Presenter Biographies

Valarie Blake

Valarie Blake

Trans Health in Appalachia

Valarie K. Blake is a professor law at WVU focusing on health care law. Before joining the WVU College of Law faculty in fall 2015, she was a visiting professor at Duquesne School of Law. Prior to that, she served as an ethics senior research associate for the American Medical Association (AMA), where she engaged in research and policy-making efforts related to the AMA’s Code of Medical Ethics. She has also worked at the Cleveland Clinic as an advanced bioethics fellow providing bedside ethics consultation, research teaching, and service in the areas of law, ethics, and professionalism.

Professor Blake’s scholarly research is on the intersections between health care delivery and ethics. She is particularly interested in how increasing state and federal regulation of health care financing and delivery will impact chronic disease, health insurance, and professionalism in medicine.


Zack Buck

Zack Buck

Financing Rural Health Care

Zack Buck is an associate professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law who specializes in health law.

Professor Buck’s scholarship examines the enforcement of laws that affect health and health care in the United States, and most recently, his writing has focused on the future of the Affordable Care Act, the legal rules that govern overtreatment, and the regulation of pharmaceutical drug prices. He is the author of more than 15 law review articles, many published in top journals. Over the last five years while at Tennessee Law, he has received the Marilyn V. Yarbrough Faculty Award for Writing Excellence, the Wilkinson Junior Research Professorship, the Harold Warner Outstanding Teacher Award, and the Forrest W. Lacy Award for outstanding contributions to the moot court program.

He has previously taught at Mercer University School of Law, Seton Hall University School of Law, and at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, and formerly practiced complex commercial litigation at Sidley Austin LLP in Chicago. Professor Buck holds a BA in Political Science and Journalism from Miami University (OH), a Master’s in Bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.


Deborah Farringer

Deborah Farringer

Medicaid Expansion Expectations

Deborah Farringer is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, an Associate Professor of Law, and Director of Health Law Studies at Belmont University College of Law where she teaches a variety of courses, including Health Law, Health Care Fraud and Abuse, Health Care Business and Finance, Bioethics, and Mental Health Law.

Deborah is the faculty supervisor for the Belmont Health Law Journal, a journal that serves as a resource for practitioners maneuvering through the complex legal landscape of health law through its blog, student notes, symposia and other programs.

Deborah focuses her scholarship on health law and policy, primarily related to health care compliance, including health data technology, fraud, abuse, and privacy issues. She has published articles in Brooklyn Law Review, Seattle Law Review, Texas A&M Law Review, and The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, among others. Prior to joining the faculty at Belmont, Deborah served as Senior Associate General Counsel in the Office of General Counsel at Vanderbilt University, where her practice focused primarily on transactional matters for Vanderbilt University Medical Center, including analysis of contracts for compliance with applicable healthcare laws such as the Stark Law, Antikickback Statute, Civil Monetary Penalties Law, and the False Claims Act, physician practice acquisitions, joint ventures, general corporate governance and corporate maintenance issues, hospital operations, and real estate leasing and purchasing issues.

Prior to her role at Vanderbilt University, Deborah practiced in the Healthcare Industry group at a large Nashville law firm. Deborah is a member of the American Health Lawyers Association, the Tennessee Bar Association, and is also licensed to practice in the state of Tennessee.


Jacqueline Fox

Jacqueline Fox

Dental Care in Rural Populations and Medicare Coverage

Professor Fox teaches Health Care Law and Policy, Public Health Law, Bioethics, and Torts at the University of South Carolina. She has published numerous articles on health law, health care financing and regulation, and health care reform in publications including the University of Cincinnati Law Review, Buffalo Law Review, Seton Hall Law Review, the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics, the International Journal of Healthcare Technology and Management, and The Hasting Center's Health Care Cost Monitor. Her current work closely examines the newly created Independent Payment Advisory Board, which is tasked with capping the costs of the Medicare program. She has published op-ed pieces in The State newspaper and appeared on local and regional news shows speaking on the subject of health law. Her work on Medicare, in particular, has been cited in a number of scholarly publications and one of her contributions to the Hastings Center health reform publications has been the subject of an article in the New York Times. She has also been an invited speaker at universities including Oxford University, the University of Toronto, Johns Hopkins University, and Yale University. She was a visiting professor at the Santa Anna University in Pisa, Italy, for the spring semester of 2009.

