Academy Leaders
John Porcari
Beth Davis, SPHR
Instructional Team
Robert M. Arnold, MD
Franklyn P. Cladis, MD
Leslie R.M. Hausmann, PhD
Lisa S. Parker, PhD
Doris M. Rubio, PhD
Jennifer E. Woodward, PhD
Academy Leaders
John Porcari is the Founder and President of JPorcari & Associates, LLC., where he works with forward thinking organizations to build, accelerate and continually re-energize their Leaders, Teams, Culture, and Critical Change Initiatives.Internal Consulting Capability. Enabling internal functional experts to transition to trusted advisor consulting partners who co-create high impact solutions with Business Leaders.
Prior to his current endeavors, John was a Senior Executive at the global consulting firm Accenture, Founder and President of 3rd River Partners, and Director of Performance Strategies and Solutions at FiveStar Development.
Beth Davis, SPHR, believes that everyone in a company is responsible for people development and creating company culture. After many years in various corporate roles across a diverse set of global industries, Beth founded The Llewellin Group where she now gets to work with people serious about bringing the Agile mindset, principles, and methods forward in their workplaces in pursuit of lasting value creation for customers and the creation of exceptional employee experiences.
Beth is a certified Scrum Trainer with Scrum Inc., co-created the first Scrum in HR certification experience with Scrum Inc., and is one of the first certified facilitators of the iCAgile – Agility in HR certification in the USA. She contributed the chapter on Self-Organization in the recently published book by Agile People, Agile People Principles: Your Call to Action for the Future of Work. Beth holds certification as a Senior Professional in Human Resources, and is a certified trainer and Community of Practice leader of 3 Vital Questions (www.3vitalquestions.com) aimed at developing self-coaching and leadership capabilities in everyone she gets to work with. She volunteers as one of the leaders of the PittAgile Meetup community and is core faculty for the Early Career and Advanced Faculty Leadership Academy at the University of Pittsburgh School of Health Sciences.
Instructional Team
Robert M. Arnold, MD, is a Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and in the University of Pittsburgh Center for Bioethics and Health Law. He completed his medical school training at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and residency at Rhode Island Hospital. Subsequently he has been on the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh. In 2000, Dr. Arnold was named the first Leo H. Creip Chair of Patient Care. The Chair emphasizes the importance of the doctor-patient relationship, particularly at the end of life. He is the Director of the Institute for Doctor-Patient Communication and the Medical Director of the UPMC Palliative and Supportive Institute. He is clinically active in palliative care.
Dr. Arnold has published on end-of-life care, hospice and palliative care, doctor-patient communication, and ethics education. His current research interests are focused on educational interventions to improve communication in life-limiting illnesses and better understanding how ethical precepts are operationalized in clinical practice. He also is working with the UPMC Health System to develop system-wide, integrative palliative services throughout the health system. He is the Past-President of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities as well as the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine.
Franklyn P. Cladis, MD, is a professor of Anesthesiology at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine, the Clinical Director of Pediatric Anesthesiology, and the Program Director of the Pediatric Anesthesiology Fellowship Program.
Dr. Cladis provides full-time pediatric anesthesia care at UPMC Children’s Hospital, serves on the Pediatric Pain Medicine Service, and is a member of the Pediatric Transplant Team. He is widely published, and his clinical research focuses on anesthesia for pediatric craniofacial surgery.
As a practicing physician, educator, and clinical investigator for over 20 years, he’s taken a special interest in managing difficult situations and mastering difficult conversations, particularly in an academic health center.
Leslie Hausmann, PhD, is Associate Professor of Medicine and a Core Investigator at the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System (VAPHS) Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion (CHERP). As Co-Director of the Health Equity Capacity Building Core within CHERP, Dr. Hausmann also spearheads the development and dissemination of tools and education to support innovative health equity research and empower those working in the field to conduct equity-focused quality improvement. An experimental social psychologist, Dr. Hausmann has devoted her career to improving the health and health care of vulnerable Veteran populations through research and quality improvement. Her primary research interests include understanding how issues of discrimination and bias contribute to health and health care disparities, especially with regards to pain and pain management. However, her research spans the full continuum of health equity research, including epidemiological studies designed to identify health and healthcare disparities, observational studies investigating factors that cause or exacerbate disparities, and studies in which patient, provider, and system-level interventions to reduce disparities are developed and evaluated.
