Judy Bradford is the Director of the Virginia Commonwealth Survey and Evaluation Research Laboratory (SERL) within the Center for Public Policy, an interdisciplinary center for excellence.
Judy works at the national level in several areas of community health and understudied populations. She currently serves on review panels for several agencies in the Public Health Services and has served as a consultant of the Office of Women's Health Research in the National Institutes of Health. Judy has significant interest and substantial background in women's health research. She works with the Mautner Project for Lesbian with Cancer, as evaluation consultant on a multi-year CDC-funded replication. With Caitlin Ryan, she conducted the National Lesbian Health Care Survey in 1994-95 and is currently working to establish an international network of lesbian researchers.
Marj Plumb was born and raised in a western suburb of Chicago.
She left the Midwest in 1980 for San Francisco to begin work on
the first west coast women's music and comedy festival and has
worked in the gay and lesbian community as a health care administrator,
activist and national organizer ever since.
As a founding member of the DC-based Lesbian Health Advocacy Network she was intimately involved in the very first meetings with the Department of Health and Human Services to encourage them to include lesbians as an underserved population. She has recently left full-time employment with the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association so that she can finish a book on health policy advocacy and apply to graduate schools so that she can earn her Ph.D. in Public Health and teach, her first love. As a working-class, butch lesbian, Plumb speaks on issues concerning sexuality, race, class, and gender.
Caitlin C. Ryan, MSW, is an award-winning clinical social
worker. An educator and researcher, she has worked on lesbian
and gay health issues since the 1970s. With Donna Futternman,
she is the co-author of Lesbian and Gay Youth: Care and Counseling
(Columbia University Press, 1998). This is the first, comprehensive
guide to the care, counseling and support needs of lesbian and
gay youth for providers, advocates, and parents. Ryan's work has
been acknowledged by many organizations and groups, including
the National Association of Social Workers' "Social Worker
of the Year" award in 1988.
Tonda Hughes is an Assistant Professor in the Department
of Public Health, Mental Health and Administrative Nursing, and
Faculty Affiliate of the Center for Research on Women and Gender,
both at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Tonda has participated
in a number of national committees and advisory groups, most of
them related to addiction in vulnerable or underserved populations.
She recently provided expert testimony on lesbians' use of alcohol
and other drugs at the Institute of Medicine's meeting on Lesbian
Health Research Priorities.
Tonda has been teaching and conducting research on women's use of alcohol and other drugs for more than 15 years. Since beginning to focus on lesbian's mental health and substance use in 1992, she has written or contributed to more than a dozen journal articles, book chapters and government monographs, and has presented her research on these topics at numerous local, national and international conferences or meetings. She is currently working with several researchers to analyze the combined data from the Chicago Women's Health Survey and replication studies conducted in New York City and Minneapolis/St. Paul. Tonda and her research team have recently completed data collection for a pilot study of lesbian health and are waiting to hear about federal funding for a much larger study to being late next year or early in 2000.