Dr. Olga Yakusheva is an economist with research interests in health economics and health services research. Dr. Yakusheva's area of expertise is econometric methods for causal inference in non-randomized studies. She has applied these methods in a broad range of content areas, such as obesity, pregnancy and birth, and peer effects on health behaviors and outcomes. She has also published extensively on the role of nurses in care delivery and quality of patient care, developing an adaptation of the teacher value-added method for outcomes-based clinician productivity measurement using the electronic medical record. Dr. Yakusheva is a team scientist who has contributed methodological expertise to many other interdisciplinary projects on hospital readmissions, including predictive modeling for readmissions, retrospective and prospective analyses of an intervention to improve hospital discharge process, and a large multi-site cluster-randomized intervention study to reduce readmissions.