Lisa Parker, PhD, is the Dickie, McCamey & Chilcote Professor of Bioethics, Director of the Center for Bioethics & Health Law, and a Professor in the Department of Human Genetics in the School of Public Health. She directs the University’s Master of Arts in Bioethics Program, is a co-director of the Area of Concentration in Medical Humanities and Ethics in the School of Medicine, and is a member of the Steering Committee of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program. For the Office of Research, she leads the Research, Ethics, and Society Initiative, which is designed to foster campus-wide discussion of research ethics and the social implications of empirical research, scholarship, and technology development.
Dr. Parker has published extensively on ethical concerns related to the design and conduct of research, particularly in genetics/genomics and mental health. Her research on ethical issues in genetics/genomics has focused on the ethical management of incidental findings and return of research results, pharmacogenomic research, and genetic enhancement, as well as ethics and implications of predictive analytics more generally. As Associate Director for Bioethics in the University’s Institute for Precision Medicine, she serves as an ethics consultant on studies involving biobanking and whole exome/genome sequencing in different patient populations, as well as the integration of whole genome sequencing data into the Test2Learn educational platform
For the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), Dr. Parker serves on its National Advisory Council and has chaired, and is currently serving a second term on, the Genomics and Society Working Group. At the University, Dr. Parker has just begun her first term on the Faculty Assembly. She co-chairs the Institutional Conflict of Interest Committee, and serves on the Humanities Council, the Human Data and Biological Samples Sharing Policy Committee Charter, the Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC) Committee, and the COVID-19 Vaccine Policy Drafting Committee.
Doris Rubio
, PhD, is Professor of Medicine, Biomedical Informatics, Biostatistics, and Clinical & Translational Science at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. She is the Assistant Vice Chancellor for Clinical Research Education and Training, Health Sciences and directs the Institute for Clinical Research Education (ICRE). The ICRE has 7 degree programs and 15 career development programs for clinical and translational science researchers and medical educators. The ICRE is also home to the KL2, TL1, Workforce Development, and Team Science for our Clinical and Translational Science Institute. Dr. Rubio has been particularly committed to the mentorship and development of faculty of color and women in science. With the goal of addressing the limited number of people who are underrepresented in science, she started the LEADS (Leading Emerging and Diverse Scientists to Success) program (R25GM116740), which is a collaboration with nine Minority Serving Institutions to launch the research careers of junior investigators. Additionally, she has a U01 under the NIH’s Diversity Program Consortium and the National Research Mentoring Network to test an intervention across 25 CTSAs for underrepresented biomedical researchers to retain them in research careers (U01GM132133). Among other honors, she has received the Educator of the Year Award from the Association for Clinical and Translational Science (ACTS) in 2016 and the ACTS Award for Contributing to the Diversity and Inclusiveness of the Translational Research Workforce in 2021. She also was awarded the Chancellor’s Distinguished Public Service Award in 2021 given her work on diversifying the workforce both locally and nationally.
Jennifer E. Woodward, PhD, serves as Vice Chancellor for Sponsored Programs and Research Operations and Professor of Surgery and Immunology in the School of Medicine.
Previously, Dr. Woodward was Associate Vice Provost for Research Operations, Assistant Dean for Faculty Affairs in the School of Medicine, and Executive Director for Research and Academic Affairs at the Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute.
Jennifer has extensive experience negotiating in an academic culture – sitting on both sides of the table. She is an alumna of ELAM, the Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine program, which is a year-long fellowship for senior women faculty dedicated to developing the skills required to lead and manage in today's complex health care environment.
Jennifer has received additional training in negotiation under Catherine Morrison, a nationally recognized negotiation consultant specializing in academic healthcare.
Learn more about the 2023 Advanced Faculty Leadership Academy
Apply to the Advanced Faculty Leadership Academy