Team

As Associate Director of Programs, Megan is responsible for HGHI’s Programmatic agenda, oversees the Fellowship programs, and manages the Institute’s day-to-day operations. In this role, she brings together partners across disciplines, sectors and geographies to engage in critical conversations that identify gaps and articulate tangible solutions. Her team drives toward impact through fostering novel partnerships, producing groundbreaking research and disseminating educational content.

Prior to joining HGHI, Megan worked with the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma where she coordinated a portfolio of projects on global mental health. She has conducted research on the intersection of the built environment and mental health and explored how complex geopolitical environments impact access to health services. She holds a Master’s degree in epidemiology from the Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health and BA in sociology from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana.

Laura Burke is an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School and an emergency medicine attending at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She received her MD from the University of Massachusetts in 2007.

After completing her emergency medicine residency at BIDMC in 2010, she went on to get her MPH from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health while completing a Zuckerman Fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School Center for Public Leadership. In addition to her clinical practice, Dr. Burke works as a health services researcher within the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and has worked on a number of projects on the measurement of and variation in quality of emergency and acute care. In particular, her recent work published in JAMA in May 2017, examined the association between teaching status and mortality among Medicare beneficiaries treated in United States hospitals. She is the current recipient of the Emergency Medicine Foundation Health Policy Research Scholar Award.

Jose Figueroa, MD, MPH, is an Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Physician at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital. He graduated from Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health with a concentration in health policy and management.

He currently is the 2017-2018 Burke Global Health Fellow at the Harvard Global Health Institute and the Faculty Director of the Residency Management & Leadership Pathway at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital. His research focuses on identifying drivers of spending and poor outcomes among high-need, high-cost populations, improving health equity, and evaluating the impact of pay-for-performance efforts globally on health care quality and costs. He was a member of a national planning committee at the National Academy of Medicine for high-need patients and serves as a faculty advisor for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.

Austin is a health economist, associate professor, and researcher; the creator, co-manager, and a primary author of The Incidental Economist; and a regular contributor to The New York Times’ The Upshot.

He has an educational background in physics and engineering. After receiving his PhD in statistical and applied mathematics, he spent 4 years at a research and consulting firm conducting policy evaluations for federal health agencies.

Austin is now the Director of the Partnered Evidence-based Policy Resource Center (PEPReC) at the Boston VA Healthcare System, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. He is also an Associate Professor with the Department of Health Law, Policy and Management at Boston University’s School of Public Health. In addition, he is an Adjunct Associate Professor with the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Austin is a Senior Associate Editor for Health Services Research and serves on the editorial board of The American Journal of Managed Care. He is also a member of the New England Comparative Effectiveness Public Advisory Council.

Austin has authored numerous peer-reviewed, scholarly publications, many relevant to health care financing, economics, and policy.

In addition to regular contributions to The New York Times’ The Upshot, he writes for the JAMA Forum.

Dr. Miranda Lam is an instructor in radiation oncology at Harvard Medical School and a radiation oncology attending physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital / Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

She received her MD/MBA from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School/Wharton Business School and completed her residency training in the Harvard Radiation Oncology Program. In addition to her active clinical practice of treating patients with sarcoma and gastrointestinal cancers, Dr. Lam works as a health services research within the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is working to understand how health policy impacts both costs and quality of cancer care. She has recently identified factors that drive the cost of care among the high-cost patients and has evaluated the impact of new and emerging payment models such as accountable care organizations on cancer patients. She is also engaged in research to understand how national policies impact end-of-life advanced cancer care and how specific factors contribute to variations in cost and quality in oncology.  

Jessica provides data management and statistical analysis support for health care research.

Jessica received a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Villanova University and a Master of Science in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from Georgetown University. Previously, she worked as a Statistician at the U.S. Census Bureau, where she conducted demographic and self-response research related to the decennial census.

Kristen joined HGHI after graduating from Amherst College with a BA in English. Kristen is interested in health equity and thus, hopes to pursue a career in healthcare where she can help improve the wellbeing of vulnerable communities.

She looks forward to broadening her understanding of global health and health policy while at HGHI. In her free time, Kristen likes to write poetry, try new restaurants, and practice yoga.

Liana R. Woskie is a PhD candidate in Health Policy and Health Economics at the LSE and is a Research Fellow at the Harvard Global Health Institute. Her dissertation focuses on the evaluation of health system performance with a focus on person-centered care and autonomy; using this work to quantify human rights violations.

Prior to her PhD, Liana served as the Assistant Director of the Harvard Initiative on Global Health Quality (HIGHQ). In 2015-16, as an extension of her role at the Institute, she coordinated the Harvard-LSHTM Lancet Report on the Global Response to Ebola. More recently, she worked with Irene Papanicolas and Ashish Jha on an NASEM commission to quantify harm caused by poor quality healthcare in LMICs and a series of comparative health system performance evaluations in high income countries, with published output in JAMA, the BMJ and HealthAffairs. Current COVID-related projects include: 1.) Assessing the impact of social distancing policies on changes in aggregate human mobility, and 2.) Developing a risk score-card to mitigate reproductive health sequalae from COVID-19.

Liana holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and completed an MSc at the LSE and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). Prior to joining the Institute, she worked with the U.S. Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services and was a Global Health Corps Fellow at Partners In Health. As a Thomas J Watson Fellow Liana also worked with, and studied, iterations of the Community Health Worker model in over ten countries including Rwanda, Bangladesh, India and the United States.