The Department of Economic Health Modeling features multiple PhD students who assist on projects and receive guidance through mentorships with professors
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PhD Mentees
Hannah Crook
Admitted Year: 2021Research Interests: Health care payment reform, value-based payment, social determinants of health, rural health, state and local health policy.
Hannah Crook is a first-year PhD student in Health Policy at Vanderbilt University. She is interested in researching new ways of paying for health care that encourage high-value care, lower costs, and better patient outcomes. She is also interested in how value-based payment programs can address social determinants of health.
Hannah received a Bachelors of Science in Public Health with a major in Health Policy and Management from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Previously, she was a research assistant at Duke University’s Margolis Center for Health Policy, using mixed methods research to study health care payment and delivery reform. In her free time, she enjoys reading, crafts, and being outdoors.
Primary Advisors: Melinda Buntin, PhD, and John Graves, PhD
Dennis Lee
Admitted Year: 2020Research Interests: Healthcare access, costs and delivery, health system quality, vulnerable populations
Before coming to Vanderbilt, Dennis had collaborated on a variety of research projects at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. First, he joined the HQSS Commission, which culminated in a comprehensive report on healthcare system quality in 134 low- and middle-income countries. Afterwards, he conducted research at the department of Health Policy and Management, primarily working on comparing costs, outcomes and quality for Medicaid and heavily-subsidized private health insurance for low-income individuals and buprenorphine policy to tackle the opioid crisis. A unifying theme in Dennis’s work is the use of rigorous research to shed light on healthcare systems and policy on vulnerable populations.Dennis graduated with a degree in Economics and Statistics from UC Berkeley in 2016 and has since conducted analyses using methods found in epidemiology, biostatistics, econometrics, and machine learning. He has also published in journals such as The Lancet Global Health, Health Affairs, BMJ Open and Health Services Research. For fun (and pre-COVID), Dennis is a martial artist, having competed on UC Berkeley’s Taekwondo sparring team, and training in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
Primary Advisor: John Graves, PhD
