Risa Lavizzo-Mourey

Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, M.D., a member of the President's Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition, is the President and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is dedicated to improving health and health care for all Americans. She is the first woman and the first African-American to head the Foundation, which has an endowment of approximately $10 billion and distributes more than $400 million a year. Lavizzo-Mourey earned her M.D. at Harvard Medical School and completed her internship and residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. In 1984 she was named a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her master of business administration degree in health care administration from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business in 1986. Lavizzo-Mourey is master and former regent of the American College of Physicians, where she chaired its committees on ethics and human rights.

Lavizzo-Mourey's career combines geriatric medicine and health policy, focusing on disease, disability prevention, and health care issues among minorities. She combines up-to-date business management skills with hands-on doctoring. Her accomplishments include innovations in caring as well as administration. In 1998, as chief of geriatric medicine and director of the Institute on Aging at the University of Pennsylvania, Lavizzo-Mourey made house calls as part of a model team program to care for elders in Philadelphia. She served as deputy administrator of the federal Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHCPR, now the Agency for Health Care Quality) from 1992 to 1994 and was co-vice chair of the IOM committee that produced the "Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities" report.