The Department of Health Care Policy is proud to announce Warren Alpert Foundation Professor of Health Care Policy, J. Michael McWilliams, MD, PhD, has selected as winner of the 2023 Harvard/MIT MD-PhD Program’s Outstanding Advisor Award.  The award was conferred to McWilliams at the at the annual MD-PhD retreat.

McWilliams has found his longstanding involvement with the MD-PhD program highly rewarding. As Co-PI of a NIA-funded training grant that supports MD-PhD students in the social sciences, a member of the program’s social science program committee and subcommittee on admissions, and an advisor to many students, he has helped develop a next generation of MD-PhD social scientists that is unprecedented in its size and diversity of interests. Being part of this, he noted, has been a great privilege and joy. 

The Harvard/MIT MD-PhD program is comprised of nearly 200 students with the mission to train the next generation of physician-scientist leaders. The diversity of students’ background and experience provides an array of clinical disciplines and research areas ranging from basic and translational sciences to bioengineering to the social sciences.

Through its cooperative and personal approach, the program trains doctors to make a difference in the lives of patients, by engaging students in compassionate medical care and breakthrough research alongside faculty and colleagues from across Boston’s many hospitals, campuses, and research institutions.  

McWilliams is the Warren Alpert Foundation Professor of Health Care Policy, a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. His research spans questions related to health care spending, quality, and access, with an overarching goal of informing policies that support value and equity in health care. His focus areas include the design and impact of payment systems, the organization and quality of health care delivery, physician agency, effects of health insurance coverage, and quasi-experimental methods for causal inference in observational research. He is currently a principal investigator of a Program Project (P01) on the Medicare program funded by the NIA and serves as a Senior Advisor to the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation.