As Sutter’s Chief Research and Equity Officer, Leon has responsibility for research, oversight of Sutter’s Institute for Advancing Health Equity, and serves as the designated institutional official for Sutter’s graduate medical education program. Prior to joining Sutter Health in April 2020, Leon spent more than 20 years at the Mayo Clinic. For the past decade, he served as chairman of Mayo’s research administration department where he was instrumental in the re-imagination of research and educational activities to advance patient care. Leon earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from DePaul University. He is a certified Quality Fellow by the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine.

As scientific medical director, Kristen leads a team of scientists, clinician-researchers and analysts to use the resources and data within our integrated network to incubate innovative solutions to eliminate health disparities and advance the science of health equity. Over the past decade, she has led numerous published studies in the areas of health services research, health disparities and health equity. She holds graduate degrees from Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and Bloomberg School of Public Health and was named a Fellow of the American Heart Association (FAHA) in 2018. Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California San Francisco in Epidemiology and Translational Science.

Dr. Lane recently joined Sutter Health’s Institute for Advancing Health Equity team as a senior health equity scientist. Dr. Lane will lead a portfolio of high-quality, original scientific research aimed at addressing health disparities, including cardiovascular disease prevention, mental health, long-COVID, program evaluation and implementation science. Dr. Lane most recently served as a senior health scientist/behavioral health scientist for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. Dr. Lane completed her doctorate in medical sociology at the University of California, San Francisco. She also holds a master’s degree in social psychology and evaluation from Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, Calif., and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Ala.

Dr. Sudat is a researcher, biostatistician and data scientist passionate about the ways data and methodology can improve care delivery and experience for patients, families and care providers, with a particular focus on ensuring that the data and methods underpinning healthcare algorithms and analyses are not perpetuating or masking health disparities. She joined Sutter’s Institute for Advancing Health Equity in 2019 and recently led work estimating the impact of pulse oximeter inaccuracy on treatment course for Black patients with COVID-19. Dr. Sudat also conducts research within the Sutter Health Center for Health Systems Research (CHSR). During her more than 17 years at Sutter Health, she has developed deep experience with accessing, extracting, and analyzing complex health data from multi-source electronic health records (EHRs) for clinical and observational research. Dr. Sudat completed graduate training in Biostatistics at the University of California at Berkeley, where she focused on risk prediction and semi-parametric methods for estimation in the context of causal inference and observational health data.

Maria has been with Sutter Health since 2003, leading the system’s health equity initiatives including the Advancing Health Equity Program and a system effort to collect self-reported patient demographic information (Race/ Ethnicity/ Ancestry/ Language). She received two awards from The California Endowment and one award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to address language and diversity needs across the system. Maria holds a Master of Public Health degree from Columbia University. In 2017, she received a fellowship to the Harvard Medical School Disparities Leadership Program.  

Zijun supports data and analytic needs for the programs and initiatives of the Sutter Health Institute for Advancing Health Equity. He provides key support for investigators and program stakeholders on managing analytic datasets from various data sources, study design and statistical analysis. Zijun has been with Sutter Health since 2017. He holds a master’s degree in biostatistics from the University of Florida.