On the eve of primaries on the Right in November and for the Socialist Party in January, the French presidential campaign for the April/May 2017 elections is now in full swing. The political landscape is bleak indeed: both major political parties are profoundly divided and fragmented; the incumbent party has suffered a string of defeats since 2012 in municipal, European and regional elections and whoever its candidate(s) may be, he/she will most probably not qualify for the run-off in May, guaranteeing the election of Alain Juppé or Nicolas Sarkozy in the spring. The terrorist attacks in Paris and Nice have accelerated the drift towards identity politics as the extreme right finds validation of its favorites themes on immigration and the supposed radical incompatibility between Islam and the French republican compact; the attacks also stand as a major cause for the implosion of the Socialist Party. Beyond the context (high unemployment levels and a slow, sputtering economic recovery, Brexit, the terrorist threat...), this form of political chaos has institutional roots as the republican model designed by Charles de Gaulle in 1958 is no longer adapted to the challenges France is facing today. This lecture will attempt to unpack the topical from the structural in the long descent of France towards political dysfunction and assess the possible scenarios for political reform.
Speaker Bio:
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Vincent Michelot is Professor of American Politics at Sciences Po Lyon. He is a graduate of Ecole Normale Supérieure de Saint Cloud and holds a PhD from Université de Provence. Author of two essays on the American presidency (L'Empereur de la Maison Blanche, Armand Colin, 2004; Le président des Etats-Unis, un pouvoir impérial? Découvertes Gallimard, 2008), and a political biography of John F. Kennedy (Kennedy, Folio, 2013), he also co-directed with Olivier Richomme Le Bilan d'Obama (Presses de Sciences Po Paris, 2012), a collection of essays on Barak Obama's first term. His latest work, a casebook in French on women's rights in the Supreme Court will be published in 2017. He is currently at work with Ray La Raja and Alix Meyer on an essay in comparative politics on political parties in France and the United States. Professor Michelot is a member of the board of the Fulbright Committee in Paris and the vice-president of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Institut des Amériques. In the Spring of 2017 he will be a visiting professor at the University of Virginia.
**Co-sponsored with the Bill Lane Center for the American West**
Vincent Michelot
Professor of American Politics at Sciences Po Lyon
CISAC's William J. Perry created a free, public 10-week course for people to learn more about the looming dangers of nuclear catastrophe. His new MOOC, developed with the support of Stanford’s Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, offers a chance to take that message to a much larger audience.
“I believe that the likelihood of a nuclear catastrophe is greater today than it was during the cold war,” said Perry, who recently wrote a New York Times op-ed on why America should dismantle its ICBM missile systems.
Because the continued risk of nuclear catastrophe isn’t widely recognized, Perry believes, “our nuclear policies don’t reflect the danger. So I’ve set off on a mission to educate people on how serious the problem is. Only then can we develop the policies that are appropriate for the danger we face.”
The course offers participants the chance to ask questions and participate in discussions via an online forum, which Perry and his fellow experts will address during weekly video chats. Each week, Perry will be joined in conversation by top thinkers, including CISAC's Martha Crenshaw, David Holloway and Siegfried Hecker, Scott D. Sagan, and Philip Taubman. George Shultz, the former secretary of state, will also participate. Outside experts include Ploughshares Fund president Joseph Cirincione, nuclear negotiator James Goodby, former Russian Deputy Minister of Defense Andre Kokoshin, and Joseph Martz of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Learn more about "Living at the Nuclear Brink" in this story or watch a video. Register for the course here. It is now open for enrollment and begins Oct. 4.
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William J. Perry has created a new, free online course for people to learn about the risk of nuclear catastrophe.
According to the OECD, corporate taxation has steadily fallen since 1994 and today represents around 8.5 per cent of all taxes raised by governments across the globe. The proliferation of tax-efficient structures that route profits to low tax countries in the form of interest payments and royalties has been a big drain on revenues. The European Commission has made several unfruitful attempts to coordinate ‘anti-avoidance’ measures. In a recent effort to crack down on ‘base erosion and profit shifting’ [BEPS] to safeguard the future of corporate tax and curb competition between Member States based aggressive tax rulings, the European Commission has embarked on a ‘fairness’ crusade using antitrust prerogatives. Apple, Starbucks, Amazon, McDonalds and many more others have been accused of benefiting from illegal State aid resulting in orders to pay (back) billions of euros. Are American companies really being targeted by the European Commission? How will corporate taxation in the European Union evolve from here?
