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About the Center > Staff Biographies

Staff Biographies

• University of California San Francisco
• Topeka Independent Living Resource Center
• InfoUse
• University of Maryland, Baltimore County
• University of Michigan
• PHI (formerly the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute)
• Institute for the Future of Aging Services
• West Virginia University and Job Accommodation Network

University of California San Francisco

Charlene Harrington, Ph.D., RN, Professor of Sociology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at UCSF is as the Principal Investigator for the Center. She is a widely published on LTC and PAS and is conducting research on nursing home reimbursement, supply, staffing, utilization and expenditures. She is the director of a consumer information project and manages a website for the California HealthCare Foundation which includes nursing homes, home health, hospice and other long term care. She has been the principal investigator of numerous research studies on state LTC policies and program characteristics and she conducted a large study of PAS and HCBS waivers in the states and has been funded to track Medicaid PAS participants, services, and expenditures since 1994. She has many published articles and books, including many on PAS and HCBS and is a fellow in the American Academy of Nursing and a member of the Institute of Medicine.

Mitchell P. LaPlante, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the Institute for Health and Aging is recognized as one of the foremost disability researchers in the country. He became Principal Investigator of the Disability Statistics Program at UCSF in 1987 and was as Director and Principal Investigator of the Disability Statistics Training Center from 1993-2003. He is a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and has served on committees of the Institute of Medicine, the National Research Council, and the United Nations and has published numerous publications on various disability-related subjects. Dr. LaPlante is a co-principal investigator at the Center for Personal Assistance Services and leads the research team on studies of the need for formal and informal PAS services and the need and unmet need for PAS services, caregiving support, and assistive technologies.

Robert J. Newcomer, Ph.D.is a Professor of Sociology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the UCSF. His initial work was in the design and planning of health and LTC programs and has served as principal or co-principal investigator of over 30 grants and contracts related to LTC, including the CMS evaluation of the Social Health Maintenance Organizations and the Medicare Alzheimer’s Disease Demonstration. He has conducted three case management and/or nursing health coaching projects and continues to conduct research on residential care. He is a co-principal investigator and the director of workforce research for the PAS Center. This work has included studies of state infrastructure for financial management organizations and the occupational injury surveillance for independent providers. He is collaborating with the State of California in the evaluation of their In-Home Supportive Services family provider waiver program know as IHHS Plus. He also studies housing and congregate living for people with disabilities, and he has published numerous books and articles on LTC.

H. Stephen Kaye, Ph.D. is Associate Professor in the Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences and the Institute for Health and Aging at UCSF. He received a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1983. Dr. Kaye has served as Research Director of the UCSF Disability Statistics Center since 2000, and is Co-Principal Investigator of the Center for Personal Assistance Services, a UCSF-based Rehabilitation Research and Training Center funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research. He also serves as Co-Principal Investigator of the CDC-funded state disability & health grant for California. His primary research interests focus on employment, use of information and assistive technology, and access to health care among people with disabilities. His accomplishments include a groundbreaking study on the effect of the digital divide on the disability population and the Disability Watch series of reports on the status of Americans with disabilities.

Martin Kitchener, Ph.D., M.B.A., is Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at UCSF. He received his Ph.D. from Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, where he taught before being awarded a prestigious Harkness Research Fellowship in Health Policy at University of California Berkeley in 1999. At UCSF since 2001, he directs the Center for Personal Assistance Services studies on long term care, personal assistance services, and home and community based services funded by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the NIDRR. His work has tracked program statistics and policies for Medicaid PAS, HCBS waivers, and home care services in the states. He has written many journal articles on PAS and HCBS services as well as on organizational theory, public management, health policy, and research methods. He teaches organizational theory and health policy at UCSF.

Susan Chapman, Ph.D., RN, is Assistant Professor in the UCSF School of Nursing, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Director of Allied Health Care Workforce Studies at UCSF’s Center for the Health Professions. Dr. Chapman is Co Investigator and Project Director for multiple projects including: a three-year demonstration to improve the educational preparation and career pathway of allied and auxiliary health professionals, a study of the supply and demand for certified nursing assistants to provide LTC in California, an evaluation of a state-funded program to recruit and train new populations of workers in LTC, and a study analyzing models for the LTC workforce.

