Meet the Team
Sara S. Bachman, Ph.D.,Principal Investigator and Director of Research
Meg Comeau, M.H.A., Co-Principal Investigator
Beth Dworetzky, M.S., Project Director
Melissa Hirschi, M.S.W., L.C.S.W., Research Assistant
Katharyn (Kate) Jankovsky, M.S.W., Research Assistant
Angela Wangari Walter, M.S.W., M.P.H., Ph.D.
Kasey Wilson, M.S.W., Research Assistant
Edi Ablavsky, M.A., Communication Specialist
Sara S. Bachman, Ph.D., Principal Investigator and Director of Research
Sara S. Bachman, Ph.D. is Director of the Health & Disability Working Group, Associate Professor in the Research Department at the Boston University School of Social Work, and Research Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Boston University School of Public Health. She has twenty years’ experience with health policy research and program evaluation, especially in the area of state health policy for youth and adults with disabilities or complex health and social conditions. She is currently the Principal Investigator of the Catalyst Center, one of six national centers, funded to improve financing of care for children with special health care needs. Bachman previously served as Co-Principal Investigator of HRSA’s SPNS Innovations in Oral Health Evaluation and Technical Support Center.
Bachman has also participated in several studies of access to health care services for adults and children with disabilities across the spectrum of disability. She has served as a research partner with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, investigating the transition of youth with disabilities to adulthood. Bachman has evaluated health reform initiatives using data from the Massachusetts Survey of Insurance Status and has studied the cost and impact of mandated benefits. She was Co-Principal Investigator of a project to examine the specific role of the Commonwealth Connector in the Massachusetts health reform initiative.
Bachman has served as Co-Principal Investigator of two program evaluations sponsored by SAMHSA’s Center for Substance Abuse Treatment. One is an evaluation of an outreach and case management program for injection drug users at risk for HIV and the second is an evaluation of an outreach and case management program targeting men who have sex with men.
Bachman has an M.S. in Epidemiology from the University of Massachusetts School of Public Health, and this perspective has informed her approach to understanding disability and public health issues. Bachman received her Ph.D. from Brandeis University’s Florence Heller School where she was a Pew Health Policy Fellow. Bachman teaches Research Methods to Master’s and Doctoral students at the Boston University School of Social Work, where she also directs the school’s doctoral program. Bachman chairs the Boston University Charles River Campus Institutional Review Board. She has been nominated by students four times to receive the School’s Teaching Excellence Award.
Meg Comeau, M.H.A., Co-Principal Investigator
Meg Comeau, M.H.A. is currently the Co-Principal Investigator for the Catalyst Center. She is a nationally recognized expert on the role of Medicaid in serving children with disabilities, the implications of federal health care reform for children with a broad spectrum of special health care needs, and the causes and consequences of financial hardship among families raising children with special health care needs. Comeau is also a member of the Leadership Circle for the Institute for Professionalism and Ethical Practice (IPEP) at Boston Children’s Hospital and serves as faculty for IPEP’s Program to Enhance Relational and Communication Skills (PERCS).
Between 1998 and 2005, Comeau was the coordinator of the Family Initiatives program at Boston Children’s Hospital. In that role, she was responsible for facilitating family input into hospital policy and programming design. Her major projects focused on issues related to pediatric palliative care, bereavement support and improving family/professional communication. While at Children’s, she was also the co-chair of the Family Advisory Committee, chair of the Family Faculty program and a member of both the Children’s Hospital Ethics Advisory Committee and the Harvard Teaching Hospitals’ Joint Community Ethics Committee.
Comeau holds a master’s degree in Healthcare Administration from Simmons College in Boston. She has earned several honors, including a Young Investigator Award from the World Federation of Pediatric Intensive Care and Critical Care Societies and the David S. Weiner Award for Outstanding Leadership in Child Health.
Beth Dworetzky, M.S., Project Director
Beth Dworetzky is the Project Director for the Catalyst Center. She writes the Catalyst Center Coverage and Catalyst Center Quarterly e-newsletters and researches issues of health care financing and how they affect health care coverage for children and youth with special health care needs. Prior joining the Catalyst Center team, Dworetzky was the Project Director for the Massachusetts Family-to-Family Health Information Center at the Federation for Children with Special Needs, where she developed an individualized technical assistance protocol to help Massachusetts families navigate the MassHealth eligibility and application process for their children and youth with special health care needs. She is also an at-large member of the Massachusetts Child Health Quality Coalition, created as part of the state’s CMS-funded Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act (CHIPRA) Quality Demonstration project that works towards improving child health outcomes for all Massachusetts children.