Professor Fox received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and J.D. and LL.M. from Georgetown University. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of South Carolina, she was a Greenwall Fellow at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities, and a Donaghue Scholar of Research Ethics at Yale University.


Hannah Haksgaard

Hannah Haksgaard

Frontier Nursing and Rural Midwives

Hannah Haksgaard is an Associate Professor at the University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law where she teaches courses in the areas of Property, Family Law, and Reproduction & the Law. Her scholarship focuses on rurality and the law, and she has written about women’s reproductive rights access in rural areas, how rural families own and manage property, and rural America’s attorney shortage. Hannah holds a BA from the University of Kentucky and a JD from Berkeley Law. She has family roots in the Appalachian foothills of southeastern Kentucky and the plains of South Dakota.


Nathan Hamons

Nathan Hamons

Trans Health in Appalachia

Nathan Hamons is an associate at Nelson Mullins LLP in Huntington, West Virginia, where uses his experience in personal injury, insurance litigation, healthcare litigation, qualified immunity, and multiparty litigation to assist clients in a variety of industries. He previously worked at Pullin, Fowler, Flanagan, Brown, and Poe, PLLC. He was also a legal intern at West Virginia United Health System.

Hamons is a 2018 graduate of the West Virginia University College of Law, earning a dual-degree J.D./MPA (Master of Public Administration). He was an associate editor of the West Virginia Law Review, Vol. 120. 


Kit Johnson

Kit Johnson

The Immigration Solution for Improving Rural Health

Kit Johnson is a professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law where she teaches Immigration, Crimmigration, and Civil Procedure. She previously taught at the University of North Dakota School of Law. Her research focuses on immigration, with a particular emphasis on authorized migration. She is a co-editor of the ImmigrationProf Blog, one of the most popular blogs on immigration law.


David Moore

David Moore

International Human Rights as a Vehicle for Achieving Rural Health

Professor Moore is a scholar of foreign relations law, international law, international human rights, and international development at Brigham Young University. His publications have appeared in the Harvard, Columbia, Virginia, and Northwestern Law Reviews, among others. Professor Moore has taught international law, international human rights, U.S. foreign relations law, civil procedure, legal scholarship, a plenary powers colloquium, and international human rights and international religious freedom clinics. As a teacher, he has been recognized with the University's R. Wayne Hansen Teaching and Learning Fellowship, the BYU Law Alumni Association Teacher of the Year Award, and the Student Bar Association First Year Professor of the Year Award. He is a member of the American Law Institute.

As a human rights expert, Professor Moore serves on the roster of experts of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Moscow Mechanism. In 2020, he was elected to a brief term on the Human Rights Committee, a body of independent experts that oversees states’ compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Professor Moore also serves as an Associate Director of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies, which seeks to secure the blessings of freedom of religion or belief for everyone, everywhere.

Between 2017 and 2019, Professor Moore served, variously, as the Acting Deputy Administrator and General Counsel of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the federal government’s lead agency for international development and humanitarian assistance. From 2016 to 2017, he was the Associate Dean for Research and Academic Affairs at Brigham Young University Law School. He was a Visiting Professor at the George Washington University Law School from 2008 to 2009.

Before joining BYU, Professor Moore clerked for Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. during the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2007 Term. From 2003 to 2007, Professor Moore was an assistant and then associate professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law. He arrived at the University of Kentucky after researching and teaching at the University of Chicago Law School as an Olin Fellow from 2001 to 2003. From 2000 to 2001, Professor Moore clerked for Judge Samuel A. Alito, Jr. on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. From 1996 to 2000, he was an Honor Program trial attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Division, Federal Programs Branch.

Professor Moore is a summa cum laude graduate of Brigham Young University Law School, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review and graduated first in his class. He received his BA from Brigham Young University, where he was a Benson scholar and graduated summa cum laude, with University Honors, as co-valedictorian of his college, and first in his graduating class. He and his wife Natalie are the parents of seven wonderful children.


