Senior Fellow

Cynthia Zubritsky, PhD

  • Director of Policy Research and Evaluation, Penn Center for Mental Health, Perelman School of Medicine

Cynthia D. Zubritsky, PhD is the Director of Policy Research and Evaluation at the Penn Center for Mental Health. Dr. Zubritsky’s research, teaching, and clinical efforts reflect her longstanding career interest in the design and implementation of systems to provide services to individuals with medical and psychiatric comorbidities, with an emphasis on behavioral health care in large scale settings. As the Director of Policy Research and Evaluation at CMH, she has extensive experience in management and organizational issues in behavioral health care systems, including integrated systems design, outcome measurement, quality assurance measurement, evaluation, and policy design.

Dr. Zubritsky’s current research includes studying the effectiveness of a state system redesign for aging and mental health services in multiple states in response to an Olmstead consent decree, the redesign of a state Human Services System to develop Person Centered Care across four disability groups, the design and implementation of a joint corrections and substance abuse effort to divert individuals from incarceration, and the design of a system to divert youth from residential treatment settings. She has served as the primary investigator of NIH and SAMHSA sponsored research, including Systems of Care studies, health disparities, integrated systems research targeted at building collaborative models between mental health, substance abuse, aging, corrections and education, and national multi-site studies investigating the effectiveness of integrated behavioral health service delivery models. She has also been supported by private foundations such as Pew to develop intervention studies for vulnerable populations.

Dr. Zubritsky serves as a national expert in behavioral health systems design for national and international foundations and is a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Center for the Studies of Health Disparities and at the University of Pennsylvania Institute on Aging.

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