Ep. 61: Emily Polak is Vot-ER's senior vice president of partnerships and organizing, where she works to help ensure Vot-ER's health center, association, hospital, health system, and academic partners have the resources and support they need to weave nonpartisan civic engagement materials into healthcare spaces. Prior to her time at Vot-ER, Emily spent over a decade at Community Catalyst advancing health advocacy work at the local, state and national levels. She holds an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School and a B.A. in sociology from Wesleyan University.

Check your voter registration, find your polling location and more at https://vot-er.org/act/. Also, access the Election Protection hotline at 866-OUR-VOTE.

Listen now, and learn more about how Emily is a pioneering leader in healthcare.

For more about the Health Fund, visit https://healthfund.org/

Ep. 60: Dr. Jamila Michener is a professor of government and public policy at Cornell University. She studies poverty, racism and public policy, with a particular focus on health and housing. She is author of Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism, and Unequal Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Uncivil Democracy: How Access to Justice Shapes Political Power (Princeton University Press, 2026). She is co-editor of Politics in the American States: A Comparative Analysis (Sage Publications, 2024). She is inaugural director of the Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures and senior associate dean for public engagement at the Brooks School of Public Policy.

Jamila’s research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Institute for Research on Poverty, the Russell Sage Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund, and the Ford Foundation. Her public writing has been featured in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Vox, and other many other outlets. She works closely with community-based organizations around the country to apply research insights to address urgent problems facing racially and economically marginalized communities.

Prior to working at Cornell, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at the University of Michigan. She received her master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago and her undergraduate degree from Princeton University.

Listen now, and learn more about how Jamila is a pioneering leader in healthcare.

For more about the Health Fund, visit https://healthfund.org/

Ep. 59: Clay Wirestone returns to Pioneers in Health to discuss his new book, “Opinionated.” Clay serves as the opinion editor at the Kansas Reflector, and his new book provides an eye-opening tour through the golden age of Kansas journalism and proves why local newspapers and incisive commentary are indispensable for an informed public.
Listen now, and learn more about this new book covering innovative leaders in Kansas.

For more about the Health Fund: https://healthfund.org/