Home » Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky adds two board members

Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky adds two board members

Clifford T. Maesaka, Jr.
Clifford T. Maesaka, Jr.

Will serve 3-year terms

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (Dec. 5, 2016) — The Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky today announced two new additions to its board of directors. Each will serve three-year terms.

The 15-member board establishes and oversees the financial, program and policy affairs activities of the Foundation, which works to improve Kentuckians’ health and address unmet health care needs in the commonwealth.

New members:

Clifford T. Maesaka, Jr., DDS

Maesaka, of Louisville, has served as president and CEO of Delta Dental of Kentucky since February 1995. He also serves as CEO and chairman of Dental Choice of Kentucky and Dental Choice agency, two subsidiaries of Delta Dental of Kentucky. He is a member of the Delta Dental Plans Association (DDPA) Board of Directors, where he also has served as treasurer. Dr. Maesaka also serves on the Renaissance Leadership Team, the Renaissance Holding Company board of directors, and is an ex-officio member of the board of directors of the Renaissance Health Services Corporation, also Delta Dental companies.

He served for many years on the Dean’s Advisory Council at the University of Kentucky School of Dentistry, and endowed and funded a charitable foundation at Delta Dental. Dr. Maesaka holds a DDS degree from the Indiana University School of Dentistry, an M.B.A. degree from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Minnesota.

Janice Burdette Blythe
Janice Burdette Blythe

Janice Burdette Blythe, PhD, RDN, LD

Blythe, a nutrition and dietetics health professional for more than four decades, currently serves as the Julia Parmly Billings Chair in Child and Family Studies and an academic division chair at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. She also has served as Academic Division Chair and associate provost at Berea College. Prior to that, she was a professor at Eastern Kentucky University, and a diabetes nutritionist at the Lexington Clinic. Dr. Blythe is returning to the Foundation’s board following an interim appointment that expired in November 2015.

She is a graduate of Leadership Madison County and serves on the Berea Human Rights Commission and the Richmond-Madison County Branch of the NAACP. She has received many awards, including the Lyman T. Johnson Torch of Excellence Award, and has been inducted into the College of Health Sciences Hall of Fame at the University of Kentucky.

The board also elected Charles Ross, retired director of the Purchase District Health Department in Paducah, as its new chair; Passport Health Plan CEO Mark Carter will serve as vice chair; Allen Montgomery, a Norton Healthcare System executive, as secretary; and Dr. Brent Wright, a Glasgow family physician, as treasurer. Maesaka and Blythe fill the seats of Christopher Roszman, Chief Financial Officer of Centerstone Kentucky (formerly Seven Counties Services) in Louisville, and Rosalie Albright, a registered nurse from Bullitt County who works in the Ephraim McDowell Community Services Department, respectively. Both of their terms expired today.