Measures and Methods to Advance the Science of Teaming and Coordination in Cancer Care (Speaker Bios)

Veronica Chollette, RN, MS is a Program Director in the Health Systems and Interventions Research Branch (HSIRB) of the Healthcare Delivery Research Program. She has been managing a portfolio of grants at NCI for over 30 years. In HSIRB, her training and experience allow her to manage NCI-funded social and behavioral research directed at multiple contextual levels to improve rates of cervical cancer screening and HPV vaccination; factors associated with disparities in Prostate Cancer, PSA screening and the downstream consequences following screening; and studies that improve interprofessional teamwork in healthcare delivery. She is a co-lead of the Healthcare Teams Initiative, which addresses multiple strategies to improve patient outcomes through the delivery of healthcare grounded in principles of evidence-based team research. Ms. Chollette received her Bachelor of Science in Nursing and master’s degree in health systems management from George Mason University.

Dr. Janet de Moor is the Acting Associate Director of the Healthcare Delivery Research Program in the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at the National Cancer Institute. In this role, she leads research and programmatic activities focused on cancer-related financial hardship, employment outcomes after cancer, and cancer survivorship. Dr. de Moor previously served as a Program Director in the Healthcare Delivery Research Program and prior to that the Office of Cancer Survivorship. Before coming to the National Cancer Institute in 2011, Dr. de Moor was on the faculty of The Ohio State University College of Public Health. She received her Master of Public Health degree and Doctorate in Behavioral Science from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Public Health.

Michelle Doose, Ph.D., M.P.H, serves as a program director in the Office of Cancer Survivorship at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and holds a secondary appointment in the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch of the Behavioral Research Program at NCI. As a program director, Dr. Doose is responsible for advancing cancer survivorship research and supporting programs and initiatives to promote health equity and improve the health of populations that experience cancer disparities. She is particularly interested in advancing the science of care coordination within and across healthcare teams and health system boundaries to improve health outcomes and quality of care for cancer survivors. Dr. Doose has applied epidemiological methods to study the composition and complexity of multidisciplinary care teams, team effectiveness, and care fragmentation from a health system perspective using primary and secondary data sources, including surveys, interviews, medical records, claims data, and cancer registries.

Nick Faris is a Program Coordinator for the Global Hematology team at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in the department of Global Pediatric Medicine. Before joining St. Jude, he was a member of the Baptist Cancer Center’s Thoracic Oncology team in Memphis, TN, for more than a decade. During that time, he worked in several leadership positions, most recently as the department Director. In that role, he helped coordinate system-level efforts to design, implement, and improve clinical programs spanning the care continuum, from tobacco cessation to survivorship. All efforts served the team’s vision to eliminate lung cancer stigma and mortality for all people. That team’s work has received international attention and millions in grant and philanthropic support. Nick has also served as a member of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer Patient Advocacy Committee, the National Lung Cancer Roundtable’s (NLCRT) National Stigma Summit and the NLCRT Survivorship Committee. He is particularly interested in supporting large-scale interventions at the intersection of epidemiology, dissemination and implementation science, and team science.

Sylvia J. Hysong, Ph.D. is a Professor of Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, and Director of the Houston Evidence-based Rapid Measurement and EvaluationS Center (HERMES), an evidence-based policy evaluation center funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs Quality Enhancement Research Initiative (QUERI). She is also a Lead Research Scientist at the Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness and Safety (IQuESt, a Center of Innovation sponsored by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Health Services Research and Development Service), and Alumni Affairs Director for the VA Quality Scholars Program Coordinating Center.

She is an industrial/organizational psychologist with nearly three decades of experience in organizational research and quality improvement implementation. Funded currently by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality, her research interests include primary health care as a work environment, feedback systems, team coordination, and performance measurement. In 2020 she was inducted as a fellow of the Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology for her outstanding and career-long contributions to translating the science of I/O psychology into solving health services research problems. She is the author of 76 peer-reviewed publications, over 140 national and international presentations, and is a member of the VA Health Services Research & Development Scientific Merit Review Board. She is also an accomplished educator, and is one of only 10 faculty holding Norton Rose Fulbright Faculty Excellence Awards in all four categories of Educational Excellence.

