Richard Culbertson, PhD

Richard Culbertson is Professor and Director, Health Policy and Systems Management at Louisiana State University School of Public Health, New Orleans, and Professor of Family Medicine in the LSU Medical School.  From 2013 through 2015 he served as Interim Dean of the School of Public Health.  He is adjunct professor of family medicine at Tulane University School of Medicine. He holds a Master of Divinity degree cum laude  from Harvard University; a Master of Health Administration from the University of Minnesota; and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Sociology from the University of California-San Francisco. He has served as the Director of the Master of Health Administration program at Indiana University-Indianapolis; Associate Vice Chancellor for the Health Sciences and Associate Dean of the Medical School at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Founding Director of Administration and Finance for  the University of California-San Francisco Medical Group; and CEO of the Kaiser-Permanente Sunset Medical Center, Los Angeles, as well as COO and other administrative positions for several major teaching hospitals.

 He has published articles in scholarly and professional journals with primary interest in academic medical centers and managed care; organizational structure of medical schools; and organization of medical practices to promote physician autonomy.  He heads the Ethics Resource of the Louisiana Clinical & Translational Science Center (LA CaTS), and is a nationally recognized lecturer and author in the area of healthcare management ethics by the American College of Healthcare Executives and the Healthcare Financial Management Association.

His major public service contributions are in the area of healthcare governance.  He is the former Chairman of the Board of Directors and Board Member (1994-2007) of the Aurora Health System in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the largest private employer in the state of Wisconsin. He was a member of the Governing Board of Touro Infirmary, New Orleans (2004-2009) and a member of its Quality of Care Committee from 2009 through 2015.  Touro was the first hospital in the City of New Orleans to reopen following Hurricane Katrina in 2005.  He was a member of the Committee on Governance of the American Hospital Association (2006-2009) and its Regional Policy Board during the same period.  His service to the American Hospital Association continued from 2009-2012 as a member of its Leadership Development Council.  He received the Allen Copping Award in 2015 for excellence in teaching voted by the students of the School of Public Health.

He was named a W.K Kellogg Foundation National Leadership Fellow and an Emerging Young Leader in Health Care by the Healthcare Forum.  He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Delta Omega national academic honorary societies.  He is a reviewer for Healthcare Financing Review and The Journal of Health Administration Education, and a member of the Health services Research and Development scientific merit review panel of the Veterans Affairs Health System.

During 15 years as Professor of Global Health Systems and Development at Tulane University he twice served as chairman of the University Senate Committee on Intercollegiate Athletics and Chair of the NCAA Certification process, as a Fellow of Newcomb College and of the Murphy Institute Center on Ethics and Public Policy,  and served as interim chair of the department of Health Systems Management and interim director of the Institute for Health Services Research.  Under his guidance as chair, five students received their doctoral degrees from Tulane.

In addition to his academic and scholarly pursuits, he is an avid swimmer, having completed the 2009 Alcatraz Invitational Swim Race from Alcatraz to San Francisco in the non-wetsuit division.  In 2016 he endowed the Richard A. Culbertson Professorship in Health Policy and Systems Management.  Together with his wife Susan Leary he also endowed the Susan Leary and Richard Culbertson Professorship in the LSU School of Medicine.