Jakob Bjørner, MD, PhD - Chief Science Advisor
Dr. Bjørner specializes in applying modern psychometric theory to the measurement of health outcomes. Jakob has been an International Quality of Life Assessment (IQOLA) project collaborator of Dr. Ware's for over ten years and was a consultant to QualityMetric before joining the company in 2003. He was formerly a Senior Researcher at the Danish National Institute of Occupational Health, and co-developed QualityMetric's Dynamic Health Assessment (DYNHA®) system and numerous computerized adaptive health assessments of generic and disease-specific health outcomes. He is also a physician of psychometrics and medical sociology, having received his training from the University of Copenhagen. In addition, Jakob is an award recipient for his research on quality of life and HIV.
Mark Kosinski, MA – Vice President and Senior Scientist
Mark has worked closely with Dr. Ware over the past 17 years, providing analytic support for the SF-36®, SF-12®, and SF-8™ Health Surveys. He has been involved in numerous studies on the measurement of health outcomes, including the development and validation of the SF-36 and SF-12 physical and mental component summary scales, the SF-8, the Asthma Control Test™ (ACT)™, and the Headache Impact Test™ (HIT-6™). In recent years, Mark has focused most of his research efforts on the development and analysis of item banks for computerized adaptive health assessments. He has co-authored over 120 peer-reviewed journal articles related to the development and analysis of patient-reported outcome (PRO) measures, and has contributed to ten manuals and interpretation guides for various PRO measures, including the SF-36, SF-12, and SF-8. Over the past ten years, he has been actively involved in working with the pharmaceutical industry in the analysis of clinical trial data with PRO measures as secondary indicators of treatment efficacy. Mark received his MA in Psychology from Bridgewater State University.
Barbara Gandek, MS - Director and Senior Scientist
Barbara has authored or co-authored more than 40 peer-reviewed articles, many of which fostered the development of health outcomes measurement around the world. She spearheaded the ongoing effort to translate QualityMetric's entire suite of adult SF™ Health Surveys for use in more than 75 countries, and co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology that summarized the work of the International Quality of Life Assessment (IQOLA) Project in the 1990s. She has also been involved in the development of five of the SF manuals, including the most recently published "User's Manual for the SF-36v2® Health Survey - Second Edition."
For years, Barbara worked closely with her colleagues at QualityMetric as a Scientist and Director at the Health Assessment Lab (HAL). Before this, she worked at New England Medical Center's Health Institute, primarily on the IQOLA Project and the Medical Outcomes Study (MOS). She received her BA in Economics from Swarthmore College and MS in Health Policy & Management from Harvard School of Public Health. Barbara is also an instructor at Tufts University School of Medicine.
Mark E. Maruish, PhD - Director and Scientist
Dr. Maruish has more than 25 years of experience with the development and implementation of psychological assessments and health outcomes surveys, as well as consultation and editorial services for psychological test publishers and book publishers. Mark also has several years of experience in providing psychological assessment and treatment services to mental health and medical patients. Prior to joining QualityMetric in 2004, he served as the Director of Survey Research at Ingenix Pharmaceutical Services, where he was responsible for surveys of patient populations pertaining to their well-being, symptoms, quality of life, and functioning. Before that, he served as the Director of Quality Improvement at Optum Behavioral Health. Mark received his PhD in Clinical Psychology from Alliant International University in San Diego and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Clinical Neuropsychology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. He is a licensed clinical psychologist, a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, and a Diplomate of the American Board of Assessment Psychology.
Michelle K. White, PhD – Director and Scientist
Prior to joining QualityMetric in 2008, Dr. White spent eight years as a Research Scientist and Assistant Director of a business unit overseeing the implementation of the GAIN bio-psychosocial assessment. Michelle's work included helping 14 state substance abuse treatment, child welfare, mental health, and justice system programs implement the tool statewide. Her research interests include improved implementation of evidence-based practices across systems of care, behavioral health treatment outcomes research, and reducing health disparities and improving quality of life. She has spent many years working at residential treatment and detention centers, and in various clinical settings. Michelle received her doctorate in Sociology from the University of Illinois (UI), where she focused on population, health, and life course studies, and has since taught at UI and Illinois State University.
Min Yang, MD, PhD – Senior Scientist
Dr. Yang joined QualityMetric in 2006. Min's research interests span the areas of health-related quality of life, health services utilization, pharmacoepidemiology, research methodological designs, and medication adherence/compliance. Her research covers many areas, including women's health, mental health, gastrointestinal diseases, respiratory diseases, and cardiovascular diseases. Min's research and analysis experience includes using clinical trial data, survey data, and claims databases to perform treatment effect analysis, health outcomes analysis (e.g. side effects evaluation), and patient-reported outcome (PRO) analysis (e.g. burden analysis, minimally important difference (MID) estimation for PRO instruments). She is also experienced in qualitative research and survey instrument development and validation. In addition, she has twice received research awards for her presentations at International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR). Min received both a master's degree and doctorate in Pharmacy from the University of Texas at Austin. She also holds a doctorate in medicine from Suzhou Medical College, China, and is trained in surgical oncology.
Regina Rendas-Baum, MS – Scientist
Regina joined QualityMetric as a Senior Outcomes Analyst in 2007. Prior to joining QualityMetric, she was a research assistant at Brown University, where she investigated the use of nonlinear mixed models to study cancer diagnostic accuracy. Regina also worked as a statistician at the Center for Statistical Sciences at Brown University, participating in the planning, data collection, and analysis for several multi-site studies aimed at investigating alternative cancer diagnostic imaging methods. In addition, she served as consulting statistician at the Department of Preventive Medicine at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. Regina received both her BS and MS in Statistics from the University of Connecticut.
Aaron Yarlas, PhD – Associate Scientist
Prior to joining QualityMetric in 2008, Dr. Yarlas spent seven years as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, where he taught classes in Research Methods, Educational Psychology, and Cognitive Psychology, in addition to conducting research. The focus of Aaron's research program, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), was to understand how people construct mental representations of the environment, particularly focusing on cognitive models of differential processing for elementary features of information, and the relations that bind these elements. Aaron received his doctorate in Cognitive Psychology from UCLA, and conducted postdoctoral research at the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State University. He has won numerous honors and awards, including an NSF Graduate Fellowship, and has authored numerous peer-reviewed articles and conference presentations.