OHD Board of Directors

Michael Garland

Oregon Health Decisions Co-Founder
Michael J. Garland, D.Sc.Rel

Michael J. Garland is a co-founder of Oregon Health Decisions and served as its first Executive Director from 1983 to 1986. He has been a member of the Board of Directors since 1987. Michael is a professor emeritus in the Department of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Oregon Health & Science University OHSU. He is a co-founder of the Center for Ethics in Health Care at OHSU. Michael received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and letters from St. Louis University and a master’s degree in theology from the University of Notre Dame. He earned a doctorate in religious studies from the University of Strasbourg in France, where he focused on the theory of responsibility in ethics.
Dr. Garland has been active in the field of biomedical ethics since 1973 when he joined the Health Policy Program at the University of California, San Francisco. He is published widely in the field of biomedical ethics with particular focus on ethical issues in the allocation of health care resources, social ethics education in health professions’ curricula, ethics in human experimentation, ethical issues in withholding treatment from the terminally ill, and the community’s role in guiding ethical choices in health policy.

Paige Sipes-Metzler

President

Paige Sipes-Metzler, DPA, MSN, RN

Vice President, AON Consulting

Paige Sipes-Metzler is Vice President at Aon Consulting. Her focus area is working with employers to achieve health transformation. She has been actively involved in health care reform in both Oregon and California.
Dr. Sipes-Metzler has a Doctorate of Public Administration from the University of Southern California, MSN from the University of California San Francisco, and BSN from the University of Pennsylvania. She is an adjunct faculty member at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.
In addition to serving as the Board President for Oregon Health Decisions, Dr. Sipes-Metzler serves on the Oregon Idaho Conference of the United Methodist Church, Board of Pensions as Vice Chair and the Oregon Public Health Institute Board of Directors as Immediate past President. In her spare time she enjoys spending time with her family and three children.

Donalda Dodson

Donalda Dodson, MPH, RN

Executive Director, Oregon Child Development Coalition

Donalda Dodson is the Executive Director for the Oregon Child Development Coalition providing executive leadership for all aspects of the organization under the guidance of the Oregon Child Development Coalition Board of Directors and Head Start Policy Councils.
Donalda has over 36 years of experience in management and administration of public health programs. The majority of this work has been in the area of Maternal and Child Health in the public sector. She has held leadership and administrative positions at county, state, and national levels. Donalda was the Public Health Manager for the fourth largest county in Oregon for 27 years. She then took a position with the State of Oregon as the Administrator for the Office of Family Health, Oregon Department of Human Services.

Liz Baxter

Elizabeth Baxter

Executive Director of the North Sound Accountable Community of Health

Liz Baxter recently became the first Executive Director of the North Sound Accountable Community of Health, which encompasses Snohomish, Skagit Island, San Jan and Whatcom Counties.  Prior to moving to Whatcom County Liz was Executive Director of the Oregon Public Health Institute (OPHI), and spent seven years leading We Can Do Better (founded as the Archimedes Movement). The common element in each of her roles is a belief that community voice is essential to sustainable change to impact policy and practice, and influence the state and national dialogues on health and health care reform. Liz has spent her career building bridges between complex policy discussions and the public’s ability to understand and weigh in on these issues.

Liz chaired the board for Cover Oregon for more than three years, and serves on the board of Oregon Health Decisions. She was vice chair of Oregon’s Future of Public Health Task Force, and remains an elected member of the Oregon Health Authority’s Health Equity Policy Committee. She has a bachelor’s degree in social welfare, two years of graduate study in gerontology and a Master’s in Public Health.

Lauren Frank

Lauren Frank, MHS, PhD

Associate Professor of Communication at Portland State University

Lauren Frank is an Associate Professor of Communication at Portland State University.  She used to work on maternal and child health research with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, and she worked with collaboratives advocating for access to healthcare throughout California.  In her current role, she researches health communication.  Her projects include studies of how to design messages to be effective and involve families.  She has worked to promote informed decision making on health issues such as cervical cancer prevention and family planning.

Margaret Klein

Margaret Klein, RN, MS, MSN, JD

Oregon Director of Clinical Operations for KEPRO

Margaret is a nurse, attorney, ethicist, educator, and published author with over 40 years of experience in healthcare, law, ethics and the insurance industry. She has held positions in direct patient care, management and administration – serving in healthcare leadership positions for Legacy Health System, Oregon Health Sciences University, Providence Health and Services, and Vibra Specialty Hospital. Currently, Margaret chairs the Palliative Care and Quality of Life Advisory Council and is the Oregon Director of Clinical Operations with KEPRO.

In her spare time, Margaret helps at the family-owned restaurant Tebo’s with her husband and co-owner, Craig; has served as the photojournalist and team administrator for a medical mission team to Guatemala through Faith in Practice out of Houston Texas; serves on the board for the local chapter of Hockey Ministry International; grows roses, and has three beautiful Shih Tzu pups, Porsche, Lincoln, Tesla and their domestic cat, Miss Bentley.

John Stull

John Stull, MD, MPH

John obtained his MD from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, pediatrics training at Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati, a Master of Public Health at the Harvard School of Public Health, and Preventive Medicine training at OHSU. He practiced as a general pediatrician for 25 years, and for the past 19 years has served on faculty at OHSU, teaching epidemiology, ethics, several public health survey courses, and serving as Director of the OHSU MD/MPH Program as well as Program Director for the Preventive Medicine Residency from 2007-2018.

His wife and three grown children reside in the Portland area. In addition to serving on the board for Oregon Health Decisions, his academic interests are epidemiology methods and epistemology, teaching, the interface of medicine and public health, and working directly with students as advisor/mentor. He enjoys reading, outdoor photography (landscape & wildlife), road biking, travel, and spending time in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park.