Aimee Palumbo

Aimee Palumbo

Why Aren’t Mountain State Folks Getting the Shot? Health Literacy, COVID-19, and Vaccination Rates in West Virginia Counties

Aimee J. Palumbo, PhD, MPH, joined the faculty of Temple University’s College of Public Health in August 2018. Prior to this she was a postdoctoral fellow with joint appointments at the Penn Injury Science Center at the University of Pennsylvania and the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and as adjunct teaching faculty at Drexel University. 

She received her doctoral degree from Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health in 2016 with a focus on life course social exposures. She worked for three years at the Pennsylvania Department of Health’s Bureau of Epidemiology managing public health investigations related to foodborne, waterborne, and healthcare-associated infection illnesses. The goal of Aimee’s research and teaching is to use the foundational principles of epidemiology to understand how social exposures, including where we live and where we work, influence multiple aspects of health. 

Her goal with teaching is to engage students with practical applications of epidemiologic concepts in order to solidify understanding and motivate students to answer questions that matter to them.


Jessica Roberts

Jessica Roberts

Materials Related to Technology and Health

Jessica L. Roberts is the Director of the Health Law & Policy Institute and the Leonard Childs Professor in Law at the University of Houston. She specializes in genetics and the law, health law, and disability law. Prior to UH, Professor Roberts was an Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School and an Adjunct Professor of Disability Studies at the City University of New York. Immediately after law school, she clerked for the Honorable Dale Wainwright of the Texas Supreme Court and the Honorable Roger L. Gregory of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Professor Roberts' research operates at the intersection of health law, ethics, and social justice. Her scholarship has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, Northwestern Law Review, Science, Nature Biotechnology (twice), and JAMA Internal Medicine, among others. Cambridge University Press published her book on "healthism," co-authored with Elizabeth Weeks Leonard, in 2018.

A noted expert on diverse issues of health law, Professor Roberts has been interviewed by several leading media outlets, including U.S. News, the New York Times (twice), the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, National Public Radio, and BBC World Service.


Elizabeth Van Nostrand

Elizabeth Van Nostrand

Why Aren’t Mountain State Folks Getting the Shot? Health Literacy, COVID-19, and Vaccination Rates in West Virginia Counties

Elizabeth Van Nostrand is an associate professor in the Department of Health Services Administration and Policy at Temple University. She also serves as the department’s MPH program director.

Van Nostrand is an expert in legal epidemiology—the study and application of law as an intervention to prevent disease and injury. Currently, she is leading a four-year study funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that will identify impactful therapies, services and treatments offered to individuals arrested for drug misuse and their effect on morbidity (as measured by emergency department presentations, in-patient hospitalization admissions, rearrest and EMS calls) and mortality.

Van Nostrand’s interests include disaster preparedness research and developing new methods to prepare the public health workforce to respond to emergencies. She co-authored three public health emergency law bench books and conducted trainings for health departments in the District of Columbia, Louisiana and Pennsylvania. Through a CDC-funded grant, Van Nostrand also created the Emergency Law Inventory (ELI), a public health informatics tool for volunteers engaged in disaster response. She received the National Partner Award from the Medical Reserve Corps (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) and two awards from the University of Pittsburgh's Innovation Institute for the development of ELI.

Previously, she was an associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. While at Pitt, Van Nostrand was the department’s vice chair for practice, director of the MPH and JD/MPH programs, and the interim director of the Center for Public Health Practice. She developed innovative courses and curricula, including Public Health Law, Health Law, Current Issues in Health Law, Health Policy, Population Health, and Law in Public Health Practice. Van Nostrand received three Craig Award nominations (Pitt Public Health’s highest award for teaching) and a Delta Omega Honorary Society award (honorable mention) for curriculum development.

Van Nostrand is the former director and principal investigator of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Public Health Training Center (funded by the Health Resources and Services Administration). Under her directorship, the training center focused on public health informatics trainings and creating multidisciplinary training paradigms that integrate both public health and clinical care.

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