AcademyHealth Announces 2025 Award Recipients

Washington D.C. (May 19, 2025)—AcademyHealth announced today the 2025 winners of its Annual Awards program. The awards program recognizes individuals and projects that have made significant contributions to the fields of health services research and health policy, while supporting AcademyHealth’s mission to improve health and health care for all.

AcademyHealth will honor the recipients of these prestigious awards throughout the 2025 Annual Research Meeting in Minneapolis this June 7-10. The Alice S. Hersh Emerging Leader Award, The Outstanding Dissertation Award, the Publication-of-the-Year Award, and the Gail Wilensky Award for Impact in Health Policy, Sponsored by NORC at the University of Chicago, will be recognized at the opening plenary on Sunday, June 8 at 11:00 a.m.. The Mosaic Award recipients will be recognized on Monday, June 9 at the 11:15 a.m. plenary session, and the Reinhardt Distinguished Career Award recipient will be recognized at the closing plenary on Tuesday, June 10 at 11:45 a.m.

Reinhardt Distinguished Career Award
Michael Esman Chernew, Ph.D.

The Reinhardt Distinguished Career Award is AcademyHealth’s highest award, recognizing leaders who have made significant and lasting contributions to the field of health services research (HSR). Previously known as either the Distinguished Career or Distinguished Investigator Award, the Award was renamed in 2023 to honor Professor Uwe Reinhardt, a seminal figure in the field who established high standards in moving evidence into action and translating evidence to serve the public interest.

Michael Chernew, Ph.D., is the Leonard D. Schaeffer Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on improving the health care system through improvements to benefit designs, payment models, and regulation of both private and public health care markets, including the Medicare Advantage program. Michael is Chair of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) and has served on several advisory panels for CMS. He is a member of the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Health Advisors and the Massachusetts Health Connector Board. Michael holds a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University and has received multiple awards for his work in health care policy.

Alice S. Hersh Emerging Leader Award
Aaron Schwartz, M.D., Ph.D.

The Alice S. Hersh Emerging Leader Award recognizes scholars early in their careers as health services researchers who show exceptional promise for future contributions to the field.

Aaron Schwartz, M.D., Ph.D., is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy and in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. Dr. Schwartz maintains an active primary care practice at the Corporal Michael J. Crescenz VA Medical Center in Philadelphia, where he serves as a core investigator at the VA Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion. As a health economist, Dr. Schwartz conducts research on measuring and improving the efficiency of U.S. health care delivery. Topics of his research include the private provision of federal health care benefits (e.g. Medicare Advantage and VA Community Care), low-value medical services, insurer coverage restrictions, and alternative health care financing arrangements. Dr. Schwartz is a proud alumnus of Swarthmore College, the Harvard M.D.-Ph.D. Program, and the Brigham and Women's Hospital Residency Program in Primary Care and Population Medicine.

Publication-of-the-Year Award
Differential Legal Protections for Biologics Vs Small-Molecule Drugs in the U.S.
Olivier J. Wouters, Ph.D.

The Publication-of-the-Year Award recognizes the best and most relevant peer-reviewed, scientific work that the fields of health services research and health policy have produced and published in the prior calendar year.

Olivier Wouters is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Services, Policy, and Practice at Brown University’s School of Public Health. He also holds a visiting faculty appointment in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Harvard Medical School. Olivier’s research focuses on pharmaceutical economics and policy, particularly issues related to drug pricing and access to medicines in high- and middle-income countries. He holds a Ph.D. in Health Policy and an M.Sc. in Health Economics, both from the London School of Economics.

Outstanding Dissertation Award
Assessing Value and Optimizing Decision-Making in Post-Acute Care across Diverse Populations
Fangli Geng, Ph.D., M.Sc.

The Outstanding Dissertation Award honors an outstanding scientific contribution from a doctoral thesis in health services research or health policy.

