Black PR Wire Power Profiler on Risa Lavizzo-Mourey

Risa Lavizzo-Mourey is president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a position she has held since 2003. With more than 30 years of personal experience as a medical practitioner, policymaker, professor, and nonprofit executive, Lavizzo-Mourey combines the scientific and ethical values she learned as a doctor with an enduring conviction that meaningful philanthropy must achieve lasting social change. Under her leadership, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has researched, evaluated, and implemented transformative programs tackling the nation's most pressing health issues.

For more than four decades, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has addressed key issues in public health such as establishing the 911 EMS system, reducing tobacco use, and improving end-of-life care. Under Lavizzo-Mourey's leadership, the Foundation is striving to build a comprehensive Culture of Health in America by focusing on four major themes: Healthy Communities; Healthy Children, Healthy Weight; Transforming Health and Health Care Systems; and Leadership for Better Health.

A specialist in geriatrics, Lavizzo-Mourey came to the Foundation from the University of Pennsylvania, where she served as the Sylvan Eisman Professor of Medicine and Health Care Systems. She also directed Penn's Institute on Aging and was chief of geriatric medicine at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Medicine.

At the federal level, Lavizzo-Mourey served as deputy administrator of what is now the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality and worked on the White House Health Care Reform Task Force, co-chairing the working group on quality of care. She has also served on numerous federal advisory committees, including the Task Force on Aging Research, the National Committee for Vital and Health Statistics, and the President's Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry. Additionally, she co-chaired a congressionally requested Institute of Medicine study on racial and ethnic disparities on health care.

Raised in Seattle by parents who both were practicing physicians, Lavizzo-Mourey completed her undergraduate work at the University of Washington and the State University of New York at Stony Brook and earned her medical degree from Harvard Medical School. She completed her residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. She trained in geriatrics at Penn, then earned an MBA from the Wharton School. She is the author of several books and dozens of articles.