Mara Baer, MPH

Mara Baer, M.P.H., is the Founder & President of AgoHealth, LLC an SBA Certified Women-Owned Small Business offering health policy analysis and strategic counsel to state governmental entities and non-profit organizations. Mara is an expert in both public and private health insurance market policy. With over 20 years of experience, Mara has advised senior officials in federal and state government as well as insurance market carriers on a variety of health care issues, shaping health policy to ensure access to care and coverage.

Mara has Thoracic Outlet Syndrome, a rare nerve condition causing nerve entrapment and ongoing nerve pain. She has leveraged her role on the Connect for Health Colorado (state exchange) board and the Colorado Connect board to elevate the challenges faced by small business owners and consumers of health care. She has written about her chronic pain experience and is passionate about advancing system changes to support pain sufferers.

Areas of expertise: Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, private health insurance markets, pandemic-related policy, drug pricing, state and federal legislative and regulatory processes and related advocacy strategies

Email: mara@agohealth.com Twitter: @marabaeragohlth  

Tamara Baker, PhD

Tamara Baker, PhD is a professor in the School of Medicine at the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Department of Psychiatry.  She is an expert on racial disparities in pain management and treating pain in older populations. She previously served as the Director of the Gerontology Program at the University of Kansas.

Tamara’s research examines health disparities and social determinants of health among diverse racial and marginalized populations. She considers inequities in the management of disease and designs interventional programs that address barriers to optimal symptom management. 

Areas of expertise: pain, pain management, race and ethnicity, health disparities, barriers to access to care, gerontology/aging studies, chronic disease management, social determinants of health  

Email: tamara_baker@med.unc.edu  Twitter: @DrTamaraBaker

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

Leo Beletsky, JD, M.P.H.

Leo Beletsky, JD, M.P.H, is a professor at Northeastern University School of Law and the Bouvé College of Health Sciences. His is an expert on the public health impact of laws and their enforcement with special focus on infectious disease, drug policy, and how health policies shape individual liberties. 

Beletsky founded and leads the Health In Justice Institute and regularly consults with government and non-government entities. In 2020, he was given the award for community service in law, medicine, and health care from the American Association of Law Schools.  

Areas of expertise: public health law and policy, drug law and policy, human rights, health disparities

Email: l.beletsky@northeastern.edu  Twitter: @LeoBeletsky

Hance Clarke MD, FRCPC, PhD

Hance Clarke MD, FRCPC, PhD is the Director of Pain Services and Medical Director of the Pain Research Unit at the Toronto General Hospital. Hance regularly speaks nationally and internationally and he has played a leading role in educating the Canadian public about pain control, appropriate opioid prescribing and misconceptions about opioid use, and the need for further studies on the beneficial and adverse effects of cannabis.  

He is a public champion of evidence-based solutions for the overdose crisis and a national pain and addiction strategist. 

Areas of expertise: pain management, acute pain, chronic pain, genetics of acute to chronic pain translation, public health, opioids, cannabis, addiction

Email: Hance.Clarke@uhn.ca  Twitter: @Drhaclarke 

Beth Darnall, PhD

Beth Darnall, PhD is Associate Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine in the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative, and Pain Medicine. She directs the Stanford Pain Relief Innovations Lab, and leads NIH and PCORI-funded clinical trials that investigate behavioral medicine for acute and chronic pain. She is a scientific member of the NIH Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee, and an appointed member of the CDC Opioid Workgroup.

Beth has provided testimony to Congress and federal agencies on pain, opioids, and harms associated with opioid tapering.  She is the author of numerous books and her work has been featured in national media outlets. Beth speaks internationally about the psychology of pain relief, including at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Areas of expertise: pain, pain management, acute pain, chronic pain, behavioral medicine, patient protections with opioid prescribing and tapering, brief and digital interventions 

Email: snapl@stanford.edu     Twitter: @BethDarnall

Daniel Goldberg, JD, PhD

Daniel Goldberg, JD, PhD is a professor at the University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus, in the Center for Bioethics and Humanities. He is an attorney, a historian of medicine, and a public health ethicist. He focuses on law, policy, and bioethics as they relate to the social determinants of health, public health policy, chronic illness, health inequities and stigma. 

Goldberg is an expert on the history of pain without lesion. He has been writing and speaking about the undertreatment of pain in the U.S. since 2000.

Areas of expertise: pain, undertreatment of pain, public health policy, health inequities, social determinants of health, stigma

Email: daniel.goldberg@ucdenver.edu  Twitter: @prof_goldberg

Juan M. Hincapie-Castillo, PharmD, MS, PhD

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

Stefan G. Kertesz, MD, MSc

Stefan G. Kertesz, MD, MSc is a physician in internal medicine and addiction medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Birmingham Veterans Affairs Medical Center. Through his research, work, and advocacy, Stefan seeks to foster the provision of effective health services for populations that may contend with poverty, homelessness, addiction, pain, and stigma. 

Starting in 2016, Stefan began to write and speak on the damage to patients with severe chronic pain patients who faced increasing barriers to accessing their prescription medication. He frequently writes for or appears in interviews in the national media. 

Areas of expertise: internal medicine, Veterans’ care, homelessness, addiction, pain, and stigma 

Email: skertesz@uabmc.edu  Twitter: @StefanKertesz

Sean Mackey, MD, PhD

Sean Mackey, MD, PhD is the Chief of the Division of Pain Medicine and Professor of Anesthesiology, Perioperative, and Pain Medicine at the Stanford University Medical Center.  He is a physician-scientist who focuses on defining the factors that cause pain to become chronic, discovering methods to prevent the persistence of pain, and finding novel therapies for its treatment. 

