Sarah Catanzaro is a senior undergraduate student at Stanford University majoring in international relations and minoring in Art History. Her interest in international security studies was provoked by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. Living on Long Island in a community that was impacted by this tragedy, she experienced firsthand the acute anxiety and sense of vulnerability induced by terrorism and sought to understand this phenomenon through academic research. As a result, she, like Ms. Esberg worked as a research assistant for Jacob Shapiro, a former postgraduate fellow at CISAC, examining the inefficiencies and vulnerabilities of terrorist groups. Since her junior year, she has served as a research assistant for Professor Martha Crenshaw. Moreover, Sarah interned at the Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law, where she created a database of released Guantanamo Bay detainees that now serves as a crucial research tool for the executive director of the Center, Karen Greenberg. She is also active in the Stanford community as the President of the Public Health Initiative and former Events Director of Stanford Women in Business. She looks forward to expand her knowledge and professional experiences in the field of international security in the near future.

Jane Esberg is a CISAC Undergraduate Honors Student graduating this June with a B.A. in International Relations. She currently works as a research assistant for acting co-director of CISAC, Professor Lynn Eden, investigating US nuclear war planning. Previously, she has researched for Professor Kenneth A. Schultz, CISAC Homeland Security Fellow Jacob Shapiro, and PhD Candidate Luke Condra. In Summer 2008 Jane received a Stanford in Government Fellowship to work with the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London, in the Transnational Threats and Political Risks division. She studied abroad at Oxford University, where she completed a tutorial on "the Politics of Terrorism," and in Santiago, Chile, where she was awarded a Stanford Quarterly Research Grant to conduct independent research for use in her thesis. After graduation, she will be traveling as a Haas Center Fellow to the Tambopata region of the Peruvian Amazon to conduct a research and service project on the impact of national policy, urbanization, and immigration on agricultural sustainability.

As part of health reforms announced in April 2009, China plans to expand and strengthen primary care (i.e., provision of first contact, person-focused, ongoing care over time, and coordinating care when people receive services from other providers). Other nations of Asia continue to grapple with how to promote population health and constrain healthcare spending. What is the evidence about the effectiveness of primary care in improving population health and making healthcare accessible and affordable?

In this talk, Dr. Starfield will speak about the robust evidence of the association between primary care and better health outcomes at lower cost; ways of measuring the effectiveness of primary care; how selected Asian countries compare in such rankings; and the broader implications of primary care research for health policy in Asia.

Dr. Starfield, a physician and health services researcher, is internationally known for her work in primary care; her books, Primary Care:  Concept, Evaluation, and Policy and Primary Care: Balancing Health Needs, Services, and Technology, are widely recognized as the seminal works in the field.  She has been instrumental in leading projects to develop important methodological tools, including the Primary Care Assessment Tool, the CHIP tools (to assess adolescent and child health status), and the Johns Hopkins Adjusted Clinical Groups (ACGs) for assessment of diagnosed morbidity burdens reflecting degrees of  co-morbidity.   She was the co-founder and first president of the International Society for Equity in Health, a scientific organization devoted to furthering knowledge about the determinants of inequity in health and ways to eliminate them.  Her work thus focuses on quality of care, health status assessment, primary care evaluation, and equity in health. She is a member of the Institute of Medicine and has been on its governing council, and has been a member ofthe National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics and many other government and professional committees and groups. She has a BA from Swarthmore College, an MD from the State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center, and an MPH from Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health.

Thailand introduced a universal coverage program in 2001. This program is commonly known as a "30 Baht Health Reform," adding coverage for nearly 14 million more people. This presentation will give an overview of the 30 Baht Health Reform including its main features and evolution, as well as a preliminary evaluation of its success. The talk will mostly be based on a paper entitled "Early Results from Thailand's 30 Baht Universal Health Reform - Something to Smile About," published in Health Affairs.

Kannika Damrongplasit is currently the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of California at Los Angeles and RAND Corporation. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Southern California. Her fields of interest are in program evaluation, applied econometrics, health economics and applied microeconomics. She has published in Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Health Affairs, and Singapore Economic Review. In January 2010, she will assume an assistant professor position at the Department of Economics, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

With what now seem like almost weekly product scandals, recalls, and supply chain exposes, the public increasingly wants to know more about the products they are putting in, on, and around their families. Until recently, consumers had no way to find out the full impacts of the products they consumed. However, with advances in information technologies, product assessment methodologies, and web and mobile platforms, there is now a real potential to radically increase transparency in consumer markets and global supply chains. Dara O'Rourke, Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, will discuss an experiment in providing information to the public about the environmental, social, and health impacts of products and companies: GoodGuide. GoodGuide's award-winning web and iPhone apps have been featured recently in the New York Times, Newsweek, Time, and even Oprah's Magazine! Dara will discuss GoodGuide's long-term vision, current strategies, and the information technologies they are applying to this challenge.

Dara O’Rourke is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the co-founder of GoodGuide. Dara’s research focuses on systems for monitoring the environmental, labor, and health impacts of global production systems. His research has been featured in The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, Business Week, Newsweek, Time, and TechCrunch. Dara has served as a consultant to international organizations such as the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and a wide range of domestic and international non-governmental organizations. He has degrees in Mechanical Engineering, Political Science, and Energy and Resources, and he previously taught at MIT.

GoodGuide seeks to revolutionize how consumers see and interact with products and companies. GoodGuide provides a suite of tools that offer information about the environmental, social, and health performance of products and companies to consumers at the point of purchase (through web and mobile apps), and that empower people to screen and compare products based on their personal values and concerns. GoodGuide's tools seek to empower millions of consumers to buy products that better match their values, to avoid products that are detrimental to their health, the environment, or issues they care about, and to participate in a more transparent marketplace.