Home Testimonials/FAQ Agenda Faculty & Speakers Application/Registration Partners Travel & Lodging Useful Links

Faculty and Speakers

Jennifer Miller Croswell, M.D.
Paul Goldberg
Gardiner Harris
Barnett S. Kramer, M.D., M.P.H.
Joseph K. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Boyce Rensberger
Lisa M. Schwartz, M.D., M.S. &
Steven Woloshin, M.D., M.S.
Gary Schwitzer
Liz Szabo
H. Gilbert Welch M.D., M.P.H. 

Jennifer Miller Croswell, M.D. received a BA in English literature from the University of Chicago, an MA in theatre history, literature, and criticism from the Ohio State University, and her MD from the University of Illinois at Chicago.  She admits this constitutes a somewhat checkered past, but notes that it has been an interesting ride, to say the least.  After several years of residency in general surgery at George Washington University, she transitioned in 2005 into the Department of Health and Human Services' Emerging Leaders Program, a two-year fellowship designed to recruit “the young and the (intellectually) restless” into the field of public health.  She now serves as the Acting Director of the NIH Office of Medical Applications of Research.  Her primary research interests include the development and implementation of evidence-based medical practices, issues surrounding the use of surrogate endpoints in clinical trials, and the balance of benefits and harms in preventive screening programs for the healthy public.

Paul Goldberg joined The Cancer Letter in 1986. He launched the newsletter's business section. His reporting on the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, FDA, and practitioners of unconventional therapy has been recognized by the Washington DC Professional Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, the Gerald Loeb Awards, and the Newsletter and Electronic Publishers Foundation. He was a reporter for the Wichita (KA) Eagle and the Reston Connection. He authored a history of the Helsinki Watch group in the former USSR, called "The Final Act" (William Morrow, 1988), and co-authored, with Ludmilla Alexeyeva, "The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post- Stalin Era" (Little, Brown, 1990; and in paperback, University of Pittsburgh Press). Goldberg also translated from the Russian, "To Live Like Everyone," the memoirs of the late dissident Anatoly Marchenko (Henry Holt, 1989). He is a graduate of Duke University with a B.A. in economics (1981).

Gardiner Harris, a correspondent in The New York Times’s Washington bureau, reports on public health. A graduate of Yale University, he previously covered the pharmaceutical industry for the Wall Street Journal.

Barnett S. Kramer, M.D., M.P.H., Director of the Office of Disease Prevention at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Kramer is also editor-in-chief of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. He holds positions with the National Cancer Institute and the Department of Medicine of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. Dr. Kramer has extensive experience in cancer treatment studies, primary prevention studies, and clinical screening trials of lung, ovarian, breast, and prostate cancers. He received his medical training at the University of Maryland and Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, Mo., and has a master’s degree in public health from The Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health.

Lisa M. Schwartz, M.D., M.S., and Steven Woloshin, M.D., M.S., are general internists at the White River Junction Veterans Administration in Vermont (Lisa is Co-Director, Steven is a Senior Research Associate) and associate professors of medicine and community and family medicine at Dartmouth Medical School. Their work, which focuses on improving the communication of medical information to patients, physicians, journalists, and policymakers, has appeared in leading medical journals.

For the past several years they have focused on creating and testing practical ways to overcome two important barriers to good communication: (1) many people (patients, providers, journalists) are limited in their ability to interpret medical data; and (2) exaggerated and incomplete health messages are common. To this end they are developing and testing material to help people understand medical statistics, the benefits and harms of prescription drugs, and write an occasional series for the Washington Post entitled "Healthy Skepticism" (available at: http://www.vaoutcomes.org/washpost.php).

Gary Schwitzer specialized in health care journalism in his more than 30-year career in radio, television, interactive multimedia and the Internet. He worked in television medical news for 15 years – at CNN in Atlanta, WFAA-TV in Dallas, and WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee. During the 1990s, Schwitzer produced “Shared Decision-making Programs” for the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making based at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. In 2000, he became the founding Editor-In-Chief of the MayoClinic.com consumer health web site. He joined the faculty of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota in 2001, is now an Associate Professor and teaches health journalism and media ethics. He was named as a Poynter Ethics Fellow for 2008-9.

In April 2006, he launched a new website - http://www.HealthNewsReview.org - that grades daily health news coverage across the US. In its first year, it won a Knight-Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism and a Mirror Award for reporting on the media industry.

Liz Szabo is an award-winning journalist with a masters degree from the University of Virginia. She has covered medicine for USA TODAY since 2004.

Before coming to USA TODAY, Szabo covered medicine for The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va. Her investigation of dangerous doctors prompted Virginia to pass legislation reforming the state Board of Medicine, which came under fire for giving medical licenses to murderers, child molesters and incompetent surgeons. The stories won two awards from the National Press Club, among other honors. Her stories about the questionable use of Ryan White funding led to the re-opening of seven clinics for indigent patients with HIV and AIDS in Norfolk, Va., which had been closed due to infighting among local officials. Her earlier coverage of religion won awards from the Religion Newswriters Association, the Religion Communicators Council, the Virginia Press Association and others.

Szabo volunteered teaching English as a Second Language for nine years and founded a volunteer tutoring program for immigrant employees at USA TODAY/Gannett headquarters in Virginia. She has spoken at the annual meeting of Investigative Reporters and Editors, and the Poynter Institute. She has completed several short fellowships in medical journalism at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

H. Gilbert Welch M.D., M.P.H.,  is a general internist who is the Co-Director of the VA Outcomes Group, White River Junction, Vt. and a Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Community and Family Medicine, Dartmouth Medical School. A graduate of Harvard, University of Cincinnati and the University of Washington, he has held a variety of jobs--a math teacher in a New England boarding school, a disc-jockey in a small town in Wyoming, a general practitioner in the Alaskan bush and a journal editor for a medical society headquartered in Philadelphia. For the 20 years he has been practicing medicine, Dr. Welch has also been asking hard questions about his profession. His research has focused on the problems created by medicine's efforts to detect disease early: physicians test too often, treat too aggressively and tell too many people that they are sick.   

back to top

Accessibility | Disclaimer | Privacy Policy | Department of Health and Human Services | National Institutes of Health