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Jacques Derenne is the head of the EU Competition & Regulatory practice at Sheppard Mullin’s Brussels office. He has over 28 years of competition law experience in all areas (mergers, cartels, abuses of dominance and State aid), in EU regulatory and related competition law issues in a variety of regulated industries such as energy, the postal sector, aviation, railways, telecoms, satellites, the audio-visual sector and tobacco products. He regularly appears at competition hearings before the European Commission, and pleads cases before the General Court and the Court of Justice of the EU, national competition authorities, the Belgian and French courts and various regulatory bodies.
Jacques' State aid experience spans more than two decades, during which time he has acted for beneficiaries, competitors and Member States before the European Commission, EU courts and national courts. He co-directed and co-authored studies for the European Commission on the enforcement of State aid rules at the national level (2006 and 2009), which contributed to the Commission's Recovery and Enforcement Notices in 2007 and 2009 respectively. He co-edited a book on the Enforcement of EU State aid law at national level - 2010 - Reports from the 27 Member States (Lexxion, October 2010), and has written quarterly comments on State aid case law and the Commission’s decisional practice in the journal Concurrences since 2004 (together with EU officials).
Jacques also publishes widely on various other EU constitutional, competition and regulatory issues. He is a founding member of the Global Competition Law Centre (College of Europe, Scientific Council and Executive Committee). He graduated from the University of Liège (Belgium, 1987) and from the College of Europe (Bruges, 1988), and teaches competition law (State aid aspects) at the University of Liège and at the Brussels School of Competition.
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Yaniss Aiche is a Counsel in the EU Competition and Regulatory Practice in Brussels. His practice focuses on the intersection between public policy, government affairs and legal advocacy. He brings corporations, financial institutions, non-profit organizations and government bodies an integrated strategic insight that combines a deep legal, political and business expertise to help them with policy risk assessments and compliance, monitor relevant policy developments and effectively advocate their interests towards key EU institutions and EMEA governments.
Yaniss has over 15 years of experience in EU Policy, international trade and strategic business development. Yaniss started his career in 2000 in Brussels as an expert advisor on international trade and trade negotiations within the WTO's Doha Development Agenda where he advised governments, corporations and trade associations on a range of intricate political and legal challenges including investment promotion, cultural services and goods, defense contracting an free trade. In 2007, Yaniss joined AHEL, the consulting arm of The International Institute for Strategic Studies in London where he focused on advising F500 companies at executive and board level on geopolitical and military risk, investment policy development. In this role he supported the business expansion of European and US companies in the Far and Near East.
In more recent years Yaniss has worked in senior positions for leading global law firms assisting them with their regional expansion, client development strategies and legal services packaging.
Yaniss holds a JD from the University of Gent, a Masters from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Chicago Booth.
Jacques Derenne
Partner, Head of EU Competition & Regulatory
Speaker
Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP, Brussels
Yaniss Aiche
Counsel EU Policy and EMEA Government Affairs
Speaker
Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP, Brussels
The CISAC lecture series, "Security Matters," surveyed the most pressing security issues facing the world today. Topics include cybersecurity, nuclear proliferation, insurgency and intervention, terrorism, biosecurity, lessons learned from the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis – as well as the future of U.S. leadership in the world.
The lectures come almost entirely from the 2014 winter term of International Security (PS114S), co-taught by intelligence expert and CISAC Co-Director Amy Zegart and terrorism authority Martha Crenshaw co-taught the Security Matters class in 2015. (Zegart recently co-wrote a journal paper on why the U.S. might adjust its national security approach in light of a changing international order.)
“This series is the first in what we hope will be a continuing experiment of new modes and methods to enhance our education mission,” said Zegart. “We have two goals in mind: The first is to expand CISAC's reach in educating the world about international security issues. The second is to innovate inside our Stanford classrooms.”