Teresa Scherzer, PhD, MSW,is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, UCSF. Her research focuses on the organization of healthcare and supportive services work, and the impacts on worker and client well-being. She conducts qualitative and quantitative studies on workforce PAS. She has conducted studies on state and national infrastructure for documenting occupational injury among PAS workers and on PAS workers with occupational injuries. She is currently studying the California’s Public Authorities’ Medicaid-funded consumer-directed programs, an evaluation of California’s IHSS-Plus Waiver program, and a study of the financial management service organizations used by Medicaid PAS programs.

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Rani Eversley, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at UCSF. She has focused her research on HIV/AIDS with an emphasis on women, minorities, and youth including issues of risk, access to care, mental services, health disparities, and program evaluation. More recently, she has studied racial and ethnic disparities in breast cancer surgery and access to diagnosis and treatment. She has taught and consulted on projects regarding cultural competency and access to care.

Taewoon Kang, Ph.D. is a statistician with significant experience in survey sampling and analysis. In support of various research projects, he has since performed extensive analyses of the National Health Interview Survey core, the NHIS Disability Supplement, and NHIS Disability Followback Survey. He is involved in the statistical analysis of formal and informal personal assistance services. Recently, he has been studying service utilization and expenditures for individuals with developmental disabilities and examining California’s personal care option (In-Home Supportive Services) and a Medicaid waiver that expands the program.

Joseph T. Mullan, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the UCSF. His research employs quantitative and qualitative methods to examine how people adapt too chronic and difficult life conditions often anchored in their social roles. He has been involved in studies of the experiences of consumers using personal assistance services; family and friends caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s or AIDS/HIV; the measurement of nursing home quality; and adaptation to type 2 diabetes among patients and their partners.

Terence Ng, M.A. is a Research Associate in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at UCSF. He previously worked on and co-authored a number of articles on AIDS prevention studies among minorities and the underserved community when he was at the UCSF Center for AIDS Prevention Studies. Recently, he works on studies of state Medicaid programs where he is tracking personal assistance services, home and community based waivers and home health activities across all states along with state PAS activities and policies. He has co-authored a number of articles on personal care and home and community base waivers.

Toby Adelman RN, Phil.C., a doctoral student in nursing health policy in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at UCSF, received her Masters in International/ Cross-Cultural Nursing from the UCSF School of Nursing (SON) and has several years of experience in home and community-based services. Prior to entering the doctoral program, she managed a 1915 (c) federal/state waiver program for frail elders in the City and County San Francisco. Currently a Betty Irene Moore Fellow, her doctoral research is focused on an institutional case study of change and inertia in the New York State Medicaid Personal Care Services Program.

Brian R. Grossman, ScM, a sociology doctoral student in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at UCSF, received a BA from Rutgers University and a Master of Science in Health and Social Behavior from Harvard School of Public Health. Previously a research assistant for the Disability Statistics Center, he is conducting interviews with users of paid PAS and people who have been institutionalized for the Center for Personal Assistance Services. His main research interests are disability policy and sociological models of disability.

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Mauro Hernandez, BS, is a research associate and sociology graduate from in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at UCSF. His main research interests are federal and state long-term care policies that impact service quality and access in home and community based settings.  His recent dissertation study examined long-term care policy developments in Oregon since the mid-1980s, with a focus on assisted living/residential care supply changes, public financing and Medicaid utilization trends.  He also directs research activities for My InnerView, Inc., which provides evidence-based management tools that support quality improvement efforts by long-term care providers.

Micky Willmott, is a research associate at the National Patient Safety Agency in the UK. Previously she was the National Health Policy Officer for Age Concern England. From 2003 through 2006, she served as a postgraduate fellow in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at UCSF., where she conducted research on home and community services for the Center for Personal Assistance Services. Micky's interests are health policy, older people, and people with disabilities.

Alice Wong received her M.S. in sociology from the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of California, San Francisco. In addition to working on the PAS workforce project at the Center, she is also a research assistant at the Depression in Primary Care program at UCSF conducting interviews of primary care practitioners about their experiences providing care to people with depression. Her main research interests are disability studies, women's health and mental health services.

Mel (Melinda) Neri has a BA in Sociology from the University of Washington and has been working in disability and health services research since 1997. She comes to UCSF from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) in Portland, OR. At OHSU she was the Coordinator for a CDC-funded grant to promote the health and well-being of Oregonians with disabilities. Previous to that she worked for seven years at the National Rehabilitation Hospital in Washington, DC where she was the Coordinator for the NIDRR-funded Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Spinal Cord Injury and Secondary Conditions. Mel has also worked for the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, WA and the Center for Disability Policy and Research at the University of Washington.

