Davene Wright, PhD

Davene R. Wright is an Associate Professor of Population Medicine at the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute and Harvard Medical School and the Associate Director of the Division of Child Health Research and Policy. She is affiliated with the Harvard-wide PhD Program in Health Policy and is affiliate faculty at the Center for Health Decision Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. 

Dr. Wright received her doctorate in Health Policy and Decision Sciences from Harvard University. She is a decision scientist, interested in the study of how stakeholders make decisions and how they can make better decisions in the presence of uncertainty, complexity, and competing values. The overarching goal of her research is to improve the demand for and supply of effective and efficient health care for patients with chronic diseases with a focus on obesity and diabetes. Dr. Wright specializes in leading interdisciplinary studies that link a variety of decision sciences methods and related techniques including stated preference elicitation, economic evaluation, simulation modeling, health services research methods, and qualitative research. She is committed to using her methodological toolkit to design health care interventions and policies that will have high uptake and high potential to improve population health. Research led by Dr. Wright has been funded by NIH, AHRQ, the American Heart Association, and the American Diabetes Association.