Dr. Hysong received her doctorate in 2000 in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Rice University, and completed her Health Services Research post-doctoral fellowship in 2007 at iQuESt.

MICHAELA KERRISSEY, PhD, MS, is an Assistant Professor of Management on the faculty at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. She analyzes how organizations innovate, improve, and integrate services, with a focus on team climates and joint problem-solving.

Dr. Kerrissey has authored over 30 research papers on team and organizational topics and publishes in leading academic journals in both management and healthcare, such as Administrative Science Quarterly and Social Science & Medicine. She also contributes to popular outlets such as Harvard Business Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and NEJM Catalyst. She has received Best Paper awards from the Academy of Management and the Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research. In 2022, she was named on the 40 Under 40 list by the Boston Congress of Public Health and in 2023 was listed on Thinkers50 Radar, a global listing of top management thinkers.

Dr. Kerrissey designed the Organization Science for a New Era course at the Harvard School of Public Health. She teaches in multiple executive programs at Harvard’s business and medical schools and in 2023 received the Harvard Chan School Teaching Citation Award.

Dr. Kerrissey earned a PhD from Harvard Business School, an MSc from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, and a BA from Duke University. She was awarded the Robertson Scholarship and Hart Fellowship at Duke and the Reynolds Fellowship at Harvard. Prior to academia, she was a consulting team leader at The Bridgespan Group, which was launched by Bain & Company.

Dr. Lisa C. Lindley, PhD, RN, FPCN, FAAN is an Associate Professor and Nightingale Endowed Faculty Fellow in the College of Nursing at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Dr. Lindley holds a Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Nursing from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a Master of Science Degree in Business from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research training was supported by an NIH T32 pre-doctoral fellowship, AHRQ R36 dissertation award, and NIH K01 career development award. Dr. Lindley’s research focuses on the intersection of pediatrics, access, quality, and equity. The primary goal of her research is to promote quality, accessible care children for children and adolescents with serious illness and their families. Her research incorporates data science, advanced statistical approaches, and BigData to test real-world health services and policy interventions. She serves as Principal Investigator for the PedEOL Care Research Group. Dr. Lindley is the recipient of multiple NIH research project grants (R01, R56) in support of her research work, and has published widely in the field of pediatric end-of-life care. Dr. Lindley is an active member of the Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association, America Academy of Nursing, and Statewide Pediatric Palliative Care Coalitions Network. She was recognized as the 2023 Distinguished Researcher by the Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association. Dr. Lindley is a member of the Sigma Theta Tau International honor society. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine and as a peer reviewer for NIH.

John Mathieu is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at the University of Connecticut, where he also holds the GE Capital Chair in Business. His primary areas of interest include models of team and multi-team effectiveness, leadership, training effectiveness, and cross-level models of organizational behavior. He has conducted work with several Fortune 500 companies, the armed services (i.e., Army, Navy, and Air Force), federal and state agencies (e.g., NRC, NASA, FAA, DOT), and numerous public and private organizations. Dr. Mathieu has over 150 publications, 350 presentations at national and international conferences, and has been a PI or Co-PI on over $12M in grants and contracts. He is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology, American Psychological Association, and the Academy of Management. He serves on numerous editorial boards and has guest edited special volumes of top-level journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Old Dominion University.

Dr. Mathieu is a leading scholar on multi-level investigations having published top-tier articles on: the evolution and future of the paradigm, the construct validity of aggregate variables, multi-level homology, numerous empirical investigations, and co-edited a special issue of Academy of Management on multi-level issues. He is adept at measurement development, multi-level SEM analyses, and quasi-experimental and longitudinal designs. He has authored seminal works on team composition, processes and emergent states, shared mental models, charting, and multi-team systems. He has conducted research on team and unit level phenomena with Army populations for over 20 years, and served as a PI or CO-PI on numerous Army grants and contracts.