Topeka Independent Living Resource Center

Mike Oxford, B.A. is the Executive Director of the Topeka Independent Living Resource Center and an organizer with American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today (ADAPT). This center provides personal assistant management services, independent living counseling, legal services, advocacy, housing, skills training, information and referral, and training. Mike is President and Board member of the National Council on Independent Living (NCIL). Mike has retired after three years from the steering committee for Project ACTION and is a co-founder of Kansas ADAPT. Mike is an officer with the Kansas Association of Centers for Independent Living (KACIL) and is also on the Board of Directors of the Statewide Independent Living Counsel (SILCK). Mike has been involved with the independent living movement for 17 years and is a PAS user. Mike will serve as the Consumer Research Director for the project. In this role, he will lead the effort in linking our research efforts with PAS users across the country.

InfoUse

InfoUse is a woman-owned small business founded in 1984 by Susan Stoddard, Ph.D. in Berkeley, California. InfoUse has specialized in the use of information technology in the development of better programs and knowledge in disability and rehabilitation research. InfoUse contributions include the development of statistical chartbooks on disability, the conduct of program evaluations and policy studies, and the development of multimedia materials and software promoting better employment outcomes for adults and youth with disabilities, including MathPad^TM. In the PAS Center, InfoUse has been responsible for Dissemination and Training, and for the Center research on the use of Personal Assistance Services in the workplace.

Susan Stoddard, Ph.D., FAICP, Founder and President of InfoUse, has extensive experience in program planning and evaluation and policy research studies of vocational rehabilitation, employment of people with disabilities, and independent living. For the PASCenter, she has served as the Principal Investigator of Workplace PAS research, which has included surveys of employers, workplace PAS users, and employment system providers. Stoddard is the Principal Investigator of the Post Vocational Rehabilitation Study (PVRES), working with Westat on this second longitudinal survey for the Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA), studying the extent to which community services and workplace accommodations are used by Vocational Rehab exiters. Other related work includes two major statewide needs assessment studies for the California State Independent Living Council (SILC) and a study of Independent Living/Vocational Rehabilitation Collaboration at the RRTC on Independent Living Management.

Lita Jans, Ph.D., Senior Analyst, InfoUse , has led the qualitative analysis of employment service providers and PAS in the workplace for the Center for Personal Assistance Services, as well as monitoring the progress of the Medicaid Infrastructure Grants. She is currently designing the research and conducting the interviews and analysis of promising practices in Personal Assistance Services Cooperatives for the National Collaborative on Workforce and Disability- Adult, and an examination of the employers who are reticent to make accommodations for the Pacific Disability and Business Technical Assistance Center (DBTAC). She has been the Project Director of InfoUse's project to identify role models for employment for youth with disabilities. She will participate in the research on PAS in the workplace.

Lewis E. Kraus, M.P.H., M.C.P., Vice President of InfoUse, is currently leading the research effort on personal assistance services in the workplace for the Center. He is also overseeing the efforts to examine promising practices of Personal Assistance Services Cooperatives for the National Collaborative on Workforce and Disability- Adult, and the examination of the employers who are reticent to make accommodations for the Pacific Disability and Business Technical Assistance Center (DBTAC). Previously, he was the project director on a study that researched best training practices for PAS for providers as well as consumers. He has extensive experience in all aspect of training and dissemination and media development at InfoUse regarding PAS and disability He is the director for training and dissemination for the Center for PAS.

David Linnard, Ph.D., Programmer, InfoUse, is responsible for the PASCenter.org website and its maintenance. He has also conducted interviews with people with disabilities who use PAS as work.  Previously, he programmed bug fixes for MathPad, InfoUse’s software aimed at assisting students in being able to write and solve math problems.

Joan M. Ripple, B.A., Program Analyst, InfoUse, is conducting the interviews of employers and persons with disabilities using PAS at work that lead to the promising practices in workplace PAS for the Center for Personal Assistance Services. She co-authored the report “Independent Living Needs Assessment” covering the needs of Californian’s with disabilities for the California State Independent Living Council (SILC). She has evaluated the Easy Does It Emergency PAS program in Berkeley. Ms. Ripple previously served as the disability rights policy staff for the California Senate.

