Aaron Panofsky

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Aaron Panofsky is a Professor in Public Policy and the Institute for Society and Genetics. Prior to joining UCLA in January of 2008, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at UC Berkeley from 2006 through 2007. Panofsky received his Ph.D. in sociology from New York University in 2006.

Panofsky’s main research interest is in the sociology of science and knowledge with a special focus on genetics. He recently published his first book, Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics (Chicago, 2014), is an analysis of the causes and consequences of controversy in the field of behavioral genetics. A second major project is investigating how patient advocate groups are seeking to affect the research process in the medical genetics of rare disorders. Of particular interest are the means by which patient advocates and scientists can form successful, mutually beneficial collaborative partnerships. These and other projects fit with his abiding science policy interests in the governance of science and technology and the relationship between expertise and democracy.

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Mark A. Peterson

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A specialist on American national institutions, much of Professor Peterson’s scholarship focuses on the Presidency, Congress, interest groups, and public opinion, evaluating interactions among them, and their implications for policy making, both within the general domain of domestic policy and with special attention to national health care policy, Medicare reform, and HIV/AIDS politics and policy.  He also studies the role of evidence in policy making, including the contextual factors that promote or inhibit its influence.

He has written extensively on how Congress responds to presidential legislative initiatives, exploring how different political, economic, and institutional settings affect coalition building, promote inter-institutional conflict or cooperation, influence the president’s legislative performance, and establish the baseline for assessing the performance of individual leaders (including Legislating Together: The White House and Capital Hill from Eisenhower to Reagan, Harvard University Press). He has also investigated the ways in which presidents use relationships with organized interests to promote their administration’s political or programmatic agendas, based on the presidential objectives and strategic calculations.

As a participant in the Annenberg Institutions of American Democracy Project, with Public Policy Department colleague Joel Aberbach he co-chaired the Commission on the Executive Branch and co-edited the volume it produced on the politics and performance of the presidency and bureaucracy (Institutions of American Democracy: The Executive Branch, Oxford University Press), which won the Richard E. Neustadt Award from the Presidential Research section of the American Political Science Association.  He also contributed to its study of public and elite opinion on the performance of American institutions (Institutions of American Democracy: A Republic Divided, Oxford University Press).

In addition, specific to the domain of health and health care policy, he edited Healthy Markets?  The New Competition in Medical Care, Duke University Press; and co-edited both Uncertain Times:  Kenneth Arrow and the Changing Economics of Health Care, Duke University Press) and the four-volume edited series Health Politics and Policy (Sage), as well as edited the special health policy journal issues, The Managed Care Backlash and Who Shall Lead?

Much of his most recent scholarship has linked these themes and extensive original research to produce a book manuscript entitled “American Sisyphus: Health Care and the Challenge of Transformative Policymaking.” Encompassing the last 100 years, it examines how recognized problems in the health care system, the influence of public opinion, transformation of the interest group community, institutional dynamics in Congress, changes in the context and demands of political leadership, various dimensions of social learning by policy makers, and strategic and tactical choices by presidents both thwarted health care reform in the past and ultimately made possible the enactment of President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, but in a context that also primed the challenge of the law before the U.S. Supreme Court and prompted enduring partisan attacks on its implementation and continuation.

Professor Peterson was a founding team member of the UCLA-based multidisciplinary Blue Sky Health Initiative to transform the U.S. health and health care system, which helped advise Congress on the inclusion of disease prevention and health promotion strategies in the Affordable Care Act.  Previously, as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow, he served as a Legislative Assistant for Health Policy in the Office of U.S. Senator Tom Daschle.  During 2000-2003 he was on the Study Panel on Medicare and Markets organized by the National Academy of Social Insurance.

From 1993 to 2002, Professor Peterson was the editor of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, a leading bimonthly scholarly journal in the field. He later chaired the journal’s Executive Committee, on which he remains a member, and also served on the Board of Editors of PS: Political Science & Politics and the Board of Editors of the Journal of Politics.  He has often been interviewed for television, radio, and print media stories, including for CBS News, National Public Radio and state public radio networks, CNN Money.Com, local television in Boston and Los Angeles, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Christian Science Monitor, San Diego Union Tribune, Arizona Republic, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Atlanta Constitution, U.S. News & World Report, CQ Weekly, The Hill, American Medical News, Internal Medicine News, The Lancet Oncology, and newspapers and broadcast news in Latin America, Europe, and Asia.

