Michelle Mello, J.D., Ph.D.

Michelle Mello is a professor of law and public health in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health.  She holds a J.D. degree from the Yale Law School, a Ph.D. in Health Policy and Administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an M.Phil. from Oxford University, where she was a Marshall Scholar, and a B.A. from Stanford University. Mello conducts empirical research into issues at the intersection of law, ethics, and health policy.  She is the author of more than 80 articles and book chapters on public health law, the performance of the medical malpractice system, the effect of tort litigation on health care and health outcomes, medical errors and patient safety, research ethics, the obesity epidemic, pharmaceuticals, and bioethics. Her work employs methods spanning traditional legal scholarship, ethical analysis, econometric analysis, epidemiologic study designs, and qualitative research.  Mello is a Greenwall Faculty Scholar in Bioethics and the recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research.  In 2006, she received the Alice S. Hersh New Investigator Award from AcademyHealth for exceptional promise for contributions to the field of health services research.