Press Release: Joint Center Names New Vice President
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Aug. 4, 2008
For more information, contact:
Betty Anne Williams,
Director of Communications
(202) 789-3505
bawilliams@jointcenter.org
Joint Center Names New Vice President to Lead its Health Policy Institute
WASHINGTON, DC -- The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies (Joint Center) has named Dr. Brian D. Smedley, a co-founder and research director of The Opportunity Agenda and an expert on racial and ethnic disparities in health and health care, as Vice President and Director of its Health Policy Institute (HPI).
In his new position, Smedley will oversee all of the operations of the Institute, which was started six years ago with funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to explore disparities in health and to generate policy recommendations on longstanding health equity concerns. He replaces Dr. Gail C. Christopher, who left HPI last year to join the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Dr. Smedley will begin his new duties at the Joint Center on September 15, 2008.
A Detroit native who holds a magna cum laude undergraduate degree in psychology and social relations from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in psychology from UCLA, Dr. Smedley joined Alan Jenkins, Phoebe Eng, and Bill Lann Lee in 2004 to launch The Opportunity Agenda, a communications, research, and policy organization based in New York City. It works to assist advocacy and policy organizations and campaigns to advance new and innovative perspectives on opportunity – incorporating racial justice, gender equity, and human rights – and strategically links research, communications, and policy tools to accomplish this.
“With his colleagues, Brian Smedley has pioneered innovative strategies to center equity in state and federal health policy discussions, and has elevated The Opportunity Agenda into the forefront of innovation in the policy world,” said Ralph B. Everett, President and CEO of the Joint Center. “In particular, his deep experience in helping shape policy agendas toward eliminating health disparities makes him uniquely qualified to lead our Health Policy Institute into the future.”
Prior to helping launch The Opportunity Agenda, Dr. Smedley was a Senior Program Officer for the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academy of Sciences, where he served as study director for groundbreaking reports on racial and ethnic health and health care disparities, diversity in the health professions workforce, and federal health research for the medically underserved. The most recent of these reports, In the Nation’s Compelling Interest: Ensuring Diversity in the Health Care Workforce, published in 2004, provided part of the impetus – along with the Sullivan Commission’s Missing Persons report – for the creation of the Sullivan Alliance, now a part of the Joint Center, which is finding solutions to address the critical need for greater diversity among health professionals.
While at the IOM, Dr. Smedley also directed the report Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care, which concluded that many communities of color face systematic barriers to accessing high-quality health care, even when differences in insurance coverage and income are taken into account. Other reports that Dr. Smedley directed while at IOM include The Unequal Burden of Cancer: An Assessment of NIH Research and Programs for Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved – which reviewed federal research and concluded that the National Institutes of Health’s research effort to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in cancer fell far short of the burden of these diseases in communities of color – and Promoting Health: Intervention Strategies from Behavioral and Social Research, which called for a greater investment in research and evaluation of community and behavioral health interventions.
Prior to working at the IOM, Dr. Smedley was Director for Public Interest Policy at the American Psychological Association (APA), where he worked on a wide range of social, health, and education policy topics. He previously served as a Congressional Science Fellow in the office of Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (D-VA), sponsored by APA and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Among his awards and distinctions, in 2004 Dr. Smedley was honored by the Rainbow/PUSH coalition as a “Health Trailblazer” award winner, and in 2002 he was awarded the Congressional Black Caucus “Healthcare Hero” award. In August, 2002, Smedley was awarded the Early Career Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest by the APA.
Dr. Smedley lives in Silver Spring with his wife, Evita, and two children, Avery and David.
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The Joint Center is one of the nation's premier research and public policy institutions and the only one whose work focuses primarily on issues of particular concern to African Americans and other people of color.
