discuss their research on mental health policy.
 |
Dr. Yuhua Bao is Assistant Professor in the Division of Health Policy in the Department of Public Health at Weill Cornell Medical College. Her current interests include studying the payment and performance evaluation policies to provide incentives for evidence-based depression care in medical settings. She also conducts studies to understand mechanisms underlying racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in health care, and to identify policies to eliminate such gaps. Dr. Bao maintains interests in methodological issues in health services research including modeling service utilization and costs, making causal inferences based on observational data, and decision analytical methods to assess stakeholder preferences in health care. |
Health Care Reform
Wednesday April 14th
Lewis Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall
5:00PM-6:30PM
Join Cornell professors, health care professionals, and others in a panel discussion on the factors leading to reform, the merits of various proposals, and their potential impact.
 |
Dr. John Kuder is an associate professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University.His teaching and studies are on the organization, financing and economics of health services and health insurance from a systems perspective. His work focuses primarily on how public policy shapes the organization and financing of services and how decisions by persons and health service providers about use of services are then influenced by these changes. |
 |
Dr. William White is the Director of the Sloan Program in Health Administration. h He received his B.A. from Haverford College and holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. Prior to coming to Cornell, he taught at the University of Illinois in Chicago and Yale University. His primary research interest is health economics and his professional career has focused on the organization and operation of health care markets. |
 |
Dr. Sean Nicholson is an associate professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management (PAM) at Cornell University and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior to joining the PAM Department in 2004, Sean was a faculty member in the Health Care Systems Department at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Sean worked for four years as a management consultant with APM and taught high school for two years before enrolling in graduate school. He received a B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1986 and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1997. |
 |
Dr. Julie Carmalt is a lecturer in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management (PAM) at Cornell University and in the Sloan Program in Health Administration in PAM. She joined the department after completing her Ph.D. in Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University in 2009. Dr. Carmalt is a demographer with primary research and teaching interests in population health, public health policy, demographic and life course perspectives on health, and relationships and health. Particular areas of research focus are obesity and health-risk behavior. |
Health Disparities
Wednesday April 14th
253 Malott
7:30pm-9:30pm
Watch a performance of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,and listen to a panel of scholars, including medical anthropologists Professor Stacey Langwick of Cornell University and Dr. Susan Shaw of the University of Arizona, and Dr. Victoria Gardner, Director of Multicultural Affairs at the University of Washington School of Medicine. They will be discussing how issues such as miscommunication and distrust lead to health disparities.
 |
Dr. Stacey Langwick is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. She currently holds an associateship with the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany. Her book, Bodies, Politics and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania, is in press with Indiana University Press. In addition, she has published articles in the American Ethnologist, Science Technology and Human Values, and Medical Anthropology as well as chapters in several edited volumes on healing in Africa. Professor Langwick's areas of specialty include the anthropology of medicine; healing and the body; postcolonial science studies; African ethnography; the anthropology of knowledge/materiality; and cultural and feminist theory. |
 |
Dr. Susan J. Shaw is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. She is a medical anthropologist specializing in ethnicity, health disparities, social movements, and the political economy of health in the United States. Her book manuscript in progress deals with community health and governance in the U.S., presenting a collection of case studies of local struggles over the meaning of difference and ?access to health care in urban, ethnic and marginalized populations. Recent publications include an examination of researchers' role in the production and dissemination of harm reduction norms and practices among injection drug users. She has analyzed the construction of ethnic and cultural difference in culturally appropriate health care programs for primary care clinics and other settings. Dr. Shaw is currently principal investigator of a four-year, NIH-funded study of cultural differences, health literacy, and chronic disease management among four ethnic groups in the northeastern U.S. |
 |
Dr. Victoria Gardner is the Director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs. She received her Bachelors Degree in Communications from the University of the Philippines and her Masters degree in Education from the University of Washington. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in education at the UW. Ms. Gardner has been involved in higher education since 1983 and in medical education since 1990. Victoria's expertise and passion lies in the recruitment, retention and professional development of students from diverse backgrounds into higher education, especially medicine. She has been certified as a diversity trainer by the Cross Cultural Health Care Program in Seattle. Victoria's interest in cultural competency work stems from experience, training, and the belief that diversity work is leadership action for transformation and social justice. |
Drugging America
Thursday April 15th
Lewis Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall
4:30PM-6:30PM
Watch a clip from the "chilling" documentary Generation Rx, and stay for a panel discussing the ethics of prescribing medications such as Adderall, Ritalin, etc. for diseases that are hard to define. Furthermore, the panelists will discuss the effects that prescription and illegal drugs have on your brain, on society, and on the Cornell campus.
 |
Dr. Harry Segal received his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees from Columbia University and received his doctoral degrees in Psychology and English Literature at the University of Michigan and Yale University, respectively. He currently teaches Introduction to Adult Psychopathology as a senior lecturer here at Cornell University and is a senior lecturer in Clinical Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. In addition, Dr. Segal has been a psychologist in a private practice in Ithaca, NY for the past 17 years. |
 |
Dr. Gregory Eells received his PhD in Counseling Psychology from Oklahoma State University and is licensed as a psychologist by the Unviersity of the State of New York, Education Department. He has been a counseling center director for the past 11 (or more) years and currently is the associate director of Counseling and Psychological Services (otherwise known as CAPS) in Gannett Health Services here at Cornell University. Dr. Eells is also a former president of the Association of University and College Counseling Center Directors, and he publishes articles in scholarly journals and presents frequently at national conferences. The primary focus of his interests includes mental health delivery systems and providing care to challenging students. |
 |
Dr. Fred Baughman is an adult & child neurologist, and was in private practice, for 35 years. He obtained both his Bachelors of Science (B.S.) and Medical degree (M.D.) from New York University (NYU). He is an outspoken critic of the treatment and diagnosis of psychiatric diseases, especially ADHD. On this topic he has written a book, “The ADHD Fraud: How Psychiatry Make “Patients” of Normal Children” and testified before congress and in a number of court cases. He has flown here just for our event because he is very interested and dedicated to this topic. |
 |
Dr. Harris – Warrick has been at Cornell since 1980 and lectures in several classes in the department of Neurobiology and Behavior here. His training was completed at Stanford University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts (A.B.) and a Ph.D. in Genetics with a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Neurochemistry. He also did a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Neurophysiology at Harvard University. Professor Harris-Warrick's class titled Drugs and the Brain, offered every other fall, has garnered a lot of interest and respect from students. The topics covered in that course are very much in line with what we will be discussing today! |