Dr. Fangli Geng is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Services, Policy & Practice at Brown University's School of Public Health. She holds a Ph.D. in Health Policy and a secondary degree in Data Science from Harvard University. Her research focuses on health policy issues related to aging, with an emphasis on designing patient-centered, high-value, and equitable care delivery models that address the diverse needs of older adults and their families. Dr. Geng has extensive expertise in health economics and advanced quantitative methods, including quasi-experimental design, decision modeling, and machine learning. Her work spans post-acute and long-term care delivery models, payment reforms, organizational structures across hospitals, nursing homes, and home health agencies, as well as quality of care and health care staffing issues in these settings. Her contributions to health policy, particularly in post-acute and long-term care, have been published in leading journals such as Health Affairs, JAMA Health Forum, and BMJ Medicine. Additionally, she serves as an affiliated faculty member at Harvard University's T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Center for Health Decision Science. She was recently awarded the 2025 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Early Career Research Award on the Economics of Alzheimer’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease-Related Dementias.

Post-acute care (PAC) plays a critical role in the recovery and rehabilitation of millions of older adults discharged from U.S. hospitals each year. As one of the largest sources of geographic variation in Medicare spending, PAC systems require optimization to ensure efficient, high-value, equitable and patient-centered care. Dr. Geng’s dissertation investigates how PAC can better align with patient and caregiver needs, improve health outcomes, and adapt to evolving payment models. Through three interconnected studies, she addresses the preferences, outcomes, and Medicare payment implications of PAC to inform reforms that advance efficiency, quality, and equity.

The Mosaic Award
Seattle Indian Health Board/Urban Indian Health Institute & The University of Pennsylvania Wharton Health Care Management Department and Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics

The Mosaic Award recognizes organized groups within health services and policy research (HSR) that have created a more representative and welcoming experience and sense of community for their employees and/or members.

Seattle Indian Health Board/Urban Indian Health Institute

Seattle Indian Health Board (SIHB) is a Federally Qualified Health Center, founded in 1970, located in the King County, Washington. SIHB provides high quality and culturally attuned health care to more than 6000 people annually. The Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI), the public health division of SIHB, is a Public Health Authority and Tribal Epidemiology Center. We understand that indigenizing research practices, providing culturally inclusive evaluation, and practicing data sovereignty is as essential to the health and wellness of Native people as direct service health care. SIHB is home to 30 different learning programs meant to create the next generation of Native and Native Serving Health Care professionals. SIHB understands that serving the community means more than delivering high quality health and human services and rigorous public health research; it also means doing everything in our power to invest in the next generation of leaders.

The University of Pennsylvania Wharton Health Care Management Department and Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics

Founded in 2000 by the Wharton School’s Health Care Management Department and Penn LDI, the Summer Undergraduate Mentored Research (SUMR) Program is a nationally recognized 12-week internship that introduces exceptional undergraduates to research in health services, population health, and clinical epidemiology. Committed to advancing health equity, SUMR matches students with leading Penn faculty for mentored research experiences. Scholars also engage in an eight-week critical writing course, hear from more than 50 faculty members on their research, methodology and career journeys, and present their work at the End of SUMR Research Symposium. To date, over 425 students have completed the program, with more than 80 percent pursuing meaningful careers in health care, including medicine, public health, and academia.

Gail Wilensky Award for Impact in Health Policy, Sponsored by NORC at the University of Chicago
Robert Otto Valdez, Ph.D.

This new award was created to commemorate the life and impact of Dr. Gail Wilensky, who passed away in 2024. This award recognizes leaders in health policy who have made a positive impact on the American health care system through the development and use of evidence to shape U.S. health policy. In celebrating their accomplishments and recognizing exceptional leadership, the award will continue Dr. Wilensky’s legacy and preserve her memory for future generations of policy experts.

Robert Otto Valdez, Ph.D., is the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Professor Emeritus, Family and Community Medicine and Economics at the University of New Mexico. He is an Affiliate Professor at the Harvard Chan Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment (C-CHANGE). He formerly served as Director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. He was the founding Executive Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy at UNM and a founding Dean of the Drexel Dornsife School of Public Health. He previously served as a Professor at the UCLA School of Public Health and Senior Health Scientist at RAND. During the 1990s, he served simultaneously as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health (PHS) and Director of Interagency Health Policy (HCFA). He has served on several occasions as a senior advisor to the White House. Dr. Valdez was Chairman of the Public Health Institute Board and the New Mexico Community Foundation Board. He served as a Patient-Centered Research Institute (PCORI) Board of Trustees member and on the National Quality Forum (NQF) board. His expertise in health services research and policy analysis is internationally recognized, and he is a member of the National Academy of Medicine.