Current Fellows
Robin Chin is a Master in Public Policy candidate and is completing her third year at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM). Originally from St. Paul, MN, she graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in Human Biology focusing on International Health Policy. During the course of her undergraduate studies she pursued an internship at the Office of the Surgeon General in Washington, D.C. She also served as a manager of the Stanford University Arbor Free Clinic. Prior to starting medical school, she spent a year working with Dr. Laura Esserman in breast reconstruction research at the UCSF Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center. Since arriving in Boston, Robin has been active in community health projects, including an initiative at BUSM to bring medical care to underserved elderly residents in Roxbury and Dorchester. She plans to pursue either pediatrics or obstetrics/gynecology, and hopes to translate her interests in health disparities and healthcare spending into a career in policy and advocacy. Her favorite part of her time at BUSM has been working at Boston Medical Center with an incredibly diverse patient population. In her free time, Robin enjoys biking around Boston, beer tasting, and making very slow headway on learning the guitar.
Laura Ostapenko, M.D., is a Master in Public Policy candidate (expected 2018) and has completed her third year General Surgery Resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Ostapenko is exploring how to create a generalizable framework for assessing an individual residency program’s impact on national public health goals. Her belief is that graduate medical education (GME) training programs will need to produce physicians who are ready for practice in the specialties and geographic locations of highest need. Using national databases she will measure the impact on national public goals of a residency program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital as a first step towards a broader analysis of GME outcomes. Dr. Ostapenko received her MD from Dartmouth (2013) and a BA from Amherst College, majoring in English and Philosophy (2002). At Dartmouth, she pursued opportunities in research, advocacy, and leadership. She studied health care worker wellness in The Gambia, West Africa and burnout in medical students at Dartmouth. As a result of the later research she was appointed as Dartmouth’s representative to the New Hampshire Medical Society’s executive committee. She was also an elected member of Dartmouth’s student government, serving on the curriculum committee. She was appointed by the Association of American Medical Colleges to the Liaison Committee on Medical Education where she participated in discussions on the future of medical education. This is when she started to envision a career that take would take these insights into improving the delivery system by combining clinical practice with research on, advocacy for, and implementation of innovative graduate medical education systems. She is a recipient of an American Medical Association’s Physician of Tomorrow Scholarship (2012), Philanthropic Educational Organization Scholar Award (2012), Leopold Schepp Scholarship (2012), and Howard Hughes Medical Fellowship (2011).
Frances Pillsbury is a Master in Public Policy candidate (expected 2018) and a M.D. candidate at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. Frances plans to become a pediatric psychiatrist and serve as either a medical advisor for a government agency or as a mental health policy analyst for a non-profit organization. She has three goals: addressing the stigmatization of mental health, pioneering appropriate mental health care in foster homes and the juvenile justice system, and increasing patient access to psychiatric care. Frances attended UC Berkeley, graduating in 2010 with a B.A. in philosophy. Following graduation, she worked as a nurse’s aide. During this time, she became interested in the systemic healthcare issues facing the patients with whom she worked, and enrolled in a combined technical and business Master of Bioscience program at Keck Graduate Institute to learn more about the business of medicine. She then matriculated at Keck School of Medicine of USC, where she served as class co-president and class representative to the Association of American Medical Colleges, where she drew attention to the need to increase policy education within medical school curricula. She concentrated her graduate coursework on the regulation of pharmaceuticals and medical devices because she wanted to understand how the federal government incentivizes the development of therapies for undertreated diseases. In medical school, however, she realized that such innovations mean little to patients who cannot access basic care. The Grossman Fellowship will allow Frances to obtain a broader understanding of the factors affecting healthcare policy, in particular to help increase access to effective mental health services. She is also interested in how we can improve how we use and configure electronic medical records and mobile technology to monitor chronic disease for quality improvement, and is interested in the applications to delivery system reform. She is the recipient of the Keck Graduate Institute’s Distinguished Service Award.
Danny Vazquez is a Master in Public Policy candidate (expected 2019) and M.D. candidate at Harvard Medical School. He plans to pursue a career in oncology and hopes to serve an advisory role in state and national government, and is broadly interested in access to healthcare and its impact on the patient experience of receiving medical care. Danny graduated from the University of Arizona in 2013 where he received a B.S.H.S. in physiology, and became interested in medicine and public policy in his undergraduate studies following a difficult experience as a patient. Since then, he has worked on the Committee for Healthcare Financing at the Massachusetts State House through the Rappaport Public Policy Fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he studied Massachusetts Managed Care Organizations, insurance companies under MassHealth. He has also assumed several leadership positions within the American Medical Association Medical Student Section (AMA-MSS) and influenced the internal policies of both the AMA and AMA-MSS. In addition to his interest in policy, while in medical school he has conducted research in breast cancer patients, promoted outreach to the local Latino community through the Latino Medical Student Association at Harvard, and pursued several volunteering opportunities. He is the recipient of the Alexandra J. Miliotis Research Fellowship in Pediatric Oncology.
Rishi Wadhera, M.D. is a Master in Public Policy candidate (expected 2018) and third year Cardiology Fellow at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He completed his medical education (M.D.) at the Mayo Clinic, received a Masters in Public Health as a Gates Cambridge Scholar from the University of Cambridge, and completed his internal medicine residency training at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He spent summer 2016 working at the Massachusetts General Hospital Echocardiography Lab, followed by the inpatient health failure and cardiology consult services at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He will spend the remainder of the academic year caring for patients in the MGH Coronary Care Unit and the Brigham in-patient cardiology service, and performing cardiac catheterizations and nuclear studies. His research interests include: 1) Understanding the impact of policy initiatives on cardiovascular health care delivery and costs; 2) How variations in health systems and providers, and disparities in care, influence cardiovascular disease outcomes; and 3) The assessment of how quality metrics (i.e. 30 day readmission rates) influence cardiovascular practice patterns and care.