Meet-the-Experts Student Breakfast

Barbara J. McNeil, M.D., Ph.D.

Dr. McNeil founded the department of healthcare policy at Harvard Medical School and was the first person to be appointed head of the department. As well as academic and clinical appointments in radiology, she has published a series of papers in the area of decision analysis and patients' preferences which are amongst the most cited studies in the field. She studied chemistry as an undergraduate at Emmanuel College, graduating in 1962. That same year she enrolled at Harvard Medical School. McNeil graduated with a doctor of medicine degree in 1966 and spent the next year completing an internship in pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. In 1967 Dr. McNeil won a research fellowship from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), working as an NIH fellow in the Biophysics Research Laboratory at Harvard until 1971. This work earned her a doctorate in biological chemistry in 1972, from Harvard University. From 1971 to 1973 she also served as a resident in radiology at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and Children's Hospital Medical Center, and clinical fellow in radiology at Harvard Medical School. In 1974 she began the first of a long series of hospital and academic appointments in the Harvard Medical School system, as instructor in radiology at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and radiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital. She devoted much of her research to the study of new medical technologies and was one of the first physicians to apply the techniques of decision analysis and cost effectiveness analysis to the study of new imaging technologies. Since then she has worked in a number of areas related to quality of care and its determinants. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the Society of Nuclear Medicine, and the American College of Radiology. She is currently the Ridley Watts Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School and a professor of radiology at the Brigham and Women's Hospital.