OUR EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Kate Nicholson, JD, is a civil rights attorney and a nationally-recognized expert on the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). She served in the U.S. Department of Justice for 18 years, where she litigated and managed cases, coordinated federal disability policy, and drafted the current ADA regulations.
Kate developed intractable pain after a surgical mishap left her unable to sit or stand and severely limited in walking for many years. She gave the TEDx talk, What We Lose When We Undertreat Pain, and speaks widely at universities and conferences and to medical groups.
Kate has published academic and opinion pieces related to pain in the American Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, the Washington Post, the LA Times, Washington Monthly, STAT, and others, and is frequently interviewed in the press.
She was an appointed member of the Opioid Workgroup of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a 2019-20 Mayday Pain & Society Fellow. Kate also serves on task forces and working groups of aligned civil rights, disability rights, women’s health, and drug policy organizations.
Kate was a Senior Fellow at Dartmouth College and is a graduate of Harvard Law School.
Kate is Executive Director of the National Pain Advocacy Center
OUR BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Juan M. Hincapie-Castillo, PharmD, MS, PhD is an assistant professor of Epidemiology at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. He is also a faculty member at the UNC Center of Pharmacoepidemiology and the UNC Injury Prevention Research Center. Recently, he received the 2020 New Investigator Award from the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy and the 2020 Emerging Leader Award from the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology. He is a consultant for the Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee for the Food and Drug Administration.
Juan’s research focuses on drug utilization and safety in pain management, the effects of State and Federal laws on patient outcomes, and the assessment of patient safety and quality for inpatient pain management.
Areas of expertise: pain, drug utilization and safety in pain management, pharmacoepidemiology (the study of use and effects of drugs in populations), legal epidemiology (how laws affect patient health outcomes).
Juan is the President of the National Pain Advocacy Center.
Twitter: @DrJuanHC
Dawn is a former youth and young adult Lay Chaplain turned writer, health advocate, and family caregiver for dementia, skin cancer, and end of life.
Diagnosed with Spondyloarthritis in 2002, Dawn entered health advocacy in 2011 and founded the acclaimed weekly Twitter chat group, Spoonie Chat, in 2013. Spoonie Chat is an inclusive support space for patients and a bridge between the traditional disability movement and folks with less visible disabilities like arthritis, fibromyalgia, chronic pain, and mental illness.
Throughout its decade-long run, Spoonie Chat has become a community touchstone uniting patients across diagnosis groups, raising awareness, and driving conversations with students, clinicians, researchers, and journalists.
Over the years, Dawn’s work has grown to encompass many diagnosis groups spanning the chronic illness, disability and neuro-diverse communities, and others experiencing life altering differences. In particular, Dawn has focused on the disparities in care and discrimination faced by people of color in the chronic illness community. She was featured in Eric Boodman's Murrow Award Winning STAT News piece, “How medicine erased Black women from a ‘white man’s disease’.”
Dawn looks forward to growing patient centered advocacy, engaging the community to tell their stories on their own terms, to participate in narrative medicine, and leveraging cultural transformation to eliminate stigmas around chronic pain and all disabilities.
Dawn is the Secretary of the National Pain Advocacy Center and the Chair of the Community Leadership Council. She lives in Michigan with her family and a cadre of hand raised butterflies.
Julie Reiskin, LSCW has been Executive Director of the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition (CCDC) since 1996. CCDC is the premiere organization in Colorado advocating for disability rights. Its mission is to advocate for social justice for people with all types of disabilities.
Through CCDC and her work in the disability community, Julie has gained expertise on nonprofit accountability and best practices, publicly funded long-term community based services, disability rights law, public benefits, health policy and Medicaid, and the intersectionality of systemic and individual advocacy.
Julie is also adjunct faculty at the Denver University Graduate School of Social Work, where she teaches Policy Advocacy and Analysis and Program Development Curricula. In 2010, Julie was appointed by President Obama to serve on the board of directors of the Legal Services Corporation. She also serves on the boards of the Colorado ACLU and the Denver Foundation.
As a wheelchair user with Multiple Sclerosis, Julie is deeply concerned about the laws limiting access to pain treatment and medication and their impact on the disability community. On September 6, 2019, Julie and Kate were asked to testify before the Colorado General Assembly’s Opioid Task Force.
Julie received her master’s in Social Work from the University of Connecticut, with a major in community organizing in 1989. She obtained a B.S. in Women’s Studies from the University of Connecticut in 1985. She lives in Denver with her partner of more than 20 years and has two adult stepsons, who both make her very proud.
Julie is Treasurer of the National Pain Advocacy Center.
Lindsay Baran, MS
Lindsay Baran, MS is a Research Director at NORC at the University of Chicago in the Health Care Evaluation Department. Her work focuses on health equity, stakeholder engagement, disability accessibility, and program evaluation. Prior to NORC, Lindsay worked for over 15 years in disability policy, advocacy, research, and service provision, most recently as the Policy Director at the National Council on Independent Living (NCIL), a national grassroots disability rights organization. At NCIL, Lindsay worked with policymakers, partner organizations, and stakeholders across the country to coordinate and implement NCIL's legislative and advocacy activities, and she started and co-chaired NCIL’s Chronic Pain/ Opioids Task Force along with NPAC’s Kate Nicholson.
Lindsay has Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and multiple related chronic conditions, and has lived with chronic pain for most of her life. She has strong knowledge of disability and chronic pain policy, and she is deeply committed to cross-disability and cross-movement efforts. Outside of her professional roles, she has organized and facilitated chronic pain peer support groups in-person and online in Chicago and Washington, DC.
Areas of expertise: disability rights, health care, chronic pain, chronic illness, public policy, advocacy, project management, rare diseases
Email: lindsaybaran@gmail.com Twitter: @lindsay_baran
Laura Mills
Laura Mills is a human rights researcher and advocate. She previously worked at Human Rights Watch, where she conducted research on the right to health, disability rights, and older person’s rights in the US, Russia, Ukraine, and Central Asia.
In 2018, for Human Rights Watch, she authored a 99-page report, Not Allowed to Be Compassionate: Chronic Pain, the Overdose Crisis, and Unintended Harms in the US, which highlighted the impact of restrictive policies and practices on chronic pain patients.
Together with physician and patient activists, she met with members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to advocate for much-needed clarifications of the CDC guideline. She also met with representatives of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, campaigned to stop simplistic but harmful bills on Capitol Hill, and echoed calls for Oregon to back down from a proposal to involuntarily taper Medicaid patients off opioids. Throughout the reporting process, Laura was inspired by people she met who endured serious, often under-treated pain every day. While her project for HRW came to an end in June 2019, she felt motivated to continue her work on behalf of people in pain.
Ola Ojewumi
Ola Ojewumi is an activist, writer, speaker, and non-profit founder. She is also a double organ transplant (heart and kidney) and cancer survivor. As a result of her health issues, Ola became a wheelchair user who suffers from chronic pain. As an advocate, she has advised the Obama Administration and other policymakers on policies to advance the lives of people living with disabilities.
Ola has written for publications like CNN and the Huffington Post, and she has appeared on in the national media, such as on PBS’s Democracy Now and MSNBC’s AM Joy with Joy Reid. Her speeches alongside Senator Cory Booker and Senator Bob Menendez have gone viral with 3.7 million views.
Ola is the board representative to the Community Leadership Council.