Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is a national leader in transforming America’s health systems so people live healthier lives and receive the health care they need. A long time practicing physician with business credentials she has hands-on experience developing national health policy.

Driven by the belief that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is a steward of private resources that must be used in the public’s interest, particularly to help the most vulnerable, Lavizzo-Mourey combines the values she learned as a doctor with the skills and knowledge from her business training.

Under Lavizzo-Mourey’s leadership, the Foundation has restructured its strategic investments to target a set of high-impact priorities, among them designing a more effective, performance-driven, patient-centered health system; improving the quality and safety of patient care; and, strengthening state and local public health systems. During her tenure, the Foundation has taken significant strides to help reverse the childhood obesity epidemic; is supporting 17 communities around the country that are working together to transform how care is provided, delivered and paid for; and is helping to build the field of Public Health policy research and what should be expected of an accredited public health department.

Lavizzo-Mourey was a leader in academic medicine, government service and her medical specialty of geriatrics before joining RWJF in 2001 as senior vice president and director of the health care group.  Previously, at the University of Pennsylvania, she was the Sylvan Eisman Professor of medicine and health care systems and director of Penn’s Institute on Aging.  In Washington, D.C., she was deputy administrator of what is now the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality.  She is a member of the Institute of Medicine of The National Academies.

Raised in Seattle by physician parents, Lavizzo-Mourey earned her medical degree from Harvard Medical School, and an M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and completed a residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital.  She was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at Penn. Always a physician as well as an agent for wide-scale social change, she still treats patients at a community health clinic in New Brunswick, N.J.  She and her husband of more than 30 years have two adult children.