Terri Tanielian is a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation. She also currently serves as the RAND Health liaison to the Department of Veterans Affairs and is a nationally recognized expert in military and veteran’s health policy. Her research interests include access to and quality of care for service-connected health problems; military suicide; military sexual assault; military families; veteran caregivers; and psychological and behavioral effects of combat, terrorism, and disasters. She employs both quantitative and qualitative research methods and analyses in her work, including surveys, interviews, focus groups, and analysis of administrative data; as well as environmental scans of existing policies, programs and services.   She formerly directed RAND’s Center for Military Health Policy Research, overseeing RAND's diverse military health research portfolio. In this role, she was interacted regularly with senior military health officials to identify and develop policy relevant studies and advise on the use of findings to improve decisionmaking. Tanielian was co–study director for RAND’s seminal study Invisible Wounds of War: Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences, and Services to Assist Recovery (2008: RAND), the first non-governmental assessment of the psychological, emotional, and cognitive consequences of deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. She won the AcademyHealth Impact Award for this work in 2011. She was also the principal investigator for RAND’s comprehensive study of military and veteran caregivers titled Hidden Heroes: America’s Military Caregivers.  She also led the first ever prospective longitudinal study of military families across the deployment cycle, the Deployment Life Study.  She has conducted several needs assessments examining the challenges and issues facing veterans living in the Detroit Metropolitan Area, Massachusetts and in New York State. She also leads a study examining community based models for expanding mental health care for returning veterans and their families under the Welcome Back Veterans Initiative, as well as a consensus building effort to design a Blueprint for Future Research on Veteran Caregiving.  Tanielian has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. She has served on many advisory committees and expert panels related to veteran mental health policy.  Tanielian has a M.A. in psychology from the American University.