Brigham & Women's Hospital - Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmaeconomics Fellowship Directors

Aaron S. Kesselheim, M.D., J.D., M.P.H.*

Fellowship Site Director
Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Dr. Kesselheim’s research focuses on the effects of intellectual property laws and regulatory policies on pharmaceutical development, the drug approval process, and the costs, availability, and use of prescription drugs both domestically and in resource-poor settings. He has also investigated how other issues at the intersection of law and public health can affect the health care system, including health care fraud, expert testimony in malpractice cases, and insurance reimbursement practices. He is a member of the New York State Bar and is a Patent Attorney. Within the Division, Dr. Kesselheim leads the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL), an interdisciplinary research core focusing on intersections among prescription drugs and medical devices, patient health outcomes, and regulatory practices and the law. In 2013, Dr. Kesselheim was named a Greenwall Faculty Scholar in Bioethics by the Greenwall Foundation, which supports innovative empirical research in bioethics. Dr. Kesselheim’s work is also currently funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and the Harvard Program in Therapeutic Science. In the past, he has received research support from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a Robert Wood Johnson Investigator Award in Health Policy Research, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center. In 2012, he was named to the Perspectives Advisory Board of the New England Journal of Medicine. He has testified before Congress on pharmaceutical policy, medical device regulation, generic drugs, and modernizing clinical trials, and served as a consultant for the NIH, FDA, Institute of Medicine, USPTO, and numerous state government offices. Dr. Kesselheim also serves as a faculty supervisor for the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, a faculty member of the Harvard Center for Bioethics, and a Research Associate in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In the 2017-2018 academic years, he has been an Irving S. Ribicoff Visiting Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School, teaching Food and Drug Administration Law. He serves as a primary care physician at the Phyllis Jen Center for Primary Care at BWH.

Faculty Members

Jerry Avorn, M.D.

Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Chief of the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics

The scientific, policy, and social factors that shape physicians’ drug choices
Medication compliance by patients
The identification and prevention of adverse drug effects; programs to improve the appropriateness of prescribing and drug taking
Pharmaceutical cost-effectiveness analysis

Brian T. Bateman, M.D.
Associate Professor of Anesthesia, Harvard Medical School

Epidemiology of pregnancy complication and antihypertensive medications in pregnancy
Patterns of medication use and drug safety in the perioperative period

Niteesh K. Choudhry, M.D., Ph.D.
Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Impact of medication costs and drug benefit design on the use of and adherence to medications for common chronic conditions, such as coronary artery disease, hyperlipidemia and diabetes.

Michael A. Fischer, M.D., M.S.
Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Factors that influence medication use and outcomes by clinicians and patients
Appropriate use of medications, drug evaluation, and assessment of complications of drug therapy.

Jessica M. Franklin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Developing and applying statistical methods for comparative effectiveness and adverse effects of drugs, the consequences of drug policy, and the prevention of human error in medication use
Causal inference and Bayesian and hierarchical modeling

Joshua J. Gagne, Pharm.D., Sc.D.
Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Methods for generating post-marketing comparative safety and effectiveness evidence for new medical products.

Robert J. Glynn, Ph.D., Sc.D.
Professor of Medicine (in Biostatistics), Harvard Medical School
Associate Professor of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Design and analysis of studies of risk factors and treatments for chronic diseases
Designing, monitoring, and analyzing data from large-scale randomized trials, prospective cohort studies, and case-control studies
Accounting for missing data, analysis of clustered data, and approaches to identify and adjust for selection bias

Krista F. Huybrechts, M.S., Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Assessment of adverse outcomes associated with psychotropic medication use in different populations and settings, including elderly nursing home patients and pregnant women.
Exploring how variation in medication prescribing at the level of the physician or institution can be used to improve confounding control in observational studies in the area of psychiatry.

Seo Young Kim, M.D., M.S.C.E.
Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Comparative safety and effectiveness of medications for the rheumatic diseases, health services/outcome research in rheumatology.

Ameet Sarpatwari, Ph.D., J.D.
Assistant Professor in Medicine, Harvard Medical School

The effects of laws and regulations on therapeutic development, approval, use, and related public health outcomes; with current focus on drug product selection laws, risk evaluation and mitigation strategies, and regulatory and patent exclusivities.

Sebastian Schneeweiss, M.D., Sc.D.

Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology, Harvard Medical School

The comparative effectiveness and safety of biopharmaceuticals and analytic methods to improve the validity of epidemiologic studies using complex healthcare databases.