Lori Melichar

Lori Melichar, a labor economist, is a senior director—Program at the Foundation where she focuses on discovering, exploring and learning from cutting-edge ideas with the potential to help create a Culture of Health. She is also the host of the Foundation’s Pioneering Ideas podcast.

Previously at the Foundation, Lori managed several programs to focus a broad research community on studies to improve health and healthcare policy and practice, and was a key driver of efforts to advance the science of quality improvement (QI) research and evaluation. 

Prior to joining the Foundation in 2002, she served with the National Institutes of Child Health and Development and the Demography of Inequality initiative at the University of Maryland Center on Population, Gender and Inequality. Lori also worked at Pfizer Pharmaceuticals as a consultant and economic policy analyst and at the Project Hope Center for Health Affairs.

She holds a PhD and MA in economics from the University of Maryland at College Park and a BA in economics from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.

An Oklahoma native, Lori resides in New York City with her husband and three children.

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