How to Encourage Vaccine Adoption

Dana Goldman, PhD (Moderator)
Leonard D. Schaeffer Director's Chair, USC Schaeffer Center
Distinguished Professor of Public Policy, Pharmacy & Economics, USC School of Pharmacy and the USC Price School of Public Policy

Dana Goldman is the Interim Dean at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy, as well as the Leonard D. Schaeffer Chair and Distinguished Professor of Pharmacy, Public Policy, and Economics at the University of SouthernCalifornia. Goldmanbeganserving in his new capacity as interim dean on July 1, 2020. One of his first initiatives is to establish the Price School Social Justice Advisory Board representing faculty, staff, and students. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Social Insurance –two of his field’s highest honors.He is the author of more than300articles and book chapters, and his research has been published in leading medical, economic, health policy, and statistics journals. He has raised over $100 million in funding from external sources—including more than $50 million from the National Institutes of Health. Goldman pioneered the “Netflix model” to improve access to prescription drugs and the value of reduced copayments for the chronically ill. He served as a formal health policy advisor to the Congressional Budget Office, Covered California, National Institutes of Health, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Institute. He serves on the editorial boards of Health Affairs and the American Journal of Managed Care and is founding editor of the forum for Health Economics and Policy. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Economist, NBC Nightly News and other media. He is the former director of ISPOR and ASHEconand a co-founder of Precision Health Economics, a health care consultancy. Goldman received his B.A.summa cum Laude from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University.

Richard E. Besser, MD
President and CEO, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Richard Besser, MD,is president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), a position he assumed in April 2017. Besser is the former acting director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and ABC News’ former chief health and medical editor.

At RWJF, Besser leads the largest private foundation in the country devoted to building a comprehensive Culture of Health that provides everyone in America with a fair and just opportunity to live the healthiest life possible. In his role, Besser is a leading voice on the importance of health equity, advocating for racial justice, full inclusion of people with disabilities, and a COVID-19 response and recovery that prioritizes those most impacted.

Besser received his Bachelor of Arts from Williams College, his medical degree from University of Pennsylvania, and completed a residency and chief residency in pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore. He continues to volunteer as a pediatrician at the Henry J. Austin Health Center in Trenton, N.J. He and his wife Jeanne, a food writer, have two sons, Alex and Jack.

 Wändi Bruine de Bruin, PhD
Co-Director, Behavioral Sciences Program, USC Schaeffer Center
Co-PI, USC Behavioral Science and Well-Being Policy Initiative
Provost Professor of Public Policy, Psychology, and Behavioral Science, USC Price School of Public Policy

Wändi Bruine de Bruin, PhD is the Provost Professor of Public Policy, Psychology, and Behavioral Science at the USC Price School of Public Policy and USC Dornsife Department of Psychology. Bruine de Bruin’s research aims to understand and inform how people make health decisions, including about vaccinations. Since March 2020, she has been conducting national surveys on US residents’ COVID-19 risk perceptions and protective behaviors.  She has published over 125 peer-reviewed papers on risk perception and communication. She is a member of the editorial boards of Medical Decision Making, Journal of Experimental Psychology:Applied, the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, Decision, the Journal of Risk Research, and Psychology and Aging. She is currently serving on a National Academy of Sciences panel on mask use and respiratory health. She previously served on expert panels for the National Academy of Sciences on Communicating Science Effectively and for the Council of the Canadian Academies on Health Product Risk Communication.

Alison Buttenheim, PhD
Patricia Bleznak Silverstein and the Howard A. Silverstein Term Endowed Professorship in Global Women’s Health
Assistant Professor of Health Policy, Perelman School of Medicine
Director of Engagement, Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics
Scientific Director, Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics
Associate Director, National Clinician Scholars Program

Alison Buttenheim, is Associate Professor of Nursing and Health Policy, Silverstein Chair of Global Women’s Health, and Scientific Director of the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Buttenheim is a leading expert in the application of behavioral economics to infectious disease prevention. Her research agenda has focused on vaccine acceptance and vaccine exemption policy in the US, zoonotic disease prevention in Peru, and HIV prevention in South Africa. She was recently appointed to the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine’s Committee on the Equitable Allocation of the COVID-19 vaccine, and to the Lancet Commission on Vaccine Refusal, Acceptance, and Demand in the United States. Dr. Buttenheim holds a Ph.D. in Public Health from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

Jason Doctor, PhD
Director, Health Informatics, USC Schaeffer Center
Co-Director, Behavioral Sciences Program, USC Schaeffer Center
Co-PI, USC Behavioral Science and Well-Being Policy Initiative
Norman Topping Chair in Medicine and Public Policy, USC Price School of Public Policy
Chair, Department of Health Policy and Management, USC Price School of Public Policy

Jason Doctor is director of Health Informatics at the USC Schaeffer Center. He is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the USC Price School of Public Policy, where he holds the Norman Topping Chair in Medicine and Public Policy. His research centers on decision-making in healthcare and health informatics. Doctor specializes in behavioral economics and the use of choice architecture to affect policy in health and medicine. In other research, he has studied computational approaches to detecting medical errors and has established methods for representing preferences and values for health.