University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Nancy Miller, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Policy and and Coordinator of the Program’s Health Policy Track and a core faculty member for the new Intercampus Ph.D. in Gerontology. She received both her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, where she specialized in health policy. Dr. Miller has conducted interdisciplinary health policy research, focusing on disability and aging issues, for the past 16 years, first through her work at the Health Care Financing Administration (now the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, CMS), and most recently as a faculty member in the Department of Public Policy.  Her research interests are focused on chronic disease, disability, and long term care, with particular concerns toward access to care.  She has published a number of studies related to states’ provision of community based care to individuals with disabilities.  Dr. Miller also recently completed an evaluation of the Health Outcomes Survey for CMS.  Presently she is working with colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco to conduct additional interviews with working age individuals recently admitted to nursing homes, focusing on issues related to their participation in the decision, as well as the information and choices offered to these individuals.  Her work has been supported by the National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation Research, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and CMS.

University of Michigan

Brant Fries, Ph.D. is an internationally known Professor of Health Management and Policy and Senior Research Scientist at the University of Michigan, and Chief of Health Systems Research for the Geriatric Research, Education, and Clinical Center at the Ann Arbor VA Medical Center. Dr. Fries is a principal author of the Resource Utilization Groups (RUGs) systems for classifying nursing home residents and the Resident Assessment Instrument/Minimum Data set, both used in all US nursing homes. He is an author of interRAI assessment systems for community-based elders (RAI-HC), acute and long-term mental institutions (RAI-MH), and palliative care (RAI-PC). Dr. Fries currently is the analytic task leader for the national project to refine the RUG-III system as well as the Principal Investigator of several projects to assist state governments to use RAI an RAI-HC to rationalize long term care. He is the author of four books and many articles on LTC and quantitative modeling of health care systems. He is also conducting studies examining how home care systems respond to funding cutbacks and to compare the users in the various programs that provide PAS.

Mary James, M.A., joined the University of Michigan Institute of Gerontology n February 2002. For nearly 25 years she held a variety of positions in Michigan state government where she was instrumental in the development, administration, and evaluation of HCBS for people who are elderly or disabled. While in state government, Ms. James had policy responsibility for the Home Help PAS program, a consumer-directed Medicaid personal care program that served nearly 50,000 aged and disabled adults and she established the statewide 1915c Medicaid waiver program known as MI Choice and the companion state-funded Care Management program. She has been involved in studies of the users of PAS programs.

PHI (formerly the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute)

PHI is a national New York-based non-profit organization committed to improving quality care through creating quality jobs for direct-care workers. Through technical assistance at the employer level, PHI helps providers across the long-term care spectrum to adapt field-tested practices to improve the quality of the care that they provide. A recognized leader in long-term care workforce policy, PHI works with federal agencies, such as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the U.S. Department of Labor, to ensure a more stable direct-care workforce. Our state-based policy and practice experts work with providers, consumers, and worker/labor organizations in a variety of states to ensure quality care. PHI’s on-line National Clearinghouse, www.directcareclearinghouse.org, serves as the primary source of news and analysis for the direct-care workforce field.

Dorie Seavey, Ph.D., PHI’s Director of Policy Research, supports PHI’s state policy directors and is responsible for research, analysis, and writing on economic, financial, and policy issues affecting the direct-care workforce and the long-term care industry. Her recent work has addressed topics such as the cost of frontline turnover, strategies for improving wages and benefits for direct-care workers, the intersection of family and paid caregiving, strategies for linking public workforce investment systems with the workforce needs of the long-term care industry, and reforming Medicaid payment policies for home- and community-based services. Trained as a labor economist, Seavey received her Doctorate in Economics from Yale University in 1987. Over her career, she has specialized in workforce development and labor market difficulties for low-income individuals, including issues for frontline health care, social service, and childcare workers. Seavey has served as a senior member of several national evaluation and research teams investigating sectoral employment initiatives and employment brokering programs for low-income and disadvantaged job seekers. She is a former Senior Research Scientist at the Heller School at Brandeis University.

Institute for the Future of Aging Services

The Institute for the Future of Aging Services has been funded by CMS and ASPE to provide a National Resource Center on Home and Community-Based Services Clearinghouse.

