Executive Master
of Health Administration

Michael Richards’ primary research involves health care provider responses to public policies and evolving market environments. He also has considerable interests in the structure and delivery of public insurance programs (i.e., Medicare and Medicaid) as well as health care workforce issues. His active and broad research portfolio allows him to collaborate with investigators with diverse backgrounds and areas of expertise at a variety of institutions all across the US.
Professor Richards is the Director of the Sloan Program in Health Administration and has a secondary appointment at Weill Cornell Medical College in the Division of Health Policy & Economics. He is also a faculty Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
His research has been featured in the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, American Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Public Economics, the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, as well as other academic venues.
Professor Richards received his Ph.D. in Health Policy from Yale University. His B.S., M.D., and M.P.H. from the University of Illinois College of Medicine and UIC School of Public Health.

Kristen Underhill is a Professor of Law at Cornell Law School and a Professor of Population Health Sciences at Weill Cornell Medical College (Department of Population Health Sciences). She holds a JD from Yale and a DPhil from the University of Oxford in Evidence-Based Social Intervention.

Underhill completed her postdoctoral work in HIV prevention in the Center for Alcohol and Addictions Studies at Brown University, then pursued five years of NIH-funded research at Yale Law School and the Yale Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS. She was previously Associate Professor at Columbia Law School and the Mailman School of Public Health (Department of Population and Family Health), and she joined the Cornell faculty in 2021.

Her research interests focus on the relationships among law, incentives, and health behaviors, and her recent work has included projects on access to Medicaid, postpartum health, laws enabling minors to consent to health care services, laws on sexual health education, and laws affecting prenatal and postpartum substance use.

Underhill teaches courses in Health Law, Torts, Public Health Law, and Law and Economics.

Tom is currently a Visiting Lecturer in the department at the Brooks School of Public Policy.  Prior to Cornell, Tom worked as a Lecturer in the department of economics at the University of Chicago, and held various manufacturing positions in Canada, New York, and South Carolina.

Natalia Santamaría teaches classes in project management and operations management for non-business graduate students. Her research, which focuses on competitive bidding and decision making under competition and uncertainty, has been published in Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and Production and Operations Management. Prior to joining Johnson in 2014, she was an assistant professor in the industrial engineering school at Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia. She earned a BS and an MSc in industrial engineering from Universidad de Los Andes, an MSc in operations research from Rutgers University, and a Ph.D. in supply chain management and operations research from the Pennsylvania State University.

Cindy van Es is Professor of Practice in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. She has a Ph.D. in statistics from Iowa State University and joined Cornell in 1988. Professor van Es teaches three courses in the undergraduate business program: Introductory Statistics, Business Statistics, and Impact Learning: South Africa. Her general area of interest is statistical education, with a focus on business applications and teaching through social justice examples.

Professor van Es currently serves as Director of Dyson’s Undergraduate Business Program. In this position, she provides strategic leadership and supervision on activities within the undergraduate program at the school, focusing specifically on implementation of the undergraduate curriculum and review of academic policies

Nick Fabrizio’s expertise spans both the public and private sectors. He advises companies, government agencies, and prominent healthcare institutions on a variety of issues, including strategic decisions, public policy, mergers and acquisitions, turnaround/crisis management, and integrating technology.

Professor Fabrizio is a frequent presenter at state and national conferences and has published over 25 journal articles on corporate governance, strategy, and organizational change. He has also published book chapters and two books, and he is a regular contributor to news and media outlets on healthcare trends and current events.

Professor Fabrizio is the Capstone Director for both the MHA and EMHA programs. In addition to teaching in the Sloan Program, he developed the Healthcare Change Management Certificate Program for eCornell and designs custom programs for eCornell.

Professor Fabrizio received his undergraduate degree from the State University of New York at Cortland, his M.A. from Binghamton University, and his Ph.D. from Walden University.

Laurie Sprung’s career has been focused principally in three areas: health care providers’ strategic responses to the shift toward value-based reimbursement, creation and management of population health-driven delivery organizations, and the impact of consumerism on health care.
Professor Sprung spent the majority of her career as the founder and leader of the value-based care and population health management consulting practice, and a partner in the strategy practice, at the Advisory Board (now Optum), and has served in leadership and advisory roles across a range of health care organizations including physician organizations, telehealth, and behavioral health startups. She began her consulting career at McKinsey & Company following her initial career as a clinical psychologist.
Professor Sprung is a Capstone Director for the EMHA program, as well as teaching courses in strategy and population health management in the Sloan program.
She received a BA from Cornell University, an MA and PhD in clinical psychology from Syracuse University, and an MPH in health policy and management from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.