Professor Peterson has been an elected member of the Council of the American Political Science Association (2008-2010) and a member of its Administrative Committee, a founding member of the Association’s Organized Section on Health Politics and Policy, and was elected President of its Organized Section on Public Policy.  He has served on various committees for the American Political Science Association, Midwest Political Science Association, the Western Political Science Association, and AcademyHealth.  He chaired the National Advisory Committees for both the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Scholars in Health Policy Research program and its Changes in Health Care Financing and Organization (HCFO) program, and was a member of the National Advisory Committees for the Foundation’s  Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research Program and Center for Health Policy at the University of New Mexico.  He is an elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance.  Other honors include the Pi Sigma Alpha Award from the Midwest Political Science Association, the E. E. Schattschneider Award from the American Political Science Association, the Richard E. Neustadt Award from the President and Executive Politics Section of the APSA, and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research.

At UCLA, he is Professor of Public Policy, Political Science, and Law, and has twice been the Chair of the Department of Public Policy.  He is a Faculty Associate of the Center for Health Policy Research, the Center for Healthier Children, Families, and Communities, and the Institute for Society & Genetics; member of the Policy Impact Core for the Center for HIV Identification, Prevention, and Treatment Services; and is on the Internal Advisory Board for the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at UCLA.  He previously served on the faculty boards of the Center for Policy Research on Aging, the Institute for Social Research, and the Center for American Politics and Public Policy.  He is also currently a member of the University of California’s Academic Senate Health Care Task Force and the Academic Advisory Committee for the University of California Washington Center (UC in DC), and was on the University of California Office of the President’s Health Benefits Working Group.

Prior to coming to UCLA, he was Professor of Public Affairs, Political Science, and Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh, and Henry La Barre Jayne Associate Professor of Government at Harvard University.

 

SELECTED BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS

American Sisyphus: Health Care and the Challenge of Transformative Policymaking.
Mark A. Peterson.  Book manuscript in progress.

Reversing Course on Obamacare:  Why Not Another Medicare Catastrophic? 
Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 43(4) (August 2018): 605-650.

In the Shadow of Politics: The Pathways of Research Evidence to Health Policy Making. 
Special Issue on Policy Analysis and the Politics of Health Policy.   Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 43(3) (June 2018): 341-376.

The Third Rail of Politics The Rise and Fall of Medicare’s Untouchability
Mark A. Peterson.  In Alan Cohen, David Colby, Keith Wailoo, and Julian Zelizer, Medicare and Medicaid at Fifty.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Interest Groups and the Executive Branch
Mark A. Peterson.  In Burdett A. Loomis, ed., Guide to Interest Groups and Lobbying in the United States.  Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011.

Who Wants Presidential Supremacy? Findings from the Institutions of American Democracy Project
Joel D. Aberbach, Mark A. Peterson, and Paul J. Quirk.  Presidential Studies Quarterly 37 (September 2007): 515-53.

It Was a Different Time: Obama and the Unique Opportunity for Health Care Reform
Mark A. Peterson.  Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 36(3) (June 2011): 429-436.

The Ideological and Partisan Polarization of Health Care Reform and Tax Policy
Mark A. Peterson.  Tax Law Review 65(4), 2012: 627-667.

Institutions of American Democracy: A Republic Divided
Annenberg Democracy Project.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Health Politics and Policy, Four-Volume Set
Sue Tolleson-Rinehart and Mark A. Peterson, Editors.
Volume 1.  Defining Health Systems: Path Dependence and Policy Emergence
Volume 2. Tensions in Health Policy: Ethics, Interests, and the Public
Volume 3. Health Systems in Comparative Perspective
Volume 4. The Contemporary Politics of Health System Reform
London: Sage Publications, 2010.

