I believe good data should drive good decisions. Throughout my career, I’ve focused on taking complex health care data and analyses and turning them into findings that are meaningful, understandable, and useful for policymakers and other decision-makers. My work sits at the intersection of health policy, data analysis, and research, with a particular focus on Medicare and health care delivery.

My interest in health policy began with aging and long-term care. Early in my career, my research and graduate studies focused on Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, quality of care in long-term care facilities, and issues affecting older adults. After earning my MPP and MPH from the University of Minnesota, I moved to the Washington, DC area to pursue a career in health policy research.

Since then, I’ve worked at KFF, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), and The Lewin Group. Across these roles, I’ve worked with large and often complicated health care datasets to answer policy questions, evaluate programs, and better understand how changes in health policy affect patients, providers, and health care systems. I work extensively in R, SQL, and Python and particularly enjoy the process of turning a messy or ambiguous research question into an analysis that can actually help answer it.

At AAMC, I helped build the research agenda for the Research and Action Institute, where I served as the team's primary researcher and worked on issues spanning health care access, the health care workforce, hospitals and health systems, and broader health policy. My work included analyses of Medicare claims, the American Hospital Association Annual Survey, physician workforce data, and other national datasets.

Before AAMC, I spent nearly five years at KFF, working across the Program on Medicare Policy, the Program on Medicaid and the Uninsured, and State Health Facts. That experience gave me the opportunity to work across a wide range of health policy topics and strengthened something that remains central to how I approach research today: rigorous analysis is only useful if you can communicate what it means.

My work has been cited or featured by outlets including The Washington Post, Politico, Axios, NPR, and KFF Health News, as well as by federal, state, and local policymakers. It has also been cited in White House materials — and, in a career highlight I certainly never anticipated, on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

I remain interested in opportunities to collaborate on health policy research and consulting projects, particularly those health care delivery, quantitative analysis, and the translation of complex data into useful evidence.