HOMERuN Executive Committee Members

Jim Banta is a liver transplant patient who had chronic illness due to Hepatitis C and end stage liver disease. Following his successful transplant 15 years ago, and after many years of illness and months in the hospital, he now gives back in honor of his donor. He dedicates much of his time to ensure the patient voice is included in healthcare and patient centered outcomes research. His experience with hospital systems provided him with a unique lens about the needs of transplant patients and other patients who have been hospitalized.

Cathy Hanson is Director of Patient Engagement at the University of Miami Health System.  She is responsible for the Patient- and Family-Centered Care, Patient Education, and Health Literacy programs at the University of Miami. She is a founding member of the HOMERuN PFAC, a PCORI Ambassador, a teacher for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and a caregiver.

Shoshana J. Herzig, MD, MPH is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Associate Chief of Hospital Medicine for Academic Affairs in the Division of General Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). Her federally-funded research focuses on pharmacoepidemiology and medication safety in hospitalized patients. She serves as Chair of the Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee at BIDMC, and as a Hospitalist Topic Editor for DynaMed. She has practiced clinically as a hospitalist at BIDMC for over a decade, and serves as a Firm Chief for the medicine residency program, through which she regularly teaches and mentors medical residents at BIDMC.

Rebecca Jaffe, MD, is the Director of the Division of Hospital Medicine and Vice Chair for Inpatient Services in the Department of Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.

Angela Keniston, PhD, MSPH is the Director of Data and Analytics for the Division of Hospital Medicine at the University of Colorado. Her role includes research design, data collection, management, and analysis, qualitative and quantitative methods, mixed methods approaches, implementation science, user-centered design, and stakeholder engagement planning and execution. Dr. Keniston is passionate about health information technology design to improve quality of care for the hospitalized patient while supporting the clinicians delivering care. Applying this skill set acquired over 20 years of healthcare experience, she has built a national reputation as a methodologist in the field of hospital medicine, in particular in implementation science and the application of qualitative methods.

Melissa L.P. Mattison MD, FACP, SFHM is the Chief of Hospital Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston. Geriatrics-trained, she works clinically as a hospitalist and geriatrician and focuses her research and clinical innovation efforts on improving care for hospitalized elders.

Teryl K. Nuckols, MD, MSHS is Professor of Medicine at Cedars-Sinai School of Medicine, where she serves as Director of the Division of General Internal Medicine and Vice Chair for Clinical Research. Her primary research interest focuses on the quality and safety of health care including how to measure it, how to improve it, and the cost. Dr. Nuckols has led multiple federally funded grants including five R01s addressing the quality and value of healthcare and Medicare policy. She currently is PI of an AHRQ-funded RCT testing a strategy for engaging nurses in reporting medication safety events and developing prevention strategies. She was also PI of a recent NIA-funded project that developed a strategy for optimizing surgical decision making for degenerative lumbar scoliosis and spondylolisthesis. She is active in mentoring junior health services researchers and has had remarkable success helping many people to win major national grants and other competitive research funding.

Andrew Olson is a Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at the University of Minnesota Medical School and a Medicine-Pediatrics Hospitalist.  His academic focus is better understanding clinical reasoning, especially diagnostic reasoning. His research focuses on the interactions between individuals and the clinical environment and how teams make diagnostic decisions.

Sumant Ranji, MD is Professor of Medicine at UCSF and served as Chief of the Division of Hospital Medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital from 2016-2023. Dr. Ranji’s primary research interests are in patient safety, quality improvement, and medical education.

Neil Jay Sehgal PhD, MPH is Associate Professor of Health Systems and Population Health, where he serves as Director of the Master in Health Administration graduate programs at the University of Washington School of Public Health. His primary research interest focuses on the impact of partisanship and race on COVID-19 incidence and mortality, sociodemographic correlates to health care outcomes, gender- and race-based disparities in salary and promotion of healthcare workers, the use of large datasets to study patient safety and the quality of health care delivery, validating emerging health technologies, and understanding how innovation is translated into clinical practice.

Eduard E. Vasilevskis, M.D. M.P.H., is a Professor of Medicine within the Division of Hospital Medicine at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where he currently serves as Division Chief. Dr. Vasilevskis’ research has focused on acute and post-acute care of older patients. This has included observational studies, pragmatic trials, and implementation research toward enhancing delirium measurement, prediction, and prevention, as well as strategies to mitigate the risks of polypharmacy.

Dr. Williams established the first hospitalist program for a public hospital in 1998 at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, and built three of the largest academic hospitalist programs in the U.S. at Emory (1998–2007), Northwestern (2007–2013) and the University of Kentucky (2014-2019), and led the Washington University Division of Hospital Medicine from 2021-2025. With a history of more than $34 million in grants and contracts as principal or co-principal investigator and 195+ peer-reviewed publications, Dr. Williams’ research focuses on quality improvement, care transitions, teamwork, and the role of health literacy in the delivery of health care.