A computer workstation bears the National Security Agency logo inside the Threat Operations Center inside the Washington suburb of Fort Meade, Maryland, intelligence gathering operation in 2006. The Security Matters class lectures examined the many facets of U.S. and global security.
Martin Hellman is not your average cryptography pioneer.
Hellman, who is known for his invention of public key cryptography (along with Whitfield Duffie and Ralph Merkle), has a life’s journey to share in story form, one that weaves together the most complex global flashpoints of our age with the deeply personal of any age. He and his wife’s new book, A New Map for Relationships: Creating True Love at Home and Peace on the Planet, spans far and wide, covering nuclear risks in North Korea, Iran, and America’s Middle Eastern wars.
But that is not all. He and his wife Dorothie Hellman open up about their marital struggles to show how they eventually reached a point of harmony and true love for each other. As Martin Hellman sees it, conflict in the international and interpersonal arenas has much in common.
“You can’t separate nuclear war from conventional war and conventional war from personal war,” he said in an interview. Hellman is a professor emeritus of electrical engineering and faculty affiliate at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.
Just as he and Dorothie (self-acknowledged polar opposites) often butted heads during the first 10 or 15 years of marriage, nations too navigate dangerously outmoded “maps” to protect their national security and interests. Yet these “maps” are soon outdated, whether on the global stage or in the home. Hellman said, however, that differences of opinion, which revolve around fights to prove who is “right,” could instead be transformed into opportunities to learn from one another – and to expand peace in the world.
“You have to believe in the seemingly impossible gifts of unconditional love and greater peace in the world, and then dedicate yourself to discovering how to achieve them,” he said.
Cultivating inner, outer peace
He said that society only truly changes based on individual changes, so he calls for action in how people live their everyday lives. When countries fail to respect each other – and ignore the influence of history on those countries – then conflict is more likely, and it is similar to a person disrespecting another.
“You will see an immediate payoff as your relationships flower,” he wrote in the book. “The small impact that each of us can have on changing the world does not feel concrete enough to most people, but seeing progress in your personal relationships is very concrete.”
That dedication to unconditional love, he said, is the way that individuals can become models for what is needed globally.
And the time is now, he suggests, for such change if our living generations are to leave a more peaceful world for those who follow us. From Afghanistan to Cuba, Russia, Iraq to North Korea and beyond, the countries of the world need a journey of healing and reconciliation, as he writes in the book.
Today, the stakes could not be higher, Hellman noted. Long-running strategies like nuclear deterrence are risky and illogical – over time, given probability theory and the chances of mistake or malice, they won’t work.
“The United States thinks it’s a superpower, but how can we be when Russia or China could destroy us in less than a hour?” he said. “How is that being a superpower?”
As William J. Perry, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense and Stanford professor emeritus at CISAC, said on behalf of the Hellmans’ book, “The struggle for interpersonal dominance can lead to the end of a marriage, but the struggle for geopolitical dominance can lead to the end of civilization.”
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A man adjusts a spotlight above the stage before world leaders' family picture during the Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague March 25, 2014. In his new book, CISAC's Martin Hellman writes that when nations and people get together to talk and learn from one another, peace can be the result.
Encina Hall 616 Serra Street Stanford, CA 94305-6165
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markus.tepe@uni-oldenburg.de
Visiting Scholar at The Europe Center, 2016-2017
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Markus Tepe is a professor of Political Science (Political System of Germany) at the University of Oldenburg. He holds a doctoral degree from the Free University of Berlin (FU Berlin) and an MA in Political Science, Public Law and Economic Policy from the University of Münster. His research centers on public policies, political economy, and laboratory experiments in social science research. Currently, he is conducting a research project on need-based justice and redistribution (FOR2104) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
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Two decades after the integration of much of Eastern Europe into the EU, Europe is faced with increasingly complex security challenges—refugee migrations from the mid-East and north-Africa; Russia’s cross territorial incursions, hybrid warfare, and war on information; strains on social welfare economies; shifting sources of energy; and of course the daily threat of terrorism. On each of these issues, Germany has embraced a leadership role, representing a paradigm shift for a nation that even 70 years after the end of the Second World War is still reluctant to assert itself. US Ambassador to Germany John B. Emerson will address how Germany is reshaping its security policy as it relates to military engagement, intelligence and counter-terrorism, technology, energy, transatlantic trade, and the longer-term threats posed by a changing climate. In addition, he will discuss the emerging political dynamic in Germany and in particular the challenges Chancellor Merkel is facing domestically as Germany seeks to integrate well over a million refugees.