Robyn I. Stone, Dr.P.H., is a noted researcher and internationally recognized authority on health care and aging policy. In June 1999, she became the Executive Director of the Institute for the Future of Aging Services , of the American Association of Homes and Services for he Aging. Dr. Stone served as the U.S. Dept. Health and Human Services, as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Disability, Aging and Long-term Care Policy from 1993-1996 and as Assistant Secretary for Aging in 1997. In the 1980s and early 1990s, she was a senior researcher at the National Center for Health Services Research and at Project HOPE’s Center for Health Affairs. Dr. Stone was staff to the 1989 Bipartisan Commission on Comprehensive Health Care (the Pepper Commission) and the 1993 Clinton Administration Task Force on Health Care Reform. Dr. Stone has published widely in long-term care policy and quality, chronic care for the disabled, workforce development and family caregiving. Her doctorate in public health is from the University of California, Berkeley. She will provide consultation to the workforce PAS research project in the Center.

West Virginia University and Job Accommodation Network

The Job Accommodation Network (JAN) is a service of the U. S. Department of Labor's Office of Disability Employment Policy operated through the West Virginia University Research Corporation. Since 1983, JAN's consultants have provided workplace accommodation information to over 300,000 employers, rehabilitation professionals, and individuals with disabilities. JAN has a toll-free telephone and Web-based service that provides information on making workplace accommodations for people with disabilities. JAN's consultants handle over 32,000 workplace accommodation requests each year via the project's toll-free hotlines and e-mail. JAN's electronic services include a web site that serves as a gateway to information on accommodations, disability laws, publications and other resources to assist employment of people with disabilities, a Searchable Online Accommodation Resource (SOAR), and a Small Business and Self-Employment Service (SBSES).

D.J. Hendricks, Ed.D., is the Associate Director of the International Center for Disability Information (ICDI) and the Project Manager for the Job Accommodation Network (JAN). Dr. Hendricks was one of the authors of the original grant application for JAN and has continued to work with JAN since its inception in 1983. She has worked at the ICDI since 1979. She has a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Statistics, a Master’s of Science in Statistics (MSS) and a Doctorate of Education (Ed.D.) in Educational Psychology from from West Virginia University (WVU). Her Master’s thesis was an evaluation of the effectiveness of separate blind agencies versus combined service agencies in the State/Federal Vocational Rehabilitation System. Her doctoral dissertation focused on the use of propositional structures, subgoals, formulas, and text instruction in teaching statistics.

Dr. Sita Misra, Ph.D. is a Research Associate Professor at the International Center for Disability Information (ICDI). Dr. Misra has served as the Project Director for several research projects in the areas of disability and rehabilitation and possesses an extensive background in assessing systems change impact. Dr. Misra has conducted several needs assessment studies for Public VR Programs in Delaware, Maryland, and West Virginia. She has prepared Labor Market Digests for Pennsylvania and West Virginia. In 2001, she conducted a statewide study on "An assessment of the Need to Establish, Develop, or Improve Community Rehabilitation Programs (CRPs) in West Virginia". Dr. Misra is the recipient of the 1998 WVU Distinguished Service Award and 2003 Laddie R. Bell Distinguished Service Award. Dr. Misra is serving the lead researcher for the International Center for Disability Information’s subcontract with the University of California at San Francisco.

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Mr. Louis Orslene, M.P.I.A., M.S.W., serves as the Manager of Strategic Partnerships for the ICDI’s Job Accommodation Network (JAN). Mr. Orslene has served as the Assistant Manager of the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) Ticket-to-Work demonstration project, a JAN Cognitive and Mental Health Team consultant and as Executive Director of Life Management Consultants. Mr. Orslene graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with Master’s degrees in Public and International Affairs and Social Work. He has also earned certificates non-profit organization management and economic development administration. For the PAS Center, Mr. Orslene facilitates focus groups with employers, rehabilitation professionals, and people with disabilities. Mr. Orslene is conducts stakeholder surveys and the development of the "Personal Assistance Service (PAS) in the Workplace" technical assistance document for employers.

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Dr. Tatiana Solovieva, Ed.D. joined the International Center for Disability Information (ICDI) of the West Virginia University (WVU) College of Human Resources & Education in 2008. In collaboration with the PAS Center, she leads research in Workplace PAS. Dr. Solovieva has been involved in research and training programs for people with disabilities at the WVU Rehabilitation Research and Training Center, the International Center for Disability Information, and the Center on Aging. She received the Excellence in Research on Aging and Rural Health Award (Honorable Mention) from the American Public Health Association, Gerontological Health Section. Dr. Solovieva has taught at the college level and collaborated with public schools, and published research in several fields.

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