Sean is Past-President of the American Academy of Pain Medicine (AAPM). He co-authored the Institutes of Medicine’s report on Relieving Pain in America and was Co-Chair of the Oversight Committee for the HHS/NIH National Pain Strategy (NPS), an effort to establish a national health strategy for pain care, education and research. He has been principle investigator on multiple NIH awards, is the author of over 200 journal articles and book chapters in addition to giving numerous national and international lectures, and has served on several key advisory committees.

Areas of expertise: chronic pain, pain management, pain medicine, neuropathic pain, neuroimaging, psychophysics, public health, health policy, patient outcomes, medical education

Email: snapl@stanford.edu Twitter: @DrSeanMackey  

Monica Mallampalli, PhD, MSc

Monica Mallampalli, PhD, MSc is a biomedical scientist and a women’s health advocate. As a Senior Advisor to Healthy Women, she created the first summit focused on chronic pain in women in 2019. She is an expert on sex differences in pain processing and gender disparities in pain care. A scientific thought leader, Monica frequently appears on television, radio and in the national media. 

Monica previously served as the Vice President of Scientific Affairs at the Society for Women’s Health Research (SWHR). 

Areas of expertise: women’s health, pain in women, sex differences in pain processing, gaps in women’s healthcare, patient outcomes

Email: monica@healthywomen.org   Twitter: @mmallampalli1   

Jonathan Mayer MA, PhD

Jonathan Mayer MA, PhD is a Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology and Medical Geography at the University of Washington (UW). Before changing to emeritus status in 2019, he was also Adjunct Professor Medicine (Division of Allergy and Infection Diseases), Family Medicine, Health Services and Global Health. He developed and co-directed UW’s undergraduate program in Public Health. Jonathan is an infectious disease and a pain epidemiologist, specializing in public and global health, access to healthcare, health disparities and the social determinants of health, pharmacoepidemiology, and neuroepidemiology.

Jonathan has written and spoken about his "haunting experience with untreated pain" following damage to a major nerve during surgery, and the drive that has propelled him to demand better education about and treatment for pain. He teaches one of the few undergraduate courses about pain, which is interdisciplinary, including perspectives from epidemiology, pathophysiology, clinical, literature, art, philosophy and psychology. 

Email : jonathan.d.mayer@gmail.com

Ethan Nadelmann, PhD, JD

Ethan Nadelmann was described by Rolling Stone as "the point man" for drug policy reform efforts and “the real drug czar.” Ethan is widely regarded as the outstanding proponent of drug policy reform both in the United States and abroad. 

Ethan received his BA, MA, JD and PhD in Political Science at Harvard, taught at Princeton University (from 1987 to 1994) and then founded and directed first The Lindesmith Center (1994-2000) and then the Drug Policy Alliance (2000-2017), the world’s leading drug policy reform organization. He also co-founded the Open Society Institute’s International Harm Reduction Development program. 

Ethan recently started a podcast about all things drugs called PSYCHOACTIVE.

Areas of expertise:  drug laws and policy, public health laws and policy, harm reduction

Email: ethan@nadelmann.net   Twitter: @ethannadelmann

Jennifer D. Oliva, JD, MBA

Jennifer D. Oliva, JD, MBA is an Associate Professor of Law and the Director of the Center for Health & Pharmaceutical Law at Seton Hall University School of Law, where she specializes in health law and policy, food and drug law, evidence, privacy, and complex litigation. Jenn is a U.S. Army veteran and former health care litigator. She has received numerous awards due to her work with marginalized patient populations, including the AALS Section on Law, Medicine, and Health Care’s Health Law Community Service Award and the Truman Scholarship Foundation’s Ike Skelton Award. Her current research projects focus on the tools that law enforcement and clinicians use to surveille and police patients with substance use disorder, persistent pain, and other complex and stigmatized health care conditions.

Areas of Expertise: health law and policy, drug law and policy, health equity, privacy, and complex litigation

Email: jennifer.oliva@shu.edu Twitter @jenndoliva

Sally Satel, MD

Sally Satel, MD is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and a visiting professor of psychiatry at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. She has testified before Congress on Veterans’ issues, mental health policy, drug courts and health disparities, and currently serves on the National Advisory Committee of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Sally is the author of numerous books and academic articles, and she frequently writes for or is interviewed in the national media, including about the harms to pain patients of current drug policy. 

Areas of expertise: addiction, drug policy, mental health policy, policy related to Veterans and people in pain, neuroscience, health disparities, the culture of medicine

Email: slsatel@gmail.com  Twitter: @slsatel 

Robert E. Shapiro, MD, PhD

Robert E. Shapiro, MD, PhD is a Professor of Neurological Sciences at the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont, where he is Director of the Division of Headache Medicine. He is the Founding President of the Alliance for Headache Disorders Advocacy and the Past President of the Headache Cooperative of New England. Bob is also an accomplished advocate for people with invisible illnesses and headache disorders, including on Capitol Hill and with relevant administrative agencies, and he has successfully shepherded related bills through Congress. His publications have appeared in Nature, Science, Science Translational Medicine, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He holds an MA from University of Oxford, a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MD from Columbia University. He completed a Residency in Neurology at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Areas of expertise: headache disorders, migraine, headache pain, neurology, disability, invisible illnesses, advocacy

Email: Robert.Shapiro@uvmhealth.org  Twitter: @headachedoc