Board of Regents Profiles

Christopher Forrest, M.D. Ph.D., is Professor of Pediatrics, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He is the Director of PEDSnet (pedsnet.org), a national pediatric learning health system that includes the nation’s large pediatric health systems. PEDSnet has created a longitudinal electronic health record database for millions of children, and the network conducts observational research and pediatric clinical trials across all pediatric subspecialty areas. Chris serves as the Director of the CHOP Applied Clinical Research Center, which is the institutional home for PEDSnet, and the Program Director for PEDSnet Scholars, an AHRQ/PCORI funded faculty development program. His research group has developed numerous pediatric patient-reported outcome measures, both child self-report and parent-proxy versions. He co-edited the new Handbook of Life Course Health Development, which has been downloaded over 1 million times from the Springer web site. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

He received his BA and MD degrees from Boston University and his PhD (Health Policy and Management) from Johns Hopkins University.

Mitchell Katz, M.D., is the President and Chief Executive Officer of NYC Health + Hospitals, the largest municipal health care system in the United States, with 10 acute care hospitals, 5 skilled nursing facilities, dozens of community health centers, a home care agency and an insurance plan, MetroPlus Health. Since his appointment in 2018, the health system has significantly expanded access to health care, including the creation of NYC Care, a universal health access program that provides care to more than 80,000 uninsured New Yorkers. Previously, Dr. Katz served as Director of the Los Angeles County Health Agency, which combines the Departments of Health Services, Public Health, and Mental Health into a single entity to provide integrated care and programming within Los Angeles.

He received a B.A. from Yale University and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. He completed an internal medicine residency at UCSF Medical School and was an RWJ Clinical Scholar.

Anne Kwitek, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Physiology at the Medical College of Wisconsin. She previously served as an Associate Director of the Iowa Institute of Human Genetics at the University of Iowa. Her research expertise is primarily in understanding the genetic susceptibility to complex human diseases, with a focus on hypertension and cardiometabolic disease. She also leads the Rat Genome Database, the primary knowledgebase for the laboratory rat. Her past grant history includes funding from the NIH, VA, USDA and the American Heart Association. Over the years, she has participated in numerous NIH study sections and special emphasis panels and served on NCBI’s Board of Scientific Counselors from 2000-2005. Dr. Kwitek has more than 150 papers, reviews, and chapters with nearly 14,000 citations and is also an active teacher and mentor of students ranging from high school through postdoctoral fellows. She is a fellow of the American Heart Association and has received numerous awards including a Young Scholars Award from the American Society of Hypertension.

She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa.

Maichou Lor, Ph.D., RN, is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nursing. She previously served as a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Columbia University. Her research expertise is in Nursing, Biomedical Informatics, and Minority Health. She has several current research grants from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, National Institute of Nursing Research, and others, in the areas of reducing health disparities in minority populations. Dr. Lor has published extensively in the areas of cultural diversity, Hispanic health, and health informatics. Some of her current awards and honors include the Women of Color in Education Award from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the AcademyHealth Diversity Scholars Network Award.

She received her PhD in 2017 and MS in 2012 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Rasmus Nielsen, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology, the Department of Statistics and the Center for Computational Biology, University of California, Berkeley and at the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. He is a computational biologist with expertise in statistics, population genetics, and evolutionary biology. Much of his research has focused on understanding human genetic diversity and its consequences for human health. He has been supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Human Frontiers in Science Program, among others. Dr. Nielsen has received numerous awards, including the Villum Kann Rasmussen Annual Award and the AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Price, and he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.

He received his PhD in 1998 from the University of California, Berkeley.

Chris Shaffer, M.S., currently serves as University Librarian and Assistant Vice Chancellor for Academic Information Management at the University of California, San Francisco, as well as Adjunct Professor in the Department of Medicine. He previously served as University Librarian and Associate Professor at the Oregon Health and Science University Library (OHSU). His expertise is in the areas of information science and library science. He has received past research support from NLM, NNLM, and NCRR. He has published in health systems, data curation, and librarianship. He is a Fellow of the Medical Library Association (FMLA), a Distinguished Member of the Academy of Health Information Management (AHIP), a 2020 Janet Doe Lecturer, and an MLA President’s Award recipient.

He received his MS in 1994 at the University of North Texas.

Philip Walker, MS, MLIS, is the Director of the Annette and Irwin Eskind Family Biomedical Library and Learning Center at Vanderbilt University. The Eskind Biomedical Library serves as the primary information resource for the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Vanderbilt University School of Nursing, and the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He previously worked at Tulane University’s Rudolph Matas Library of the Health Sciences. His research interests include the information needs and information seeking behavior of the health sciences community, biomedical and nursing informatics, knowledge translation, evidence-based practice, and information ecology. Dr. Walker is a 2017-2018 National Library of Medicine/Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries Leadership Fellow.

Mr. Walker earned a master’s in library and information science from Louisiana State University and a master’s in health informatics from the University of Missouri. He is originally from New Orleans, Louisiana.