Karen Davis, Chairman and Treasurer

Karen Davis, PhD, is chairman and treasurer and a member of the Board of Directors and Executive Committee of the USBGF, and co-chairs the Joint Membership and Market Committee. She is president of The Commonwealth Fund, a national philanthropy engaged in independent research on health and social policy issues.  Before joining the Fund in 1992, she served as chairman of the Department of Health Policy and Management at The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where she was also a professor of economics. The first woman to head a US Public Health Service agency, she served as deputy assistant secretary for health policy in the US Department of Health and Human Services from 1977-1980.  Prior to that, she was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a visiting scholar at Harvard University, and an assistant professor of economics at Rice University.  She has written extensively on health and social policy issues.