Jonathan Jaffery Chosen for National Health Policy Fellowship

Madison, Wisconsin - Dr. Jonathan Jaffery, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health (SMPH), has been selected for the prestigious Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellows program for 2010-2011.

Jaffery joined the medical school in 2002 in the Department of Medicine's division of nephrology and earned a master's degree in population health from UW-Madison in 2008.

He currently serves as chief medical officer for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, Division of Health Care Access and Accountability. Jaffery is one of six fellows chosen for the highly competitive program to spend a year in Washington, DC.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is the largest philanthropy devoted exclusively to improving the health and health care of all Americans. Since 1973, the Health Policy Fellows, a national program of the Foundation, with direction and technical assistance provided by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Science, has selected six to 10 fellows each year from a pool of hundreds of physicians, social scientists and scholars across the country for this year-long fellowship.

A three-month orientation program is followed by a nine-month assignment in which fellows are accepted to work in a congressional office or the executive branch. Following the one-year experience, fellows return to their home institutions or practices to assume leadership roles in improving health policy and management.

"The RWJF health policy fellowship will provide me with a unique experience that builds on my current clinical and policy expertise," said Jaffery. "I'm honored to be accepted and to have the opportunity to be a part of health care reform during such an exciting period in our nation's health care debate."