The professor who headed the Syracuse University-led research to establish a database of healthcare costs has been appointed the president of Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, Calif., the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday.

 

Deborah Freund, a public administration professor and a former SU provost and vice president of academic affairs, will take her position as the first female president of the private university in the fall, according to the LA Times.

 

‘I just think this is sort of meant to be,’ she told the LA Times. ‘I come from a private university now, and the kind of work that CGU does really stokes my passion.’

 

Claremont Graduate University is 2,200-student school offering master’s and doctorate degrees in subjects ranging from humanities to management to health and is one of two graduate schools in the seven-school Claremont Colleges consortium.

 

Freund will replace the interim president, Joseph Hough, who has served since February 2009, the LA Times reported.

 

Freund was also the front runner to become chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2006, but negotiations broke down after her husband, Thomas Kniesner, an economics professor at SU, was not offered a job on the UCLA faculty, the LA Times reported. Kniesner has been offered a professorship at Claremont.

 

At SU, Freund lead the FAIR Health database research team, created in October, through the direction of Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. The database’s purpose is to determine how much co-pay an insurance company should provide to consumers who use out-of-network plans. These are plans in which a person can choose his or her own doctor and have the insurers pay a portion of the cost.

 

Cuomo created FAIR Health after he discovered – and sued – health care providers who used a private health care research and information company called Ingenix to determine how much to charge consumers and allegedly overcharged. The suit was settled with the disbandment of Ingenix. And $100 million was given to construct the FAIR Health database.

 

The project attracted controversy in March after it was reported Freund was a paid member of the Board of Directors at Excellus, one of the insurance companies under investigation and sued by Cuomo. In an attempt to avoid a perceived conflict of interest, Freund stepped down from her position on the Board of Directors.

 

‘I fully advised all involved parties of both my involvement in this project and my affiliation with Lifetime (parent company of Excellus) and Excellus,’ Freund said in a statement in March. ‘Nevertheless, given my desire to avoid even the perception of a potential conflict of interest, and given that with the commencement of work on the project within the past three weeks, I anticipate needing to devote my full attention to that work. I have concluded that it is best that I resign from the Lifetime Board of Directors and the Excellus Central New York Regional Advisory Board at this time.’