Staff
Anthony J Asciutto, MA, MPH is our Executive Director. Formerly an independent consultant in strategic business planning, group facilitation, and health care program development and performance management. He has extensive consulting experience in health information technology, strategic planning, clinical quality management, disease management, and performance measurement in both private and public sector health care settings, ranging from commercial HMOs to Federal and State Medicaid and Medicare programs, including direct engagements with over a dozen State Medicaid programs. He holds a Master in Applied Economics (Health Care) and a Master in Public Health (Health Policy and Administration), both from the University of Michigan.
Advisory Committee
Arlene Baratz, MD is a physician and mother of two daughters with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (complete AIS). Arlene and her daughter Katie, a medical student, appeared on the Oprah show titled “Growing Up Intersexed” on September 21, 2007 to promote the paradigm of honesty and family-focused, integrated care for families who are raising a child with a DSD. Arlene is a board member and medical advisor to the Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome Support Group (AISSG-USA), a support group for people affected by AIS. Arlene and Katie recently introduced a program to help teens and young women with AIS address issues of sexual health and well-being. Arlene participated in creating the Clinical Guidelines for the Management of Disorders of Sex Development in Childhood and companion Handbook for Parents as models of patient-centered care for DSDs. Arlene has been involved in patient advocacy since the early days of the breast cancer advocacy movement, which secured women’s rights to annual high-quality screening mammography in the 1980’s. As a specialist in Mammography and Breast Radiology, Arlene has long experience working with other clinicians in a comprehensive care model that is focused women’s health care needs.
Bo Laurent (using the pen-name Cheryl Chase) founded Intersex Society of North America in 1993. Her presentation “Sexual Ambiguity: The Patient-Centered Approach” at the 2000 meeting of the Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society is considered an unprecedented patient-led breakthrough in medical reform. Bo was one of two adults with DSDs who participated in creating the 2006 “Consensus Statement on Intersex Disorders.” Her long campaign to reform medical care for DSDs was recently profiled in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Bo completed an M.A. in Organization Development in May 2008. Her culminating paper was a qualitative study of healthcare team functioning.
Katrina A. Karkazis, PhD, MPH is a cultural anthropologist with a particular interest in biomedicine. She obtained her doctorate in cultural anthropology and Master’s in Public Health, both from Columbia University. She subsequently completed postdoctoral training at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University where she currently holds the title of Senior Research Scholar. Her research has centered on constructions of disease categories and their implications for treatment, social movements around health, and informed consent and physician-parent/patient communication in pediatric clinical practice. Fixing Sex, her book on contemporary controversies over medical treatment of intersexuality in the United States, is based on ten years of research on this topic, and is forthcoming from Duke University Press.
David Sandberg, PhD is Associate Professor and Director of the Division of Child Behavioral Health in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He obtained his doctorate from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada and completed postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Miami and at the College of Physicians & Surgeons of Columbia University. His research activities include the study of psychosocial aspects of short stature (for which he was profiled in the New York Times Sunday Magazine) and the psychosocial management of individuals born with disorders of sex development (DSD). He recently served as co-investigator of an (NICHD-sponsored) interdisciplinary research network concerned with biological and socialization factors in sexual differentiation, is developing a psychoeducational treatment manual for clinicians caring for newborns with congenital adrenal hyperplasia identified by newborn screen, and is designing health-related quality of life measures for individuals with DSD and their families. He recently completed a survey of pediatric endocrinologists which demonstrated that clinical decision making for DSDs is highly variable, practitioners are changing practice, and these variations are unrelated to new evidence.