John Emerson was appointed U.S. Ambassador to Germany in 2013. Prior to that, he served as President Clinton’s Deputy Director of Presidential Personnel, and Deputy Director of Intergovernmental Affairs, where he was the President’s liaison to the nation’s governors senior staff. Mr. Emerson also coordinated the Economic Conference of the Clinton-Gore transition team and led the Administration’s efforts to obtain congressional approval of the GATT Uruguay Round Agreement in 1994, and the extension of China’s MFN trading status in 1996. In 2010, President Obama appointed Mr. Emerson to serve on the President’s Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations. Ambassador Emerson was the 2015 recipient of the State Department's prestigious Sue M. Cobb Award for Exemplary Diplomatic Service, which is given annually to one non-career Ambassador who has used their private sector leadership and management skills to make a substantive impact on bilateral or multilateral relations through proactive diplomacy.
John Emerson, US Ambassador to Germany
US Ambassador to Germany
Speaker
With each passing day, computer hacking against countries, organizations and people is forcing the subject of cybersecurity to the top of national security agendas.
An estimated 42.8 million cyber attacks will take place this year, according to experts. Scaling up to meet this challenge is why more than 140 people from science, politics, business and the military attended the fourth annual Cyber Security Summit at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) on Sept. 19-20.
The Munich Security Conference and Deutsche Telekom sponsored the event. CISAC is in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Participants delved deep into issues associated with today’s online world, including how to balance privacy and civil liberties with the need for intelligence, for example. Discussions ranged on questions such as:
• What will the future of warfare look like – human soldiers or killer robots?
• How do we ensure that technological progress does not escape human control?
• What are the biggest challenges combatting the online activities of groups like the Islamic State?
• What are the possible cyberspace conflicts between the U.S., Russia and China?
• Are countries ready for cyber attacks against key infrastructure such as energy, water and utilities, or the U.S. election system, for example?
Electoral impact
In a talk on cyber attacks and the U.S. elections, panelists discussed how such electoral manipulation in the ongoing presidential campaign might happen, and what could be done about it. While it was noted that foreign adversaries could undermine the American public’s confidence in its election system, one expert pointed out that it’s unlikely to occur undetected on a widespread basis.
Credibility is now the battlefield, one panelist said. If hacking occurs, how will an election be validated? The track record shows that Russian has attempted to influence elections in Eastern Europe, so hacking into U.S. political entities is their way to sow doubt among voters.
The economic costs of cyber attacks – $400 to $500 billion a year was one participant’s estimate – and “cyberspace norms” were other issues explored. Countries and companies are grappling with the losses associated with these incursions, and with how – and who – should set the rules for the “digital game.”
On encryption, questions in one discussion revolved around how the public and private sectors can resolve such issues, how far data privacy could be compromised for effective intelligence work, and vice versa.
Online jihadism was another subject. The conference panelists talked about which tools are most effective in countering jihadist propaganda and recruitment on the Internet. Also, the need for Europe and the U.S. to work together on such fronts was mentioned.
CISAC and FSI participants included Amy Zegart, co-director of CISAC and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution; Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution; Martin Hellman, professor emeritus of electrical engineering; among others. Other attendees hailed from U.S. and European Union agencies and businesses, and local Silicon Valley companies.
Zegart said a collaborative spirit and drive for innovation characterizes Stanford. “In the past three years, we have built an exciting program dedicated to educating current and future cyber leaders, producing policy-driven knowledge, and convening leaders across sectors and borders,” she wrote in the program guide.
