Sharon-Lise T. Normand, PhD, is the S. James Adelstein Professor of Health Care Policy (biostatistics) in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School and in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Normand’s research focuses on the development of statistical methods for health services and regulatory policy research, primarily using Bayesian approaches, including assessment of quality of care, methods for causal inference, provider profiling, diffusion of medical technologies, and regulatory science. She has developed a long line of research on methods for the analysis of patterns of treatment and quality of care for patients with cardiovascular disease and with mental disorders in particular.

Dr. Normand has developed analytical approaches for comparing hospitals and physicians using outcomes and process-based measures. Since 2002, she has served as director of Mass-DAC, the data-coordinating center responsible for collecting, analyzing, and reporting on the quality of care for adults discharged following a cardiac procedure from all non-federal hospitals in Massachusetts. Dr. Normand and colleagues annually report on hospital and physician performance using prospectively collected medical-record data. She is also the director of the Medical Device Epidemiology Network (MDEpiNet) Methodology Center, which is a public-private partnership aimed at medical device evaluation. MDEpiNet partners with the FDA’s Center for Device and Radiological Health, the Science and Infrastructure Center at Weill Cornell Medical School, and the Coordinating Center located at Duke University Medical Center. Her focus is on the development of statistical approaches to active medical device surveillance, valid inferences from distributed networks, and the improvement of causal inference in the presence of high dimensional data. On the mental health side, Dr. Normand is leading an NIMH-funded study to estimate the value of publicly funded mental health care for patients with serious mental illness. She is also undertaking a study to estimate causal dose “outcomes” curves in the context of understanding weight gain associated with cumulative antipsychotic drug exposure among subjects with schizophrenia for numerous different antipsychotics.  

Dr. Normand earned her BSc and MSc degrees in statistics from the University of Western Ontario and her PhD in biostatistics from the University of Toronto. She is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, a fellow of the American College of Cardiology, and an Associate Member of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons. She served as the 2010 President of the Eastern North American Region of the International Biometrics Society; was inaugural co-chair of the PCORI Methodology Committee; co-chairs a Committee on National Statistics/National Academy of Sciences panel reviewing the Safety Measurement System of the Compliance, Safety, Accountability program run by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which penalizes truck carriers based on their scores from vehicle inspection data; and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee of Applied and Theoretical Statistics (CATS) focusing on the intersections of statistics and computer science for big data.