This fall, the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy welcomes five new professors to its faculty. Their combined education, experience and expertise will contribute to the school’s course offerings and research output.

Kirsten Gelsdorf joins the Batten School as Director of Global Humanitarian Policy, bringing 19 years of experience working in the humanitarian sector; most recently serving as the Chief of the Policy Analysis and Innovation section at the United Nations Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Her career includes long-term field postings and operational deployments to numerous emergencies around the globe. She also served as a humanitarian advisor to President Clinton in his role as the UN Special Envoy for Haiti and as a policy advisor to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the global food crisis in 2008.

She has led major policy processes and authored numerous high-profile policy reports documents that have been implemented by Member States and adopted in key UN resolutions. She has been the guest editor of journal special editions and a Senior Researcher for Tufts University. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College and a Master degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Sally Hudson is an economist joining the Batten School faculty. She studies recruiting, retention and performance in public sector labor markets. Her recent work analyzes Teach for America’s impact on staffing in high turnover school districts and the effects of salary schedules on mid-career recruiting.  

Hudson also conducts randomized evaluations of programs that aim to improve college access and completion for low-income students. She works with the Poverty Action Lab and the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team to promote the use of experiments in evaluating and improving public services. Sally earned her Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and B.A. in Economics from Stanford University.

Adam Leive joins the Batten faculty as an economist with interests at the intersection of health, risk and public policy. Leive studies consumer choices of health insurance plans, as well as taxation and regulation in markets for health insurance and medical care.

His research also examines the determinants of health status and the effects of policy interventions on health. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and his B.A. from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. Before graduate school, he worked at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington, DC.

Sebastian Tello-Trillo joins the faculty of the Batten School as an economist. His research focuses on how policies affect individual’s health behaviors and economic outcomes. His areas of interest lie within Health Economics, Econometrics and Development Economics.

Tello-Trillo received his Ph.D. in Economics from Vanderbilt University and holds a B.S in Pure Mathematics and Economics from Florida State University. Prior to his studies at Vanderbilt, he was a project associate for Innovations for Poverty Action.  Tello-Trillo was born and raised in Lima, Peru.

Dr. Michael D. Williams joins the Batten School as the Director of the UVA Center for Health Policy, a joint program of the Batten School, the School of Medicine and the Department of Public Health Sciences. With more than 20 years of experience in health care delivery and systems design, Dr. Williams is passionate about health care equity issues. Dr. Williams joined UVA in 2012 as an Associate Professor of Surgery and Director, Emergency General Surgery in the Department of Surgery. He has also served as the Director of the UVA Summer Medical and Dental Education Program, which was established by a major grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The program aims to help under-represented minority students become more competitive candidates for medical school.

After completing his undergraduate studies in Biology at Brown University, Dr. Williams earned his MD from the UVA School of Medicine. From 1993 to 1998, he conducted his postgraduate medical training in the field of General Surgery at Louisiana State University – New Orleans program at Charity Hospital. After residency, he returned to Washington, D.C. and completed one-year fellowships in Surgical Critical Care and Trauma Surgery. Williams’ public sector experience also includes serving as Chief Medical Officer for the Washington, D.C. Fire and EMS Department.