This Healing the Nation webinar is focused on the social, economic, and health impacts of COVID-19 on individual and community level well-being. Dr. Benjamin F. Miller, chief strategy officer for Well Being Trust, along with Dr. Carol Graham, Dayna Matthew, JD, and Dr. Ashwin Vasan talk about the current status of the crisis and comprehensive solutions we can put forth in response.
Speakers:
Dr. Carol Graham is the Leo Pasvolsky Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a College Park Professor at the University of Maryland, and a Senior Scientist at Gallup. was awarded the 2018 International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies Distinguished Researcher Award. The award is designated for a scholar with a lifetime of substantial contribution to quality of life/well-being/happiness research. Graham was one of the first economists to work on happiness and has done extensive work around the world on the consistent patterns in the determinants of happiness across countries and time. Most recently, Graham has established linkages between lack of hope and premature mortality—at the level of the individual, race, and place—in the United States.
Dayna Matthew, JD is a leader in public health who focuses on racial disparities in health care. She is the William L. Matheson and Robert M. Morgenthau Distinguished Professor of Law and the F. Palmer Weber Research Professor of Civil Liberties and Human Rights and serves as a professor of public health sciences and director of The Equity Center at UVA, an institution she helped found to redress racial and socioeconomic inequality in university communities. Prior to UVA Law, Professor Matthew served on the University of Colorado Law faculty as a professor, vice dean, and associate dean of academic affairs. She is the author of the book Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care, which looks at how implicit bias affects health outcomes.
Dr. Ashwin Vasan, MSc, MD, PhD is a primary care physician and public health expert with more than 15 years of experience working to improve health, social welfare, and public policy for vulnerable populations. He is the President and CEO of Fountain House, an organization dedicated to improving the lives of people living with serious mental illness in NYC. Since 2014 he has been on the faculty at Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, where he leads a graduate seminar on implementation science and global health, and at the College of Physicians and Surgeons where he cares for low-income, Medicaid/Medicare or uninsured patients from Washington Heights, Harlem, and the South Bronx as a primary care internist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center/New York-Presbyterian Hospital.
Dr. Benjamin F. Miller, PsyD is the Chief Strategy Officer for Well Being Trust, a national foundation committed to advancing the mental, social and spiritual health of the nation. He helps oversee the foundation’s portfolio ensuring alignment across grantees, overall strategy and direction, and connection of the work to advance policy. Prior to joining Well Being Trust, Dr. Miller spent 8 years as an Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine where he was the founding Director of Eugene S. Farley, Jr. Health Policy Center. He is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in the Stanford School of Medicine.
