President's Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition

Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, member of the President's Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition, is the President and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is dedicated to improving health and health care for all Americans. She is the first woman and the first African-American to head the Foundation, which has an endowment of approximately $9 billion and awards more than $400 million a year. She earned her MD at Harvard Medical School, and completed her internship and residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. In 1984, she was named a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her MBA in health care administration from the Wharton School of Business. She is master and former regent of the American College of Physicians, where she chaired its committees on ethics and human rights.

Her career combines geriatric medicine and health policy, focusing on disease, disability prevention and health care issues among minorities. She combines up-to-date business management skills with hands-on doctoring. Her accomplishments include innovations in caring as well as administration. In 1998, as chief of geriatric medicine and director of the Institute on Aging at the University of Pennsylvania, she made house calls as part of a model team program to care for elders in Philadelphia. She served as deputy administrator of the federal Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHCPR, now the Agency for Health Care Quality) from 1992 to 1994 and was co-vice chair of the IOM committee that produced the "Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities" report.