Erika Moen, M.S., Ph.D., is a health services researcher with expertise in network analysis, biostatistics, and cancer research. Her research program uses patient-sharing networks as a quantitative, scalable approach for indirectly measuring relationships between physicians based on shared patients observed in administrative data. Multidisciplinary relationships are especially relevant for diseases such as cancer, which often require complex care teams to coordinate treatment. She has expertise in leveraging nationwide Medicare claims data, SEER-Medicare linked data, and institutional electronic health record (EHR) data to assemble patient-sharing networks and examine associations with outcomes. She is currently leading an NCI R37 MERIT award to develop a novel network-based measure of “linchpin physicians,” defined as those who are the only one of their specialty type among their neighbors’ ties. They represent a critical potential weakness in access to care; for example, should a linchpin medical oncologist retire or move away, physicians in that network lack established ties to another medical oncologist. This measure goes beyond traditional measures of geographic access to cancer providers based on density at a state or county level by recognizing the importance of relationships between interdisciplinary physicians that may span geographies, which is critical for delivering high quality cancer care. Through her research, she is committed to working towards improving equitable access to cancer care using the data-driven approaches.

Ingrid M. Nembhard, Ph.D., M.S., is the Fishman Family President’s Distinguished Professor, Professor of Health Care Management, and Professor of Management (Organizational Behavior) at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on how characteristics of healthcare organizations, their leaders, and staff contribute to their ability to implement new practices, engage in continuous organizational learning, and ultimately improve quality of care. She uses qualitative and quantitative research methods to examine healthcare delivery from provider and patient perspectives, and to evaluate organizational performance. Her research provides insights about how leaders manage change, the role of psychological safety in organizations, teamwork within and across organizations, strategies for improving patient experience, and organizational efforts to learn new practices. Her research has been recognized by the Academy of Management, AcademyHealth, and Industry Studies Association, and published in leading management, health services, and clinical journals. Prior to joining the faculty at the The Wharton School, she was the Ira V. Hiscock Tenured Associate Professor at Yale School of Public Health, Associate Professor at Yale School of Management, and Associate Director of the Health Care Management Program at Yale. Dr. Nembhard received her Ph.D. in Health Policy and Management, with a concentration in Organizational Behavior from Harvard University through a joint program between Harvard Business School and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She received her M.S. in Health Policy and Management from Harvard School of Public Health, and her B.A. in Ethics, Politics and Economics and in Psychology from Yale University.

Jeremy has lived with an oligodendroglioma since he we 12 years old. After several recurrences, he has gone through multiple surgeries, radiation treatments, standard chemotherapy, and experimental treatments in pediatric and adult settings. When he’s not focusing on his professional pursuits supporting young people around the globe to protect the oceans, he passionately advocates for the brain tumor and young adult cancer communities through writing, public speaking, fundraising, and lobbying. Jeremy’s writings have been featured on platforms such as the Washington Post, and he has spoken to various groups including the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; National Cancer Institute; and the American College of Surgeons. He has also served as an advisor to young adult cancer programs at Dana Farber and UCSF. Jeremy received an MS in Health and Medical Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health’s Joint Medical Program, and a BA in Environmental Biology from Washington University in St. Louis, where he graduated summa cum laude as an Ethan A.H. Shepley Scholar, the University’s highest honor.

Dr. Pollack is the Katey Ayers Endowed Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the School of Nursing. He is a practicing internal medicine physician whose research focuses on two main areas. The first investigates social determinants of health, with an emphasis on housing policies including the health effects of housing mobility programs, housing affordability, and neighborhood context. The second theme focuses on cancer prevention and control, including issues related to health disparities and the role of provider and patient social networks across the cancer continuum.

Donna M. Posluszny, PhD, ABPP, is an Associate Professor of Medicine, Division of Hematology-Oncology, University of Pittsburgh. She is Associate Director of Training (Clinical) in the Biobehavioral Cancer Control Program, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Hillman Cancer Center (UPMC HCC). As a licensed psychologist, she provides psychological services to cancer patients and their family caregivers at the Center for Counseling and Cancer Support at UPMC HCC. She also teaches and supervises trainees in patient care.

Dr. Posluszny is board-certified in clinical health psychology. She received her doctorate from the joint Clinical and Health Psychology Program, Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh. She completed a clinical internship at UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital (formerly Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic).

In her National Cancer Institute-funded research, Dr. Posluszny is examining psychosocial and behavioral strategies to help patients and family caregivers work as a team to successfully manage the patient’s medical regimen after allogeneic stem cell transplantation, and thus improve both patient and family caregiver psychological and health outcomes. She has examined teamwork in patient-family caregiver dyads by exploring how dyads decide who will be responsible for what tasks and considering how the division of responsibilities is associated with ultimate adherence to the medical regimen. She has also examined psychosocial, behavioral, and quality of life outcomes in other cancer populations including those with breast, gynecologic, head and neck, and hematological malignancies. This work has suggested clinical strategies to maximize these patients’ well-being.

