John Graves, PhD, Professor at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, where he holds appointments in the Department of Health Policy and the Department of Medicine
Graves’ career spans over 15 years conducting interdisciplinary research at the intersection of health economics and health care policy. The focus of his work is on the use of econometric and decision analytic methodologies to inform the development, implementation and evaluation of health care reforms at the state and federal level. His research contributions include modeling efforts that informed both the 2006 Massachusetts health reform legislation and the 2010 Affordable Care Act, for which he served as a lead modeler under a contract with the White House Office of Health Reform. Since joining the Vanderbilt faculty in 2011, Graves has led and published research projects on novel methods for identifying provider shortages, on the returns to hospital spending and quality, and on the value of pharmacogenomic screening in diverse health system populations. He currently leads two large federally-funded research grants on the health effects of insurance coverage expansion among safety net patients in the South, and on the implications of provider network design for access and competition in health insurance markets.
Graves earned his BA in Economics and English from The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. He holds a Ph.D. in Health Policy from Harvard University and is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, the National Institute on Aging, the National Bureau of Economic Research, the American Statistical Association, and the National Academy of Social Insurance.
Ashley Leech, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
Dr. Leech’s research combines health services research and health economic methods to answer questions related to healthcare access, delivery, resource allocation, and use, and outcomes for reproductive-age women and their children. She is the Principal Investigator of an NIH/NIDA-funded career development award on Advancing Treatment Outcomes for Pregnant Women with Opioid Use Disorder where she is using decision science methodology to promote the coverage and adoption of high-value healthcare for pregnant women with opioid use disorder, a population that disproportionately faces major impediments to care.
Dr. Leech completed her post-doctoral training in Health Economics at the Center for the Evaluation of Value and Risk in Health (CEVR) at Tufts University School of Medicine where she focused on decision science methodology and received her Ph.D. in Health Services Research at Boston University School of Public Health.
Jinyi Zhu, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy
Her research focuses on applications and methods to inform decision-making for resource allocation in public health and health care. Specifically, her research falls into three main areas: 1) resource prioritization for the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease, 2) applied model-based cost-effectiveness analysis in other clinical areas including TB and HIV, and 3) methodological advances in disease simulation modeling (e.g., model calibration and validation).
Dr. Zhu received a Ph.D. in Health Policy from Harvard University in 2022. She also holds an MPH from Yale University and a BS in Biology and BA in economics from Peking University.
Shawn Garbett, Director, Informatics Software Development; Assistant Professor in Biostatistics in the Department of Health Policy
His research focuses include applying computational and numerical skills to modeling complex data, Rational Integration of Genomic Healthcare Testing (RIGHT), reproducible manuscripts. He worked for several years at TVA and applied combinatorial optimization to coal burning and linear programming to running the reservoir system. He also worked as a consultant for many years, and got hired at Vanderbilt's Cancer Biology to maintain math models of cancer progression and help run a microscope. Working with the microscope data, it led him to statistics as the best means to interpret the data for the lab. He discovered a new passion in statistics, and went back and got his masters, which has led him to the present here in Biostatistics. He enjoys playing piano and board games, reading science fiction, and programming.
Garbett graduated from Penn State in August 2014 with an M.S. in statistics. He completed his undergraduate at Tulane University in New Orleans in electrical engineering and computer science.