Brianna M. Lombardi, PhD, MSW is the Director of the federally funded Behavioral Health Workforce Research Center and Co-Director of the Program on Health Workforce Research and Policy at the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research. She is a tenured associate profession in the Department of Family Medicine and holds a secondary appointment as a research associate professor in the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Dr. Lombardi is a national expert on the behavioral health workforce. Her research examines how training, educational pathways, scope-of-practice regulation, and payment policy shape the workforce available to provide care, and how aligning these policies can expand access for Medicaid, rural, and underserved populations. She also studies the integration of behavioral health and social care into primary care, describing how interprofessional teams deliver behavioral health services in primary care and community health centers and identifying the payment, workflow, and workforce barriers that constrain integrated care.
She combines her research, clinical, and policy experience to help state and federal agencies design data informed health policy. Her research is currently supported by HRSA, SAMHSA, NIMH, and the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.