Eleanor T. Lewis is an organizational sociologist whose research focuses on the role of language and communication in improving health care. She currently works at the Center for Health Care Evaluation in the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. Eleanor Lewis previously worked at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center studying how hospitals learn from medication errors. Working at the intersection of organizational sociology and communication research, she has studied topics such as organizational learning and communication networks in settings including hospital intensive care units and the V.A. Readjustment Counseling Service. She was a post-doctoral fellow at Dartmouth College after earning her PhD and MSc in organization science and sociology from Carnegie Mellon University and a BA in sociology and linguistics from Stanford University.

Michal Tamuz, PhD, is an organizational sociologist with research interests in decision making, organizational learning, improving patient safety, and risk management. Michal Tamuz received a PhD in sociology from Stanford University. She is an associate professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine in the College of Medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, Tennessee. In her research, she explores how organizations learn from small samples and under conditions of ambiguity. Her research focuses on near accident reporting in hospitals and in an array of high hazard industries, from aviation to chemical manufacturing plants and blood banks. With funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, she is currently studying how hospitals learn from medication errors.