Speaker biographies
Paul A. Offit, M.D. is the chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. In addition, Dr. Offit is the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He is a recipient of many awards, including the J. Edmund Bradley Prize for Excellence in Pediatrics from the University of Maryland Medical School, the Young Investigator Award in Vaccine Development from the Infectious Disease Society of America, and a Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Offit has published more than 120 papers in medical and scientific journals in the areas of rotavirus-specific immune responses and vaccine safety, and is the codeveloper of a rotavirus vaccine recently licensed by the Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Offit was also recently a member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and is the coauthor of three books, Vaccines: What You Should Know (Wiley, 2003, 3rd edition), Breaking the Antibiotic Habit (Wiley, 1999), and The Cutter Incident: How America’s First Polio Vaccine Led to Today’s Growing Vaccine Crisis (Yale University Press, 2005).
Randall Bovbjerg is a principal research associate in the Health Policy Center of the Urban Institute. His first health policy publication was a 1975 Duke Law Journal article on HMOs and malpractice, and his most recent article on malpractice insurance crisis and reform was published in Clinics in Perinatology. Mr. Bovbjerg also drafted the sixth chapter of the Institute of Medicine’s 2000 book, To Err Is Human. He has studied prevention of medical injury, tort reform, and non-judicial alternatives, along with many other topics in health policy. He served on the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations’s taskforce on alternatives to tort litigation and on the D.C. Health Care Reform Commission. Mr. Bovbjerg has taught at Duke and Johns Hopkins Universities.
John E. Calfee is a resident scholar at AEI. From 1980 to 1986, he served in the Bureau of Economics at the Federal Trade Commission. Mr. Calfee has taught marketing and consumer behavior in the business schools of the University of Maryland–College Park and Boston University, and was a visiting senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Mr. Calfee’s research has focused on regulation (especially FDA regulation), health care, advertising and information, tort liability, and other related areas. He is the author of Prices, Markets, and the Pharmaceutical Revolution (AEI Press, 2000) and Fear of Persuasion: A New Perspective on Advertising and Regulation (AEI Press, 1997).
Ted Frank is a resident fellow at AEI and director of the AEI Liability Project, managing the institute’s research about liability reform proposals, tort law, class action lawsuits and civil procedure, and other related issues. Before joining AEI, Mr. Frank worked at law firms in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and clerked for Judge Frank H. Easterbrook. His litigation work included the Vioxx case, automobile product liability cases, class action defense, and antitrust and patent cases.
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