Pamela G. Russo

Pamela Russo, senior program officer, joined the Foundation in 2000. The major area of her work is improving health at the community level, based on the understanding of health as the result of interactions between social, environmental, behavioral, healthcare and genetic determinants. This area of programming includes developing robust collaborative partnerships across different sectors, agencies and organizations and requires addressing the root causes underlying inequities in the determinants between different populations or neighborhoods. Her program portfolio includes transforming the governmental public health system, including national accreditation as a platform for quality improvement; health impact assessment and more routinely bringing a health lens to decisions made in other sectors; working with communities to bridge sectors, including healthcare, public health, social services and others, and to identify and implement financing innovations to sustain their progress in improving the health of all in their communities; supporting predictive modeling showing the value of community-level prevention based on the best available evidence, and making those models useful to decision-makers in communities and states. Pam is a member of the IOM Population Health Roundtable.

Prior to joining the Foundation, Pam was an associate professor of medicine, researcher in clinical outcomes, and program co-director for the master’s program and fellowship in clinical epidemiology and health services research at the Cornell University Medical Center in New York City. Her education includes a BS from Harvard College, MD from the University of California, San Francisco, and an MPH in epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health, followed by a residency in primary care general internal medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and a fellowship in clinical epidemiology and rheumatology at Cornell.