McFaul, in his opening statement, noted the origins of CISAC – it was created when there was a different technological concern – nuclear materials. Then, scientists and social scientists at CISAC got together to work on nuclear proliferation. Today, the threat is cyber attacks, and CISAC is confronting this challenge. He said the scariest briefing he had in his ambassador position at the U.S. Department of State was on cybersecurity.
For his discussion on terrorism, Hellman brought pages of pro-encryption quotes from government officials. He suggested end-to-end encryption was good for Americans.
Crossing borders
The Munich Security Conference is considered to be the most important informal meeting on security policy. Outside speakers included Michael Cherthoff, former secretary of Homeland Security; Jane Holl Lute, the under secretary general for the United Nations; and Christopher Painter, coordinator for cyber issues at the U.S. Department of State.
Wolfgang Ischinger, the chair of the Munich Security Conference, said at the press conference that, “cybersecurity has over the last few years evolved to be one of the most indispensable agenda items.”
The “quest for rules” in cyberspace, he noted, is overwhelmingly difficult and vitally important.
Thomas Kremer, board member for co-sponsor Deutsche Telekom AG, said, “cyber attacks don’t accept national borders.” Cybersecurity has become a global issue, he explained, with ramifications for countries, companies and everyday people.
He added, “Our chances to fight cyber crime are far better when we collaborate.”
Stanford and CISAC are at the forefront of the national discussion on cybersecurity. The university launched the Stanford Cyber Initiative; hosted President Obama’s cybersecurity summit and defense secretary Ashton Carter’s unveiling of a new U.S. cyber strategy; and CISAC and the Hoover Institution have teamed up in recent years for media roundtables and Congressional bootcamps on cybersecurity.
Finally, CISAC senior research scholar Joe Felter and other experts held Hacking for Defense & Diplomacy class for educators and sponsors on Sept. 7-9. (See the final class presentations here). In spring 2016, they held the first such class to train students in cybersecurity for defense purposes. Steve Blank, a consulting associate professor in the Stanford School of Engineering’s Department of Management Science and Engineering, helped develop the class. This fall, they will prototype a Hacking for Diplomacy course at Stanford.
Click here for the Munich Security Conference’s agenda for this event and a list of participants.
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Michael McFaul, second from the left and the executive director of the Freeman Spogli Institute, talks with other panelists at the Cyber Security Summit on Sept. 19. On the far left is Amy Zegart, co-director of CISAC, and in the middle is Michael Chertoff, former director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. On the far right is Vinh Nguyen, a national intelligence officer for the U.S. federal government, and to his left is Dmitri Alperovich, co-founder of CrowdStrike.
Through a new translation of medieval songs, Stanford German studies Professor Kathryn Starkey reveals an unconventional take on romance.
Medieval courtship brings to mind images of chivalrous knights worshipping fair damsels, expressing their love for their ladies in refined and poetic language.
But courtship did not play out this way for all medieval knights. Neidhart von Reuental (1190-1237), a medieval German poet, composed songs about a fictional knight whose amorous pursuits were often obstructed by local peasants.
In a forthcoming book entitled Neidhart: Selected Songs from the Riedegg Manuscript,Kathryn Starkey, professor of German Studies and faculty affiliate of The Europe Center, and Edith Wenzel, professor emerita of German literature at the University of Aachen (Germany), offer the first collection of Neidhart’s songs translated into English.
During the Middle Ages, Neidhart was considered one of the Minnesänger (literally “love singers”), or German poets who, like the French troubadours, wrote songs and poems about courtly love. But drenched in slapstick humor and sexual innuendos, Neidhart’s lyrics often defied the high style of his fellow poets.
“Neidhart was the most prolific poet of his time,” Starkey said. “But he’s not well known because he has not been translated into English. And so it was important for me to make his work accessible because he’s such a canonical figure and he’s such an interesting figure.”
Although Neidhart did not criticize elite culture, he mocked it by relocating courtly motifs into the realm of ridiculous rustics. “Nothing is sacred for Neidhart,” Starkey said.
“Neidhart is so clever,” she said. “What is unique about him is his humor, parody, and the way that he takes conventions and turns them on their head and surprises us constantly by twisting expectations.”