Legislating Together: The White House and Capitol Hill from Eisenhower to Reagan
Mark A. Peterson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.

 

JoAnn Damron-Rodriguez

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Dr. Damron-Rodriguez, Retired Adjunct Professor, was awarded a UCLA 2006 Distinguished Teaching Award. This honor, given to selected faculty since 1963, recognizes exemplary teaching and education innovation. She also received the Robert Stevenson Faculty in Residence Award in 1998 and again in 2000. In 2000 she spearheaded the creation of an interdisciplinary GE Honors Cluster class titled “Frontiers in Human Aging: Biomedical, Social, and Policy Perspectives” to explore the reciprocity of biological, psychological, and social dimensions of human aging (http://www.college.ucla.edu/ge/clusters/ge80.html).

She is Co-PI on a statewide Archstone Foundation grant to research geriatric social work labor force demand in California. She is PI of evaluation of the Hartford Foundation funded Social Work Leadership Institute Practicum Partnership Program involving 65 schools of social work. As the Co-Principle Investigator on the Hartford/Archstone Geriatric Social Work Education Consortium (GSWEC), she played a pivotal role in the creation of a new field-training model that advances preparation of competent geriatric social workers.

Dr. Damron-Rodriguez is a federally appointed member of the Veterans Health Administration Gerontology and Geriatrics Advisory Committee, which reports to congress. For 10 years Dr. Damron-Rodriguez was the Associate Director of the VA Geriatric Research, Education, and Clinical Center (GRECC) of Greater Los Angeles and Co-Principle Investigator of a Health Services Research Development project to examine access to healthcare for minority veterans.

Since 1992 JoAnn has been a core faculty for the Bureau of Health Professions funded California Geriatric Education Center. She is on the Council of Social Work Education (CSWE) National GeroEd Center Board. She is a Past President of the Board of the California Council on Gerontology and Geriatrics (CCGG). She has been instrumental in the organization of state legislative hearings in partnership with the Senate Subcommittee on Aging and Long-Term Care and the Senate Committee on Education. Dr. Damron-Rodriguez has testified at both state and federal levels on policy issues, workforce competency standards, and demographic trends related to California’s aging population. She was appointed by Governor Gray Davis to serve on a Blue Ribbon panel to investigate the state nursing homes. She is currently an advisor to the World Health Organization, Kobe Center for Health Development regarding community-based care in developed and developing countries.

Additionally, Dr. Damron-Rodriguez, L.C.S.W., has twenty years of practice experience in health, mental health, and hospice care. She serves on multiple editorial boards and scientific review committees. Dr. Damron-Rodriguez has published extensively on geriatric education, diversity in aging, and community based elder care.

Todd Franke

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Trained in social work and educational psychology, Professor Franke seeks to achieve a better understanding of, and improve the responsiveness of service systems in the fields of social services, education and health. Using cognitive theory to better define policy issues related to the integration of these two important fields, Dr. Franke’s research has focused in part on the impact of disability and chronic illness on school-age children. He is currently conducting a study, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, on the use of personal assistance services for children with disabilities. In addition, Dr. Franke studies how adolescents solve social problems; urban mobility and its impact on children’s education and social development; and how to successfully integrate health and social services in school settings.

Dr. Franke is active in several local and regional efforts to restructure social services in the schools, helping to conceptualize planning and implementation and the design of evaluation measures in Los Angeles Unified School District, the country’s second-largest school district. He also serves as a consultant to local school districts for the preparation of funding proposals for Healthy Start, a state program to establish linkages between community social service agencies and schools. HIs primary work occurs at the intersection of youth violence (child welfare and gang involved youth) and education. In these areas he designs and undertakes evaluative research and has obtained over $9 million in research funding over the past 7 years. He is currently the Associate Director of the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families and Communities.

Dr. Franke has been involved with agencies that serve thousands of families representing unique geographic and cultural communities in California, particularly southern California counties. He recently prepared a report for the Los Angeles City Council which examines the measurement issues involved in assessing the success of gang-related and youth development prevention and intervention programs in the city. The link between involvement in the child welfare system and gang involvement is well documented. Dr. Franke is currently the Co-PI of the Best Start LA Initiative which aims to shape, strengthen and support five Los Angeles communities by building resources and providing access to activities that improve the well-being, development and care experienced by pregnant women, parents of newborns and children age 3 and under.

