Current Fellows

Nancy Connolly is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington - Harborview Downtown Programs. In her role as an Internal Medicine and Addiction specialist, she provides primary care to people experiencing homelessness in a variety of settings including emergency shelters, permanent supportive housing and people living in unsheltered settings. Prior to joining the University of Washington, she served as the Regional Medical Director for Virginia Mason Medical Center. At Virginia Mason, she supervised 15 providers including doctors, nurse practitioners and support staff providing comprehensive, multi-specialty care serving more than 30,000 patients while also providing continuity care to her own primary care panel.

Dr. Connolly has spent over two decades providing primary care to patients from all walks of life. Noting the significant impact of social determinants of health on her patient’s well-being, she completed fellowship training in Integrative Medicine at the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona in 2019. She has been a leader in providing holistic care for chronic pain conditions to her patients and sharing her learnings with colleagues. She has led efforts to expand approaches for treating chronic pain and spearheaded training in chronic pain and responsible opiate prescribing. Noting the overlap between chronic pain and addiction, in 2018 she pivoted her career to care for our most needy patients, those experiencing homelessness, and became board certified in Addiction Medicine in 2021. She completed the Society of General Internal Medicine - Leadership in Health Policy Fellowship in 2021 to expand her work in primary care, addiction and homelessness research into the policy world, to impact more patients and to learn how to influence systems. In 2022, hoping to bring her insights and knowledge of homelessness and population health to the state level, she ran for a seat in the Washington State Legislature. She has been an active member, serving in leadership roles in the King County Medical Society, Society of General Internal Medicine and completed a Copello Fellowship with Doctors for America.

Dr. Connolly earned a BA in Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz while also serving as an Alternate Infectious Disease Investigator for Santa Cruz County. She earned her MD at Ross University School of Medicine in Roseau, Dominica. Between degrees, she served in the Peace Corps, Benin from 1990-1992 working on Guinea Worm Eradication with USAID and Jimmy Carter’s Global 2000 campaign. She completed Internal Medicine training at the University of Illinois - Michael Reese Hospital and the University of Pittsburgh – Shadyside Hospital followed by an Infectious Disease Fellowship and Master of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh where she was part of a team that led a phase I study on HIV-Dendritic cell vaccines.

Miriam Laugesen is a tenured Associate Professor at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, where she teaches health policy, politics and public health leadership. She leads two graduate certificates in Health Policy Analysis, and Health Policy and Practice. Dr. Laugesen’s research explores health care costs and access in relation to physician payment and health systems’ balance between primary and specialty care. Her 2016 book Fixing Medical Prices: How Physicians are Paid (Harvard University Press) unpacked the inner workings of Medicare payment policy. Dr. Laugesen's research informed recent National Academy of Medicine committee recommendations on primary care and nursing, while her work on international physician fees (with Sherry Glied) has helped frame new conversations on health care costs, primary and specialty care in the United States.

A former Fulbright fellow and Tow Faculty Scholar, Dr. Laugesen received the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award, a Provost Leadership Fellowship from Columbia University, and a 2023 Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship for research in Japan. Dr. Laugesen previously served on AcademyHealth’s Education Council and is past president of the American Political Science Association's Health Politics and Policy Section. She was book review editor for the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law from 2017 to 2023.

Dr. Laugesen was born in the Punjab and raised in India and New Zealand. She received a First-Class Honours degree in Politics and Public Administration from Victoria University of Wellington and a PhD from the University of Melbourne in Australia. She completed graduate work in health policy at Harvard University and postdoctoral training in health services research at RAND-UCLA.

Amy Lewis Gilbert is a lifelong learner and public servant committed to cultivating a culture of science and evidence in public health and human services. She has engaged in over twenty years of thought-leadership at the intersection of law, ethics, medicine, public health and policy. As Chief Science Officer for the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration, Indiana’s human services agency, she provided evidence-informed strategic direction to the Secretary’s Office and the agency’s eight divisions including the Office of Medicaid Policy & Planning. She established the Office of Science & Evidence to cultivate a culture of science within the agency, and co-founded the WISE Indiana partnership, which engages nationally recognized academic and clinical experts to help evaluate and inform state practices, programs, and policies. During her time with the State of Indiana she also collaborated with other government agencies, academic partner institutions and community-based organizations to address key research questions that further progress toward a shared vision of health and well-being.

Ms. Gilbert maintains an adjunct faculty appointment at the Indiana University School of Medicine’s Children’s Health Services Research division, where she previously worked as a tenure-track pediatric health services researcher developing strategies for identifying and addressing non-medical social, legal and structural determinants of health for youth populations. While in law school, she worked at the Indiana University Center for Bioethics managing projects focused on pandemic preparedness and precision health and genetics. In her early public health career, she worked directly with community members in the US and abroad as a health educator, case manager and Peace Corps volunteer.