Melissa Hirschi, M.S.W., L.C.S.W., Research Assistant
Melissa Hirschi is a research assistant for the Catalyst Center working on projects related to family financial hardship. Hirschi is also currently working on her Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Work at Boston University. After finishing her M.S.W. at Boston University, Hirschi spent three years as a clinical caseworker for the State of Utah doing child welfare work with a specialized intensive reunification team. This team worked to reunite or find other solutions for permanent homes for children who had been removed from their families, always having as a first goal working with children and families to safely return home.
Katharyn (Kate) Jankovsky, M.S.W., Research Assistant
Kate Jankovsky is a research assistant for the Catalyst Center project in the Health & Disability Working Group at Boston University School of Public Health. Prior to her work at the Catalyst Center, Jankovsky completed her Master’s of Social Work at Boston University where she is now finishing her Master’s of Public Health concentrating in Maternal and Child Health. She has experience in community health needs assessment, research, and reproductive health. Jankovsky looks forward to applying a public health social work perspective to her research work with the Catalyst Center.
Angela Wangari Walter, M.S.W., M.P.H., Ph.D.
Angela Wangari Walter is a postdoctoral associate at the Health & Disability Working Group, Boston University School of Public Health. Walter has been conducting health policy research and program evaluation for over ten years. She has extensive experience in research, practice and policy analysis in the areas of integrated health care payment models, behavioral health services research, and HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment. She has authored several articles in the areas of health and health care disparities, substance abuse treatment, and HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment.
As a member of the Catalyst Center team, her role is to identify and support innovative financing strategies to improve reimbursement for services used by children with special health care needs. Walter is also responsible for designing and developing original scientific research related to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act for vulnerable populations, including children and youth with special health care needs.
Between 2003 and 2006, Walter was a research associate at the Institute for Health Policy on several projects with a particular emphasis on racial and ethnic disparities, quality improvement, and cultural competence in health care. She later joined the Center for Addictions Research and Practice at Boston University School of Social Work. While here, she worked on examining the relationship between substance abuse treatment utilization and HIV outcomes among injection drug users. Her other research also focused on mental health counseling and case management services as well as the use of evidence based practices to reduce substance abuse relapse rates in a residential treatment facility for Latina/os.
Prior to joining the Catalyst Center, Walter consulted with public and private sector agencies providing services in population health needs assessment and evaluation; strategic planning and program management to reduce health care costs and improve health outcomes; integrated behavioral and medical health care to provide Patient Centered Medical Home care for patients with complex health care needs; and patient engagement and care coordination for patients with disabilities, multiple chronic conditions and or co-morbid behavioral health problems.
Walter holds Masters Degrees in Social Work and Public Health from Boston University. She combines public health social work interdisciplinary paradigms to inform her approach to designing and implementing health policy research. Dr. Walter received her Ph.D. in social policy from The Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the National Association of Social Workers, Massachusetts Chapter.
Kasey Wilson, M.S.W., Research Assistant
Kasey Wilson is a research assistant at the Catalyst Center and a doctoral student in Boston University’s interdisciplinary social work and sociology degree program. Wilson has a Master’s degree in social work from Rutgers University and is currently the Catalyst Center team lead on projects related to reducing insurance coverage disparities among CYSHCN. Prior to joining the Catalyst Center team, she worked as an outpatient children’s mental and behavioral health counselor.
Wilson has recently written a paper related to the role of the social work profession in reducing insurance disparities among children and youth with special health care needs (CYSHCN) and has participated in a program evaluation of a home-based primary care program for frail elderly adults. Her research focuses on the impact of U.S. health policies on reducing racial and ethnic health disparities, with a particular focus on addressing the link between structural racism and health.
Edi Ablavsky, M.A., Communication Specialist
Edi Ablavsky manages marketing and communication strategies and projects within the Health & Disability Working Group (HDWG). In this capacity, she designs and updates project websites and oversees and implements communication strategies that incorporate social media, e-newsletters, online surveys, print materials, and video. She has more than ten years’ experience creating and managing web and print communication. Prior to joining the HDWG team, Ablavsky was a web editor at Fidelity Investments, and before that she served as principal marketing communication specialist at Stratus Technologies. Her areas of expertise include copywriting and editing, web usability best practices, and website accessibility for visually and motor-impaired users. Ablavsky holds a B.A. in German and French education and an M.A. in English Language and Linguistics from the University of New Hampshire. She also served for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal.
Through Boston University’s Metropolitan College, Ablavsky is working towards an M.L.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies, with a focus on communication for nonprofits that address social inequities. She also serves as a volunteer and community advisory board member for the Boston Center for Refugee Health & Human Rights at Boston Medical Center.