Dr. Franke was also the Principal Investigator for the First 5 LA-funded Partnership for Families Initiative, which is a secondary prevention initiative that is designed to prevent child maltreatment in vulnerable families. Dr. Franke has been the PI for the Small County Initiative, which was designed to systematically examine California’s efforts to build and enhance child abuse and neglect prevention efforts in 11 rural counties in northern California. Additionally, he has numerous years of experience in conducting cross-sectional and longitudinal research in the fields of education, child welfare and adolescent violence.

Thomas Rice

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In addition to his appointment in Public Policy, Thomas Rice is Distinguised Professor, Department of Health Policy and Management.

Dr. Rice previously served as the UCLA campus as Vice Chancellor for Academic Personnel from 2006 to 2011 and as Interim Dean of Public Health in 2012. As Vice Chancellor he was responsible for overseeing the promotions, recruitment, and retention of faculty at the campus level. He also served as Chair of the Department of Health Services from 1996 to 2000 and 2003 to 2004.

Dr. Rice is a health economist, having received his doctorate in the Department of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley in 1982. His areas of interest include health insurance, competition and regulation; physicians’ economic behavior; and Medicare. He was lead author of a book about the U.S. health care system, for the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, published in 2013. The fourth edition of his book, The Economics of Health Reconsidered, was published in 2015. He served as editor of the journal Medical Care Research and Review from 1994 to 2000.

Dr. Rice was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 2006. He was chair of the AcademyHealth Board of Directors in 2005-6, and previously he had been awarded its Article of the Year Award and its Young Investigator Award.

 

Sanford M. Jacoby

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Biography

Sanford M. Jacoby is Distinguished Research Professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. He holds professorial appointments in UCLA’s Department of History and Department of Public Policy.

Jacoby’s latest book is Labor in the Age of Finance: Pensions, Politics, and Corporations from Deindustrialization to Dodd-Frank (Princeton University Press, 2021). It analyzes the reaction of labor movements to financialization in the United States, focusing on pension fund activism, regulatory efforts, and corporate governance.

Jacoby is the author of three other prize-winning books: Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1985, 2004); Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal (1997); and The Embedded Corporation: Corporate Governance and Employment Relations in Japan and the United States (2005). His books have been translated into Chinese and Japanese.

Jacoby is co-editor of Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal and serves on the editorial boards of other journals in the United States and abroad. He has been a visiting professor at Cardiff University, Doshisha University, the London School of Economics, the University of Manchester, the University of Tokyo and Waseda University. He is the recipient of several awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship to support his most recent book.

Please visit Professor Jacoby’s personal academic website for more content: www.sanfordjacoby.com

Books

Labor in the Age of Finance: Pensions, Politics, and Corporations from Deindustrialization to Dodd-Frank (Princeton University Press, 2021)

The Embedded Corporation: Corporate Governance and Employment Relations in Japan and the United States (Princeton University Press, 2007)

Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in the 20th Century, Revised Edition (Routledge, 2004)

Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism since the New Deal (Princeton University Press, 1997)

Recognition

Research Fellow, Labor & Employment Research Association 2010

John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 2009

Abe Fellow, Social Science Research Council, 2000

National Academy of Social Insurance, 1999

Philip Taft Prize in Labor History, 1998

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 1990

George R. Terry Book Award, Academy of Management, 1986

Allan Nevins Prize, Economic History Association, 1982

Joel Aberbach

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Joel D. Aberbach is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Public Policy, and Director of the Center for American Politics and Public Policy, at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Keeping a Watchful Eye: The Politics of Congressional Oversight (Brookings, 1990), co-author, with Bert A. Rockman, of In the Web of Politics: Three Decades of the U.S. Federal Executive (Brookings 2000), co-author, with Robert D. Putnam and Bert A. Rockman, of Bureaucrats and Politicians in Western Democracies (Harvard, 1981) and, with the late Jack L. Walker, co-author of Race in the City (Little, Brown, 1973). He is also the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters.