Dr. Steitz is an Instructor in Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He completed a PhD in Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University in 2020, studying a quantitative framework to measure communication-related work among care teams treating patients with breast cancer. Dr. Steitz’s research focuses on improving care coordination and information sharing during transitions between care environments. He applies quantitative methods to study data artifacts from the electronic health record and patient portal to generate scalable insights at the intersection of communication, information sharing, and clinical workflow. He is passionate about applying and implementing his research findings to improve healthcare and healthcare delivery and maintains an active role as a clinical builder to develop and implement novel tools in the Epic electronic health record.

I am a physician scientist with 30 years of patient care experience in both the ambulatory- and hospital-based settings. Grounded by this extensive and comprehensive healthcare delivery experience, my research steered from individually targeted interventions to Implementation and Healthcare Delivery research. To more effectively study implementation and healthcare delivery, I stepped into leadership positions that encompassed supervision of physician faculty, administration of clinical services, and fiscal responsibilities. As Chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine, first at Virginia Commonwealth University Health System then the University of California (UC) at Davis, I led, designed, implemented and sustained change in our rapidly changing healthcare delivery landscape. Highlights of my research include:
Program in Operations and Workflow Effectiveness Research (POWER) -- I established POWER at Virginia Commonwealth University to address complex care delivery challenges by applying mixed methods and principles from various disciplines. In collaboration with Dr. Heim from the University of Washington, one POWER project applied Systems Engineering principles and discrete event simulation modeling to evaluate alternative scenarios of hospitalized patients on the General Internal Medicine teams. Our study was highlighted by Kohn and Greyson as “a breakthrough in the scientific rigor of hospital operations” in their Journal of Hospital Medicine editorial “Clinical Operations Research: A New Frontier for Inquiry in Academic Health Systems”.
Interprofessional Teamwork in Multiteam Systems -- As healthcare delivery processes are increasingly mediated through Electronic Health Records (EHRs), my research has steered towards studying the changing healthcare delivery ecosystem including Interprofessional Teamwork in Multiteam Systems. I brought together a team to apply social network analyses with the goal to harness the enormous amount of data in EHRs and enhance patient care through the development of highly effective data visualization for patients, providers, and clinical managers/administrators.

Sallie J. Weaver, PhD, MHS, is a Senior Scientist and Program Director in the Health Systems and Interventions Research Branch (HSIRB) at the National Cancer Institute. Sallie manages and conducts research focused on organizational factors that influence clinical team performance, and interventions designed to optimize patient safety, care quality, and coordination within and across health system boundaries. She co-directs the NCI Healthcare Teams & Teamwork Processes in Cancer Care Delivery initiative that aims to improve the outcomes and experiences of people facing cancer through research on teaming in cancer care and translation of evidence-based team performance and care coordination interventions into practice. Sallie’s interests also include research addressing disparities in care quality and access. She also currently supports the NCI Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences Rural Cancer Control Research initiatives.

Stephanie Zajac, Ph.D. is a Senior Change and Leadership Practitioner in the Leadership Institute at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Stephanie received her Master’s in Industrial Organizational Psychology from the University of Central Florida and her doctorate in the same area at Rice University. She has also earned her International Coach Federation credential as an Associate Certified Coach (ACC).

She has over 10 years of experience working in healthcare and other high reliability organizations in aeronautics, the armed services, and oil and gas. Within the Leadership Institute, she focuses on designing, developing, and implementing interventions to improve team effectiveness across the organization. This includes developing assessments to evaluate team performance, helping leaders and team members identify areas of strength and opportunities for improvement, and evaluating the effectiveness of training and development programs. She is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Organizational Psychology Review, Group & Organization Management, Joint Commission on Quality and Patient Safety, and the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Prior to joining MD Anderson, she worked for Houston Methodist Hospital in the Methodist Institute for Technology, Education, and Innovation. In this role, she developed and evaluated clinical and teamwork training for hospital personnel and industry healthcare partners and led quality and safety improvement efforts.