Knights and free-thinking maidens
Many of Neidhart’s songs take place in a village where the poet imagines an unwanted encounter with local peasants. They bar access to his beloved lady. These fictive peasants also try to imitate courtiers, parading around in fine clothing or carrying swords as would noblemen. Yet they ultimately contaminate courtliness with their unruly antics, as one of the poems suggests:
Look at Engelwan [a peasant], how high he carries his head. Whenever he struts at the dance with his sword drawn, he is not lacking in Flemish courtliness, his father Batze has little to do with that. Now, his son is a vain fool with his rough cap. I compare his puffing himself up to a fat pigeon perched with a full gullet on a grain box.
So why was Neidhart, by all accounts of knightly lineage, so obsessed with, and seemingly threatened by, peasants?
“That’s the million-dollar question,” Starkey said.
There is actually no historical evidence that suggests that knights of this era had this level of contact with the lower classes. For recent scholars, Neidhart’s predicaments might point to tensions between the lesser nobility and peasants.
“Neidhart was composing in upper Austria,” Starkey said, “where there were many ministerial families.”
Though noble, these families served an overlord, and were therefore not entirely free. According to Starkey, “it was important for them to continually affirm their nobility and their difference from the peasants who were also un-free, but of an entirely different social estate.”
Moreover, there were laws concerning class-specific clothing. For example, some laws permitted peasants to wear only gray, blue or black – the cheapest colors to produce.
“So we know that this was a contemporary issue in Neidhart’s period,” she said.
In his poems, Neidhart often depicts himself falling in love with a beautiful peasant woman. Perhaps this was part of a medieval male fantasy to dominate women or showcase women as sexually available, rather than virginal and unattainable.
However, Neidhart’s women could appear empowered.
“In terms of gender,” Starkey said, “he does create a space for women to express their sexual desire.”
With this, Neidhart again departs from conventions of courtly love. While traditional medieval love poems feature a male voice who objectifies his lady, some of his poems imagine maidens talking with one another about whom among the knights they like, why and what to do about it – what Starkey considers “an acknowledgement of female sexuality.”
Translation and teaching
Starkey said she believes that her translations will affect how medieval German literature is taught, given that “Neidhart’s songs are so unusual that if they were translated they could be taught in a whole host of courses that deal with medieval culture, sexuality and humor.”
Her translation has also spawned a digital humanities collaboration.
“I’ve just started a project called ‘The Medieval Sourcebook,’” Starkey said, adding, “Together with my graduate students, we are creating online parallel English translations of medieval texts to be used by teachers and students.”
The Medieval Sourcebook reflects some of the challenges Starkey faced when translating Neidhart into English. Some of the terms he uses – chiefly colloquialisms and idiomatic expressions – hinder translation, since they appear solely in Neidhart’s works.
“We don’t know exactly what some of his expressions mean. You have to look at the context and think about what the possibilities are,” Starkey said.
Reflecting on the value of her contribution, Starkey said she hopes that her translations “will get students thinking about their own language, about foreign language and about the relationship between them, as well as the tensions that arise when you try to translate a cultural document in one language into a cultural document in another.”
After working on Neidhart and with her students, Starkey realized that “we as scholars think we know texts. But when you translate them, you get a completely different understanding of them.”
Media Contacts
Chris Kark, director of humanities communication: (650) 724-8156, ckark@stanford.edu
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The symposium will focus on the key questions that impact health through the year 2020. How could the 2016 election affect health care in the U.S.? How will payment reform affect health systems, physicians and patients? Are the insurance exchanges viable? What challenges pose the biggest threat to global health? Experts from Stanford and beyond address these topics and more as they discuss the future of health policy.
Lloyd Minor, Dean, Stanford University School of Medicine
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Minor, MD, is a scientist, surgeon and academic leader. He is the Carl and Elizabeth Naumann Dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine, a position he has held since December 2012. Minor leads more than 1,500 faculty and 1,000 students at the oldest medical school in the West and has made precision health — the prevention of disease before it strikes — a hallmark of research, education and patient care at Stanford Medicine.
Bob Kocher,a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Venrock
Bob Kocher
Kocher, MD, is a partner at Venrock who focuses on healthcare IT and services investments and is a consulting professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. He served in the Obama Administration as special assistant to the president for health care and economic policy and was one of the key shapers of the Affordable Care Act.