His research ranges widely over topics in American and comparative politics, with emphasis on legislative-executive relations and broader issues of executive politics and policy-making. Over the years, he has trained scores of administrators as an instructor in public policy programs at Michigan and UCLA, and he has also served as a consultant to organizations such as the Government Accountability Office, the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology and Government, and the Commission on the Operation of the Senate.

Aberbach is currently Co-Chair of the Research Committee on Structure and Organization of Government of the International Political Science Association and Co-Chair of the Commission on the Executive Branch convened by the Annenberg Foundation Trust’s Institutions of Democracy Project. A volume from this project, titled Institutions of American Democracy: The Executive Branch, and co-edited by Aberbach and UCLA Professor of Public Policy Mark A. Peterson, was published in October 2005 by Oxford University Press. Aberbach has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, a Visiting Fellow at the University of Bologna’s Institute of Advanced Studies, and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. In 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.

SELECTED BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS

The Executive Branch
(part of the Institutions of American Democracy Series). New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Editors: Joel D. Aberbach and Mark A. Peterson
The Executive Branch

Paul Ong

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Professor Ong has done research on the labor market status of minorities and immigrants, displaced high-tech workers, work and spatial/transportation mismatch, and environmental justice. He is currently engaged in several projects, including an analysis of the relationship between sustainability and equity, the racial wealth gap, and the role of urban structures on the reproduction of inequality.

Previous research projects have included studies of the impact of defense cuts on California’s once-dominant aerospace industry, the impact of immigration on the employment status of young African Americans, and the influence of car ownership and subsidized housing on welfare usage.

Dr. Ong is the Director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge and editor of AAPI Nexus, and has served as an advisor to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, and to the California Department of Social Services and the state Department of Employment Development, as well as the Wellness Foundation and the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

He received a master’s in urban planning from the University of Washington, and a Ph.D. in Economics, University of California, Berkeley. Along with his quantitative research, his professional practice includes teaching and applying visual forms of communication.

SELECTED BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS

Set-Aside Contracting in S.B.A.’s 8(A) Program
Paul Ong, Review of Black Political Economy Vol 28, No. 3, Winter 2001, pp. 59-71.

Car Ownership and Welfare-to-Work
Paul M. Ong, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 21, No. 2, Spring 2002, pp. 255-268.

Impacts of Affirmative Action: Policies and Consequences in California
Paul Ong, editor,  Alta Mira Press, 1999.

The State of Asian Pacific America: Transforming Race Relations
Paul M. Ong, editor, Asian Pacific American Public Policy Institute, LEAP and UCLA AASC, Los Angeles, CA, 2000.

The New Asian Immigration in Los Angeles and Global Restructuring
Paul Ong, Edna Bonacich, and Lucie Cheng, editors, Temple University Press, 1994.

Albert Carnesale

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Albert Carnesale is Chancellor Emeritus and Professor Emeritus at the University of California,  Los Angeles (UCLA).  He joined UCLA in 1997, and was Chancellor of the University through 2006 and Professor of Public Policy and of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering through 2015.  His research and teaching continue to focus on public policy issues having substantial scientific and technological dimensions, and he is the author or co-author of six books and more than 100 articles on a wide range of subjects, including national security strategy, arms control, nuclear proliferation, domestic and international energy issues, and higher education.

Carnesale chaired the National Academies Committees on NASA’s Strategic Direction, on America’s Climate Choices, on Nuclear Forensics, and on U.S. Conventional Prompt Global Strike; and was a member of the Obama Administration’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future and of the Secretary of Energy’s Advisory Board.  He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Pacific Council on International Policy; and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  In addition, he serves on the Boards of Directors of the California Council for Science and Technology, Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Amicrobe, Inc.

Prior to joining UCLA, Carnesale was at Harvard for 23 years, serving as Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Public Policy and Administration, Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and Provost of the University.  He holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering (Cooper Union), a master’s degree in mechanical engineering (Drexel University), and a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering (North Carolina State University).