Our Team
To make this project possible in a short amount of time, everyone at HGHI pitched in—you can browse our staff list here. Here are our project leads:
Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH
Director, Harvard Global Health Institute
K.T. Li Professor of Global Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Dr. Jha’s research endeavors focus on improving the quality and costs of healthcare systems with a specialized focus on the impact of policies. He has published over two hundred various papers in prestigious journals and heads a personal blog which focuses on using statistical data research to improve health quality. Dr. Jha is a member of the Institute of Medicine at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Thomas Tsai, MD, MPH
Assistant Professor, Department of Health Policy and Management, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Tsai is a surgeon and health policy researcher in the Department of Surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is on the faculty and collaborates with colleagues at the Center for Surgery and Public Health, Ariadne Labs, and the Harvard Global Health Institute.
Tsai’s research focuses on understanding the impact of health policy efforts on achieving value in our healthcare system by reducing spending and improving outcomes. Using national Medicare claims data, his work has examined the relationship between hospital quality and readmissions; patient experience as a measure of quality; and racial and socioeconomic disparities in readmission rates.
Jose Figueroa, MD, MPH
Assistant Professor, Health Policy and Management, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Dr. Figueroa’s research focuses on improving quality of health care for complex and vulnerable populations. Specifically, his work has examined the drivers of poor clinical outcomes and health care spending for high-risk populations, including frail older adults, people with serious mental illness, disabled populations, and racial and ethnic minorities. His work on segmenting high-need, high-cost populations was highlighted by the National Academy of Medicine, where he served as a national planning committee member for a workshop series on complex populations, ultimately leading to the NAM report, “Effective Care for High-Need Patients.” Dr. Figueroa has also studied the impact of policy interventions and payment reform on health care for these populations using quasi-experimental methods.
Benjamin Jacobson
Lead Research Assistant
Ben graduated from Princeton University in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in Molecular Biology and a certificate in Computer Science. He conducted his senior thesis research on the phenotypic and epigenetic effects of hydraulic fracking exposure in children. In the future, he hopes to attend medical school and to continue working to make healthcare more equitable, effective, and efficient.
Stefanie Friedhoff
HGHI Director of Content & Strategy | Senior Editor
A German-American journalist and content strategist with 25+ years of experience in international media and higher education, Stefanie Friedhoff currently serves as Director of Content and Strategy and Senior Editor at HGHI. She is an expert at creating innovative approaches to engage audiences in critical conversations about global health. Friedhoff has worked as a foreign correspondent, feature writer, editor and photographer on three continents. Her stories have been published in TIME, The Boston Globe, Geo, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine, and many other publications. A 2001 Nieman Foundation for Journalism Fellow, she is also a senior advisor to the Trust for Trauma Journalism and a board member at RiffReporter. Twitter: @Stefanie2000