David Entwistle, President and CEO, Stanford Health Care
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Entwistle joined Stanford Health Care as its President and CEO in July, bringing extensive executive experience at leading academic medical centers. Most recently he served as CEO of the University of Utah Hospitals & Clinics, the only academic medical center in the Intermountain West region. While serving at UUHC, Entwistle received the Modern Healthcare “Up and Comers Award,” for significant contributions in health-care administration, management or policy.
Chris Dawes, President and CEO, Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital
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Christopher G. Dawes became President and Chief Executive Officer of Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford in 1997 after five years of service as Chief Operating Officer. Under his guidance, the hospital, research center and regional medical network has been ranked as one of the best in the nation, as an industry leader in patient safety and innovation in providing a full complement of services for children and expectant mothers.
Panelists:
Marcella Alsan, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Stanford University
Marcella Alsan’s research focuses on the relationship between health and socioeconomic disparities with a focus on infectious disease. Another vein of research focuses on the microfoundations of antibiotic overuse and resistance. She received a BA degree in cognitive neuroscience from Harvard University, a master’s degree in international public health from Harvard School of Public Health, a medical degree from Loyola University, and a PhD in economics from Harvard University. She is board-certified in both internal medicine and infectious disease. She trained at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, completing the Hiatt Global Health Equity Residency Fellowship in internal medicine. She combined her PhD with an Infectious Disease Fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital. She currently is an infectious disease specialist at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Palo Alto.
Laurence Baker, Chair of Health Research and Policy, Stanford University
Laurence Baker is an economist interested in the organization and economic performance of the U.S. health-care system, and his research has investigated a range of topics including financial incentives in health care, competition in health-care markets, health insurance and managed care and health-care technology adoption. Baker is a past recipient of the ASHE medal from ASHEcon and the Alice Hersch Award from AcademyHealth. He received his BA from Calvin College, and his MA and PhD in economics from Princeton University.
Eran Bendavid, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Stanford University
Eran Bendavid is an infectious diseases physician. His research interests involve understanding the relationship between policies and health outcomes in developing countries. He explores how decisions about foreign assistance for health are made, and how those decisions affect the health of those whom assistance aims to serve. Dr. Bendavid is also a disease modeler, and uses that skill to explore issues of resource allocation in low and middle-income countries with cost-effectiveness analyses. His recent research projects include an impact evaluation of the US assistance program for HIV in Africa, and an exploration of the association between drug prices, aid and health outcomes in countries heavily affected by HIV.
Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Medicine, Stanford University
Jay Bhattacharya’s research focuses on the constraints that vulnerable populations face in making decisions that affect their health status, as well as the effects of government policies and programs designed to benefit vulnerable populations. He has published empirical economics and health services research on the elderly, adolescents, HIV/AIDS and managed care. Most recently, he has researched the regulation of the viatical-settlements market (a secondary life-insurance market that often targets HIV patients) and summer/winter differences in nutritional outcomes for low-income American families. He is also working on a project examining the labor-market conditions that help determine why some U.S. employers do not provide health insurance.
M. Kate Bundorf, Associate Professor of Medicine, Stanford University
M. Kate Bundorf is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She received her M.B.A. and M.P.H. degrees from The University of California at Berkeley and her Ph.D. from The Wharton School. She was a Fulbright Lecturer and Visiting Professor at Fudan School of Public Health in Shanghai, China in 2009 and 2010. Her research, which focuses on health insurance markets, has been published in leading economics and health policy journals and has received funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She received the 13th Annual Health Care Research Award from The National Institute for Health Care Management in 2007.