Throughout her career, Ms. Gilbert has assumed numerous executive board and committee leadership roles including with Academy Health’s State University Partnership Learning Network, the American Public Human Services Association, the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine, the Indiana Public Health Association, the Indiana Health Advocacy Coalition, and the Indianapolis Bar Association. She obtained a BA in Psychology at Boston University in 1997, MPH in International Public Health at the University of Alabama – Birmingham in 2000, and JD at the Indiana University McKinney School of Law in 2009. She is licensed to practice law in the State of Indiana.

Grace Lin is a Professor of Medicine, advanced heart failure cardiologist and echocardiographer at Mayo Clinic. In her role as Vice Chair of the Division of Circulatory Failure at Mayo Clinic she oversees clinical operations and enterprise practice standardization for heart failure. Her clinical expertise and academic interests are focused on cardiac amyloidosis and cardio-oncology. She is committed to improving healthcare access for individuals with cardiovascular disease through practice innovations in healthcare delivery including digital health and remote monitoring as well as new models of community and home-based care.

Dr. Lin is a nationally recognized expert in cardiac amyloidosis and has served as a principal investigator in clinical trials for amyloid heart disease. She is the heart failure lead for the Mayo Echo Core Laboratory which directs imaging for multi-center heart failure clinical trials. Dr. Lin spearheaded a practice innovation to deliver in-home intermediate acuity care for acute decompensated heart failure as an alternative to hospitalization in partnership with the community paramedicine group. She has advised several startup companies developing digital health tools for heart failure management and directs the heart failure remote monitoring program at Mayo Clinic. She is a fellow of the American College of Cardiology and the American Society of Echocardiography.

Dr. Lin received her undergraduate degree with honors and special honors from the University of Chicago and an MD from the Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. She completed internal medicine residency and cardiology training at Mayo Clinic, and is board certified in echocardiography, cardiovascular diseases, and advanced heart failure and transplant. In 2021, she received an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where her team was winner of the 2021 Global New Ventures Competition for their digital health innovation to remotely screen for valvular heart disease.

Lucy Marcil is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Boston University and Associate Director of Economic Mobility for the Center for the Urban Child and Healthy Family at Boston Medical Center. She co-founded and is the Executive Director of StreetCred, which provides an integrated economic bundle of evidence-based, underutilized services to low-income families as a routine part of pediatric primary care in the first year of life. Her work has led to over 6,000 families claiming over $14 million in tax returns.

Dr. Marcil is nationally known for her work on improving health equity through economic justice. Her motivation for this work is rooted in her childhood experience with financial instability and her experience with patients who have expressed that having access to just a little bit of cash – to pay a bill, repair a car, find childcare – could be transformative to their financial well-being and mental and physical health. She has spent nearly a decade pioneering Medical Financial Partnerships and leading national efforts to study the impacts and scale this work, including StreetCred’s Health by Wealth Collective, an open-source technical support service that has 18 members in 10 states and D.C. For her work, Dr. Marcil has been recognized with the American Academy of Pediatrics Anne E. Dyson Child Advocacy Award, Aspen Institute Ascend Fellowship, and TED Fellowship. Her TED talk has over 1.4 million views.

Dr. Marcil completed her MD at the University of Pennsylvania, MPH at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and pediatrics training at the Boston Combined Residency Program (Harvard University, Boston University). Prior to entering medical school, Dr. Marcil served as a PEPFAR HIV/AIDS volunteer in the Peace Corps in Namibia.

Shambra Mulder is the gubernatorial-appointed Deputy Commissioner for the Department for Behavioral Health, Developmental, and Intellectual Disabilities (DBHDID) within the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services (CHFS). In this role, she led DBHDID in the revision of departmental policies and procedures and the creation of a department-wide strategic plan. She serves as the interim Director for the Division of Program Integrity, which is responsible for other critical organizational functions such as the development of regulations and the licensure of substance use disorder treatment programs. Prior to her current role in the, she served as Executive Director for the CHFS Office of Ombudsman and Administrative Review, responsible for investigating consumer complaints and working with management to resolve them, as well as identifying patterns of complaints, and recommending corrective action when appropriate.

Dr. Mulder is a Licensed Psychologist that is nationally certified in Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavior Therapy (TF-CBT), an effective evidence-based treatment for treating youth with complex trauma. Dr. Mulder is the founding director of a nonprofit for which she co-authored a coloring book titled, “Talking about Mental Health with your Child & Coloring Book.” She is a former professor at Kentucky State University, a Historically Black College and University (HBCU), where she taught graduate courses in assessments, classroom behavioral management, and teaching students with disabilities. She is a former member of the Board of Directors for the Kentucky Psychological Association (KPA).

Dr. Mulder is a U.S. Navy veteran and a Kentucky-certified school psychologist who began her career in a rural public school district. She completed the advanced certification for the Director of Special Education, a Master’s, Specialist, and a doctoral degree in Educational Psychology from the University of Kentucky. She most recently completed an advanced certificate in psychotherapy at Bellarmine University (currently located at Loyola University Chicago) for clinicians seeking to expand their clinical skills.