who we are

Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, Professor of Health Services, Policy, and Practice
Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH, is a physician, health policy researcher, and the third Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. Before joining Brown, he was the K.T. Li Professor of Global Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute (HGHI). A practicing physician, Ashish is recognized globally as an expert on pandemic preparedness and response as well as on health policy research and practice. He has led groundbreaking research around Ebola and is now on the frontlines of the COVID-19 response, leading national and international analysis of key issues and advising state and federal policy makers.

James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, Director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics
Danielle Allen, PhD, is a political theorist who has published broadly in democratic theory, political sociology, and the history of political thought. She is the co-editor of the award-winning Education, Justice, and Democracy (2013, with Rob Reich) and From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in the Digital Age (2015, with Jennifer Light). Danielle is a former Chair of the Mellon Foundation Board, past Chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Danielle is also the principal investigator for the Democratic Knowledge Project, a distributed research and action lab at Harvard University.

Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Thomas Tsai, MD, MPH, is board certified in general surgery. Thomas received his undergraduate degree from Harvard College, his medical degree from Stanford University School of Medicine, and his MPH from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He completed a general surgery residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an advanced minimally invasive gastrointestinal and bariatric surgery fellowship Massachusetts General Hospital. His clinical interests include laparoscopic and robotic surgery for gastroesophageal reflux disease and paraesophageal hernias; complex abdominal wall reconstruction; and bariatric surgery. Dr. Tsai’s research focuses on health policy evaluation and on policy and systems-level interventions to improve the quality and value of surgical care.

Academic Dean, Brown University School of Public Health
Megan Ranney, MD, MPH, is a practicing emergency physician and researcher, focusing on the intersection between digital health, violence prevention, and public health. She is the founding Director of the Brown-Lifespan Center for Digital Health as well as the Chief Research Officer for the American Foundation for Firearm Injury Reduction in Medicine, the country’s only non-profit committed to reducing firearm injury through the public health approach. She is also a founding partner of GetUsPPE.org, which is dedicated to matching donors to health systems in need of protective equipment. Megan is a Fellow of the fifth class of the Aspen Health Innovators Fellowship Program and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.

Associate Professor of Epidemiology, Brown University School of Public Health
Brandon Marshall, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health. His research interests focus on substance use epidemiology and examining the social, environmental, and structural determinants of health of drug-using populations. His work seeks to inform public health and policy interventions that improve the health of people who use drugs. Brandon is the Principal Investigator of multiple NIH-funded projects, including the Rhode Island Prescription and Injection Drug Use Study (RAPIDS). As the Scientific Director of PreventOverdoseRI, Rhode Island’s drug overdose surveillance and information dashboard, he works closely with the Rhode Island Department of Health to track, measure, and evaluate efforts to address the state’s opioid overdose epidemic.

Industry and Certificate Director, System Design and Management, MIT
Ben Linville-Engler, MS has 10 years of experience building and leading diverse technical teams, establishing shared vision and goals, meeting the needs of multiple stakeholders, building trust and collaboration across organizations, and establishing partnerships. He has a strong understanding of engineering technical matters and is adept at communicating complex information and ideas across disciplines, cultures, and organizations. His experience includes research, technology, product, and business development as well as manufacturing and operations experience from sketch to scale in both the US and Europe. He is a recent graduate of the MIT’s System Design and Management program and received the program’s 2018 Leadership, Innovation, and Systems Thinking Award.

Chief Executive Officer, Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism
In October 2020, Meredith Sumpter, MS, became the CEO of the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism. Prior to this, Meredith was head of research strategy and operations at Eurasia Group, where she led research management and strategy and carried out advisory work. She has held senior positions in the private and public sectors and has nearly 20 years of experience in policy, analysis, business, and management. Meredith is a strategic thinker and thought leader who regularly meets with senior officials and executives and often speaks at conferences and to the media. She advises industry leaders and investors on politics and commercial strategy, and her experience spans multiple regions and sectors. Meredith has held advisory positions in policy and global think tanks and in the US Senate.

Senior Director of Strategy and Innovation, Associate Professor of the Practice of Health Services, Policy and Practice, Brown University School of Public Health
Stefanie Friedhoff is a German-American journalist and content strategist with 25+ years of experience in international media and higher education. As part of the Brown University School of Public Health leadership team, she oversees the Schools’ communication and engagement efforts, and serves as a key strategic advisor on thought leadership and innovation to the Dean. Friedhoff also oversees the Dean’s ongoing special projects and pandemics portfolio, including research collaborations, modeling and data projects, congressional efforts, and crisis communications.

Assistant Director of Multimedia Content Production, Brown University School of Public Health
Caroline Claflin is an artist, filmmaker, and designer. She holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. She joins the Brown School of Public Health communications team to broaden the School’s social media engagement and visual output across all platforms, driving attention, visibility, and engagement. She also leads key data visualization, engagement, and social media projects on the School’s pandemic response team.

Principal, Huck Strategies
D’lynne is a principal at Huck, a marketing and creative services agency that provides strategic marketing and communications solutions for businesses and nonprofits, from content strategy and branding to print collateral, infographics, video and animation, and website design. She also started Queens of Content in 2018 to provide copy and editing services alongside a team of extraordinary writers.

Health Communications Expert, Hark
Alison Logan, a health communications expert with the creative agency Hark, has focused her career on understanding health behaviors and communication strategies to enable people to make better decisions. Serving clients in the public health, non-profit, and health delivery arenas, she provides insight on how people form and change beliefs and behaviors. This includes health decision-making determinants, upstream and downstream influencers of health, key trends in clinical medicine, evidence-based public health and clinical interventions, and theories and frameworks on these topics. She excels at synthesizing and operationalizing these data points to develop sound and effective marketing and communication strategies to effectuate positive behavior change.

Manager, Health Initiative, The Rockefeller Foundation
Megan Diamond is a Manager on the Covid-19 Response & Recovery team, where she leads the wastewater surveillance portfolio. Over the past year, Megan has drawn on her experience in research and strategic stakeholder engagement to facilitate a collaborative network of wastewater testing experts, support innovative initiatives in local health departments and advocate for the use of wastewater-based epidemiology as a sustainable public health tool. Prior to working at The Rockefeller Foundation, Megan was the Assistant Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, where she oversaw the organizations programmatic initiatives and managed an international consortium on health systems comparisons. She has conducted research on mental health and reproductive rights in the Middle-East and West Africa, and worked as an analyst on the first multi-country, non-communicable disease cohort in sub-Saharan Africa. She holds a Master’s degree in epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Dean’s Senior Writer, Brown University School of Public Health
Andrew Iliff is a writer and researcher published in diverse formats and topics with a wide range of collaborators, who joins the Brown School of Public Health from the Harvard Global Health Institute (HGHI). At Brown, Andrew works closely with the Dean to produce op-eds, reports and other written material on the COVID-19 pandemic and wide range of other urgent topics.

Program Manager, Brown University School of Public Health
Daisy Winner aims to convene experts and actors across disciplines and geographies to engage in critical conversations and foster collaboration for meaningful solutions. Daisy has also worked at the Harvard Global Health Institute, where she managed HGHI’s misinformation and disinformation in global health portfolio.

Program Assistant, Harvard Global Health Institute
Luke works across multiple programmatic domains at HGHI including Climate Change and Health, Tech and Health, Migration, Social Determinants of Health, and Misinformation. In his role, he contributes to the formation and execution of various initiatives through research, communications, and design-related tasks. In tandem with the Programs team, Luke seeks to strengthen HGHI’s partnerships, produce groundbreaking research, and advance critical issues around equity and health.