David Chan, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Stanford University
David Chan is a physician and economist whose research focuses on productivity in US health care. His research draws on insights from labor and organizational economics. He is particularly interested in studying what drives physician behavior, how this explains differences in productivity in health care delivery, and what the implications are for the design of health care. He is the recipient of the 2014 NIH Director’s High-Risk, High-Reward Early Independence Award to study the optimal balance of information in health information technology for patient care. David Chan is also an investigator at the Department of Veterans Affairs and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Kathryn M. McDonald, Executive Director of the Center for Health Policy and the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research, Stanford University
Kathryn McDonald, MM, is the Executive Director of the Center for Health Policy (CHP) and Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research (PCOR) and a senior scholar at the Centers. She is also Associate Director of the Stanford-UCSF Evidence-based Practice Center (under RAND). Her work focuses on measures and interventions to achieve evidence-based patient-centered healthcare quality and patient safety. Mrs. McDonald has served as a project director and principal investigator on a number of research projects at the Stanford School of Medicine, including the development and ongoing enhancement of the Quality and Patient Safety Indicators for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. She has authored numerous peer reviewed articles and government reports, including several with wide enough followership to merit recent updates: Care Coordination Measures Atlas, Closing the Quality Gap, and Patient Safety Practices.
Michelle Mello, Professor of Law and of Health Research and Policy, Stanford University
Michelle Mello is Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and Professor of Health Research and Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine. She conducts empirical research into issues at the intersection of law, ethics, and health policy. She is the author of more than 150 articles and book chapters on the medical malpractice system, medical errors and patient safety, public health law, research ethics, the obesity epidemic, pharmaceuticals, and other topics. From 2000 to 2014, Dr. Mello was a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, where she directed the School’s Program in Law and Public Health. In 2013-14 she completed a Lab Fellowship at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. Dr. Mello teaches courses in torts and public health law. She holds a J.D. from the Yale Law School, a Ph.D. in Health Policy and Administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an M.Phil. from Oxford University, where she was a Marshall Scholar, and a B.A. from Stanford University. In 2013, she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (formerly known as the Institute of Medicine).
Grant Miller, Associate Professor of Medicine, Stanford University
Grant Miller is Director of the Stanford Center for International Development, an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine, a Core Faculty Member at the Center for Health Policy/Primary Care and Outcomes Research, a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). His primary interests are health economics, development economics, and economic demography. As a health and development economist based at the Stanford Medical School, Dr. Miller’s overarching focus is research and teaching aimed at developing more effective health improvement strategies for developing countries. His agenda addresses three major interrelated themes. (1) First, what are the major causes of population health improvement around the world and over time? (2) Second, what are the behavioral underpinnings of the major determinants of population health improvement? (3) Third, how can programs and policies use these behavioral insights to improve population health more effectively?
Douglas K. Owens, Director of the Center for Health Policy and the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research, Stanford University
Douglas K. Owens, MD, MS, is the Henry J. Kaiser, Jr., Professor at Stanford University, where he is a professor of medicine. He is director of the Center for Health Policy in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and director of the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research (PCOR) in the Department of Medicine. He is a general internist and associate director of the Center for Innovation to Implementation at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. A past member of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, he has helped lead the development of national U.S. guidelines on screening for HIV, hepatitis C, hepatitis B, lung cancer, colorectal cancer, breast cancer, and use of aspirin and statins to prevent cardiovascular disease.
Maria Polyakova, Assistant Professor of Health Research and Policy, Stanford University
Maria Polyakova, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Health Research and Policy at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Her research investigates questions surrounding the role of government in the design and financing of health insurance systems. She is especially interested in the relationships between public policies and individuals’ decision-making in health care and health insurance, as well as in the risk protection and re-distributive aspects of health insurance systems. She received a BA degree in Economics and Mathematics from Yale University and a PhD in Economics from MIT.
David M. Studdert, Professor of Medicine and of Law, Stanford University
David M. Studdert is a leading expert in the fields of health law and empirical legal research. His scholarship explores how the legal system influences the health and well-being of populations. A prolific scholar, he has authored more than 150 articles and book chapters, and his work appears frequently in leading international medical, law and health policy publications. Professor Studdert has received the Alice S. Hersh New Investigator Award from AcademyHealth, the leading organization for health services and health policy research in the United States. He was awarded a Federation Fellowship (2006) and a Laureate Fellowship (2011) by the Australian Research Council. He holds a law degree from University of Melbourne and a doctoral degree in health policy and public health from the Harvard School of Public Health.
Bob Kocher
