Matthew Dizon, MD, is a Physician Fellow in Health Services Research & Development at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System. He received his B.S. in Physiological Sciences from the University of California, Los Angeles and his M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco. He then completed a residency in dermatology at Oregon Health & Science University. He is interested in healthcare utilization and value in dermatology.

Teresa Puente is the Program Manager for the Prevention Policy Modeling Lab, which conducts health and economic modeling to improve public health decision-making and inform U.S. health policy. Teresa coordinates with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and academic partners, overseeing operations and management for over 30 modeling projects.
 
Prior to joining Stanford, Teresa worked in health policy and communications at the CDC, supporting efforts to communicate the agency’s work in global infectious disease, outbreak response, and immunization. She received her master’s degree in public health from Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, with a focus on socio-contextual determinants of health.

Veena Manja is a post-doctoral fellow with the Department of Health Policy and with the Center for Innovation to Implementation, Health Services Research and Development fellowship program affiliated with the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. She pivoted to a research career after practicing as a cardiologist for several years with the goal of improving implementation of evidence based practices. She completed a PhD (2019) from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada and joined the fellowship in 2021. During her graduate studies, she worked on improving research methods and on evidence synthesis teams for evidence based guideline development for national and international organizations. Her dissertation focused on understanding the factors influencing evidence-discordant clinical decisions in cardiology and neonatology. Her current work broadly focuses on improving cardiovascular outcomes in individuals with a mental health condition or a substance use disorder with a focus on methamphetamine associated cardiovascular outcomes. She is a graduate of Mysore Medical College (MBBS), India and completed her residency in Internal Medicine and fellowship in Cardiovascular Diseases at the State University of New York in Buffalo, NY.

Nathaniel Breg is a postdoctoral fellow at the Veterans Health Administration of Palo Alto in its Big Data Scientist Training Enhancement Program (BD-STEP) and a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Health Policy at Stanford. His research into health care provision intersects with questions in labor economics and industrial organization. His current work focuses on provider use of new medical technologies, and he is more broadly interested in provider incentives, medical labor markets, and the effects of the health care industry on local economies and local health. He has a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in public policy and management with an applied economics concentration and a BA from Tufts University in economics and history. Before his graduate studies, he worked as an analyst at RTI International on health policy evaluation and implementation for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Britni Wilcher, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Health Services Research & Development. Dr. Wilcher earned her PhD in economics from American University in 2022. She is an applied microeconomist with interests in health, labor, and gender economics. Dr. Wilcher’s research focuses on the economics of health decision making and its implications for labor markets using quasi-experimental designs to draw causal inferences for historically disadvantaged populations. While completing her doctoral studies, Dr. Wilcher also conducted impact analysis of US regulations for think tanks and government agencies.
 
Prior to her doctoral studies, Dr. Wilcher completed a BA in Economics at Spelman College and MSc in International Health Care Management, Economics, and Policy at SDA Bocconi School of Management in Milan, Italy. During her masters, she specialized in the economics evaluation of pharmaceutical and medical devices. Dr. Wilcher applied that training as a senior consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton in Washington, DC and research fellow at the University of Exeter in England. Her work at Exeter, supporting an EU commission aimed at advancing the existing methodological framework for health technology assessment (HTA) of medical devices (MedtecHTA), was published in Value in Health, Health Economics, and the International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care.

Dr. Ashley Griffin is a medical informatics postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Health Policy and VA Palo Alto Health Care System Center for Innovation to Implementation. She completed her PhD in Health Informatics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2021. Dr. Griffin's research focuses on the use and interoperability of digital health technologies and patient-generated health data to support patients with multimorbidities. Her research develops methods and tools that can empower patients to take an active role in their health and inform decision-making for the care team.

Fernando Alarid-Escudero, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine. He obtained his Ph.D. in Health Decision Sciences from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, and was an Assistant Professor at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE) Región Centro, Aguascalientes, Mexico, from 2018 to 2022, prior to coming to Stanford. His research focuses on developing statistical and decision-analytic models to identify optimal prevention, control, and treatment policies to address a wide range of public health problems and develops novel methods to quantify the value of future research. Dr. Alarid-Escudero is part of the Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network (CISNET), a consortium of NCI-sponsored investigators that includes modeling to improve our understanding of the impact of cancer control interventions (e.g., prevention, screening, and treatment) on population trends in incidence and mortality. Dr. Alarid-Escudero co-founded the Stanford-CIDE Coronavirus Simulation Modeling (SC-COSMO) workgroup. He also co-founded the Decision Analysis in R for Technologies in Health (DARTH) workgroup and the Collaborative Network on Value of Information (ConVOI), international and multi-institutional collaborative efforts where we develop transparent and open-source solutions to implement decision analysis and quantify the value of potential future investigation for health policy analysis. He received a BSc in Biomedical Engineering from the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Iztapalapa (UAM-I), and a Master’s in Economics from CIDE, both in Mexico.