Advisor
Mary Lou Breslin co-founded the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF), a leading national disability rights law and policy center, and serves as senior analyst/researcher. Her current work focuses on policies and practices affecting health disparities and equitable access to health care for disabled people. She advocates for state and federal policies and legislation that aims to improve access to care and for regulations implementing provisions of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Ms. Breslin lectures on disability and health for public health and professional medical education programs and conducts research on topics related to improving health and access to care for disabled people.
Recent publications with colleagues include, “Presence of Accessible Equipment and Interior Elements in Primary Care Offices,” in Health Equity; “Compounded Disparities: Health Equity at the Intersection of Disability, Race, and Ethnicity,” for the Health and Medicine Division, of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine; and “Promoting Physical and Programmatic Accessibility in Managed Long-Term Services and Supports Programs” and “Improving Support for Health Maintenance in Home and Community-Based Services: How States Adapt Nursing Rules for the Community First Choice Program” for the Community Living Policy Center, University of California San Francisco. Other articles on barriers to healthcare that affect disabled people appear in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and Disability and Health Journal.
She earned a master’s degree from the University of San Francisco and taught graduate courses at the University of San Francisco, Masagung Graduate School of Management.
In 2016, Ms. Breslin received DREDF’s Edward. M. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award. She accepted the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Award from the University of California San Francisco in 2015 acknowledging DREDF’s advocacy on behalf of people with disabilities. Encore.org (formerly Civic Ventures) named her a Fellow in 2013. In 2009 Ms. Breslin received the community leadership award from the San Francisco Foundation. She received the prestigious Henry B. Betts award in 2002 for improving the lives of disabled people and in 2000 she accepted, on behalf of DREDF, the Paul A. Hearne Award from the Physical and Mental Disability Rights Committee of the American Bar Association.