Leslie Curry, PhD, MPH

Leslie Curry, PhD, MPH, is Research Scientist at the Yale School of Public Health and Core Faculty of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program at Yale. Her research interests include three overlapping areas with particular emphasis on older adults: approaches to improve the quality and outcomes of health care, patient experiences with health and the health care system, and trends in health insurance coverage and benefits. Research topics include innovative programs to improve quality of nursing home care, organization and financing of integrated models of long term care, and consumer perspectives on long term care quality. She has collaborated with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid on projects related to health care quality for the dual eligible (Medicare/Medicaid) population.

Dr. Curry is a nationally recognized expert in mixed methods in health research, an approach integrating qualitative and quantitative methods in a single program of inquiry. She has served as co-PI on a series of grants awarded by National Institute on Aging, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the John A Hartford Foundation designed to enhance the rigor and credibility of qualitative and mixed methods in aging and public health research. Together with colleagues from Brown, she conceived, developed and implemented two national training conferences on this topic, and was lead editor of a reference text published in 2006 by the American Public Health Association and the Gerontological Society of America: Curry L, Shield R, Wetle T. (Eds.) Improving Aging and Public Health Research: Qualitative and Mixed Methods.

Dr. Curry also has specific experience in applying mixed methods to the investigation of hospital strategies to improve outcomes performance for AMI (with Drs. Krumholz and Bradley), and in examining the role of gender on outcomes in young AMI patients (with Drs. Krumholz and Lichtman).

Dr Curry has been actively involved with teaching and mentoring at the undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate levels since 1993, including fellows in the Geriatric Fellowship Program at the UConn School of Medicine and the RWJ Clinical Scholars at Yale. She is regularly invited to lecture on mixed methods in health research. Dr. Curry serves on editorial boards of several journals, and regularly conducts reviews for many others, particularly for manuscripts reporting qualitative or mixed methods studies. Most recently, she serves as reviewer for the Health Services Organization and Delivery study section at the National Institutes of Health. She is the former Director of the Braceland Center for Mental Health and Aging, a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and a member of AcademyHealth.